Towards the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader tells a surprised and frustrated Lando Calrissian, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Over the last decade, amidst the rise of automation, an increasingly normal part of the retail experience is self-checkout at the grocery store. Introduced simply as a time-saving supplemental convenience for customers, its use has shifted into a means of aggressive cost-cutting. This has both severely diminished the customer experience and revealed a more nefarious long-term goal pursued by the operators of large retail chains: The elimination of virtually all cashier roles.

Consider that it’s late on Friday evening, about eight-thirty, and you decide to get a jump on the weekend by getting some shopping out of the way. You drive over to your local supermarket and fill up your cart full of items for the next week. Then you head up to the front, and what you find is distressing: An array of regular cashier stations, which, although spacious and plentiful, are closed, and one poor attendant who is tasked with oversight of 8-12 cramped self-checkout stations.

Given that going through self-checkout with a packed cart is a nontrivial task, you don’t find this to be convenient at all, and although you would prefer not to be a bother, you ask politely if there’s anyone around who can do normal checkout. Eventually, a manager arrives who is curt and dismissive of your request, and before you’ve even had a chance to verbally express a word, she’s already issued an ultimatum to you, “You’re just going to have to use self-checkout.”

I left.

Automation has played a vital role in the advancement of human civilization, but it doesn’t require one to be a Luddite to recognize that something different and new is happening here: Management views providing a basic customer experience as a chore, rather than a vital part of their business strategy.

This situation isn’t going to get better. It was recently announced that Kroger (a conglomerate including QFC and Fred Meyer) and Albertsons (a conglomerate including Safeway and Haggen) are going to merge, pending regulatory approval. This will leave us with fewer choices and less competition, consequently resulting in increased grocery prices.

In our own backyard, Amazon (owner of Whole Foods) has been brazen about its pursuit of a cashierless future. In 2018, the very first Amazon Go location opened up to the public right here in Seattle. Although Amazon has since closed a number of these stores, they have been offering this technology to other retailers, as BBC News reported in March 2020. While their “Just Walk Out” implementation is significantly more convenient than what’s currently on offer at most local supermarket chains, the future of the role of cashier is clearly in jeopardy.

An added dystopian dimension to the story of retail automation has been the narrative of increasing retail theft and the addition of highly prominent teams of onsite armed security personnel appearing in place of folks tasked with augmenting the shopping experience. It would seem to be an unintended consequence of removing humans from the transaction as a cost-cutting measure. At a time of price hikes we should be asking ourselves what these changes mean for the future. What’s next?

For what it’s worth, I reached out to Safeway’s corporate office regarding my own experience at the E Madison St store and specifically asked about their policy regarding self-checkout. A spokesperson for the company stated that their policy is to ensure that at least one regular checkout stand is available at any given time; clearly, there’s a misalignment of expectations from corporate and the reality in the field.

This story originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of Leschi News on page six.