Stores Bagging Customer Service

My friend Lee went shopping at Albertsons in La Habra, proceeded to the checkout, and discovered he is now a grocery clerk and bagger.

This is not how he intended to spend his retirement. But hundreds of automated checkout stands, like the ones at Home Depot, are arriving in Southern California supermarkets. This is great news for those seeking even less human contact and more electronic glitches.

You don’t have to use the automated system. You can stand in line and do business with a living, breathing checker before they are all stuffed and shipped off to the Smithsonian. But my friend Lee got the feeling the human-interaction lines were kept intentionally long, forcing shoppers to share in the work.

“What next? Will we have to stock the shelves ourselves?� Lee asks. “And will this spread? Will my dentist charge me to pull my own tooth? Will the L.A. Times charge me to write my own Steve Lopez column?�

(Editor’s note: Too late, Lee. This column is being written under Lopez’s name by a contractor in India. Lopez now works as the night manager at a Del Taco in Downey.)

To get my own look at the future, I went to the Albertsons on Commonwealth Avenue in Alhambra, which has four self-checkout stations.

Only one person, a graphic designer named Tracy Carta, was using the new system. Or trying to, at least. The first words I heard from her, as she gave up and stomped away, cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

“I’d use it if it worked,� Carta said.

David Hernandez, pushing a shopping cart, said he had done self-checkout before, but the stations are often on the fritz. When they work, he said, they can be the quickest way out of the store. That would be welcome relief, since manned checkout lines are often so long, perishables expire before you can pay for them.

But Hernandez, a process server, has qualms about an economy that keeps killing off decent-paying jobs.

“World domination by robots? Yeah, it scares me,� he said.

It should surprise no citizen that the self-checking trend is being driven by the unimpeachable king and blood-sucking ruler of the global economy -- Wal-Mart.

Retail analyst Greg Buzek says Albertsons, Vons and Ralphs realize there’s no way on God’s green Earth that they could ever win a price war with Wal-Mart. So their strategy is to slay the beast with better service.

This means displaced supermarket checkers will work the deli counter, serve up prepared food, cut fresh flowers and make sure the bread is stacked just so.

I must say that as a shopper, this strategy strikes me as utterly insane. My idea of good service is short lines and fast checkout by a human being, not a smiling clerk asking me to try the hot cross buns.

But you can’t stop Wal-Mart, and you can’t stop technology. Buzek says the next innovation will be a personal scanner that tallies up your tab as you chuck items into your basket.

“Full service means full service,� says a dubious Greg Denier of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. He thinks making shoppers do the work of checkers and baggers is all about increasing profits rather than offering better service.

“And if you look to tomorrow, we’ll see fewer and fewer employees and a lower level of service.�

The automated checkout was up and running again at the Albertsons in Alhambra, so I picked up a few items and gave it a whirl.

With absolutely no written instructions and no live person to assist me, I didn’t know exactly what to do.

I set down a six-pack of Bohemia beer and a robot spoke.

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA,� it said. “PLEASE REMOVE ITEM!�

It sounded like Congressman Darrell Issa, the schmo who struck it rich with those annoying car alarms.

I picked up the Bohemia and set it down once more.

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA.�

What’s so unexpected? They thought I’d buy Budweiser?

Before long, another sap tried a self-checkout and had the same result. Now we got it in stereo:

“UNEXPECTED ITEM ... “

This relationship will never work if I can’t talk back.

I tried scanning some cottage cheese.

No go.

Lovely. It’ll be nice to come shopping after a day in which my e-mail system crashes, the copy machine runs out of toner, I can’t remember one of the 12 personal passwords I’ve had to memorize for daily survival, I’m disconnected during an endless cycle of computerized telephone prompts, and then my cottage cheese won’t scan.

The store manager -- “Robert Y,� according to his nametag -- took mercy and came over to help me. Robert Y used a secret card to re-boot the system.

“Ninety percent of the customers don’t use this a second time because it’s such a headache,� he said.

I liked hearing this. I know they’ll probably work out the bugs at some point, but I won’t let that deprive me of the righteous anger I have every right to feel.

After Robert Y cleared me, my bottled water scanned just fine. The cottage cheese too.

But no Bohemia.

“Restricted item,� the computer flashed.

I was better off when the item was just unexpected.

People were now behind me in line, fear and loathing in their eyes.

With the human checkout lines stretching back to Dairy, they had no real choice but to follow me into the abyss.

Robert Y cleared the Bohemia.

Nothing could ever replace us, he said of human checkers.

Before ATMs, didn’t bank tellers say the same thing?

Steve Lopez can be reached at [email protected].