There was something sad about it, but it happened automatically: I wished the self-scan checkout in the Albert Heijn a nice day.
You could attribute it to the fact that I have a knack for personifying objects. My car is called François. I greet my house every day. As a child I once carried a found football under my arm at the campsite, because I thought it was sad that another child had left that ball alone. The other day I said sorry to my radio for accidentally breaking off the volume knob.
“That was by accident,” I told him. I imagined him nodding sweetly – I have a forgiving radio.
The day I talked to a self-checkout counter, my stranger meter was in the minus. I had a home working day and didn’t even know if I had brushed my teeth that day (I think I did) (I hope I did) . It was 4pm and the first unknown person I could have a small talk with was the cashier.
It had been replaced by a do-it-yourself display.
That screen then became to me what the volleyball is to Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away. In it, Hanks ends up on a desert island after a plane crash and when he finds a ball, he paints it and that ball becomes his friend to whom he talks to death. It had something nasty.
Self-checkouts are parasites eager to take over the world, giving a middle finger to what makes us human. IKEA, Kruidvat, Albert Heijn are all planning to expand. In 2023 you no longer have to greet or look at anyone when shopping.
We don’t know, but we’re doing ourselves a huge disservice with it. Our brain activity is greater with face-to-face contact than when we see or speak to each other online. Just talking to someone for ten minutes improves our cognitive functioning, which improves our memory. We create new brain cells through it. Also – and especially – when it comes to contact with new people.
It lies in the volatility: friendliness in the issues of the day. It’s in the spontaneity: don’t expect it, but get it. It’s in the sweetness: not knowing each other, but seeing each other. That’s why I was so happy that the self-scan checkouts in the Action were replaced by people again. Hear-hear! The de-automation of society had begun! Long live the personification of De Mens!
Until I understood what it was all about. The Action would have preferred to keep the self-scan checkouts because of cost savings, but there was too little control, so too much theft. Social contact takes time and money and that is why we have sent it to the periphery of society. You can meet each other spontaneously online. Or in a community center specially intended for that purpose. In a peer group. But rather not in a shop, one of the few places where every person goes every day, but where money is the first priority, and the second, and the third.
We are the oxygen for each other’s souls, but give each other less and less of it. There’s something sad about it, but it happens naturally.
2023-06-07 04:01:35
#selfcheckout #parasite #column
