Self-Service Checkout Lanes Never Adopt a KittyEvery Friday night, my wife and my mother-in-law go grocery shopping. I go to a saloon, though I am careful to be home by 8 p.m., when my labor is needed to carry the groceries into the house. The grocery store my wife uses has self-service checkout lanes, but she doesn't use them and she doesn't use the service the deli offers, either, which lets you key your deli order into a machine and then come back when it's ready. "The stores tell you it's more convenient," my wife says, "but they're really just trying to get rid of the people working there." I've never used the things, either. In America, where a person's job is printed high up in the obituary, you have to have some respect for another person's paycheck. Recent reports by the Arlington, Va., based Food Marketing Institute indicate that my wife and I aren't the only ones who want a warm-blooded clerk to ring up our hysterically overpriced groceries. Grocery stores, the institute says, are starting to remove the self-serve machines from their stores. While we don't live high in our house, my wife sometimes buys two or three slices of rare roast beef as a treat for our two 16-year-old cats. She told the deli guy at the store why she buys the beef. The clerk's in his 50s. He's a lifelong grocery-store employee, a career aspired to by very few young people, who have been saturated by images of the bling lifestyle. A few months ago, the clerk told my wife he'd adopted a cat — a kitten, really. He found it in the parking lot of the store, where someone, perhaps someone automated out of a job, had abandoned the small beast. He'd bought the cat a litter box, a small, comfy bed and some toys.
The self-serve checkout machine is supposed to be more efficient than a deli clerk who has just adopted a cat. The self-serve, drive-through, all-you-can-eat, Internet-shopping, order-your-prescriptions-through-the-mail world we are being pushed to live in is supposed to give us more time — time we theoretically spend with our families. But, of course, what keeps you from spending time with your kids isn't that 15 minutes you're spending in a grocery store checkout line. What keeps you from spending time with your family is the extra 15 hours a week you've been working since they laid off a third of the people in your department. What keeps you from spending time with your family is the second job you took after you went three years without a raise on your first job. Sometimes, what keeps you from spending time with your kids is the brutal amount of work you have to do because you bought a $500,000 house instead of the $300,000 house you could afford or the $39,000 SUV you bought instead of the $20,000 sedan you could afford. You wanted to work to make a family. You ended up working to make payments. Not all grocery stores are getting rid of their self-service checkout machines, not yet. The grocery chains keeping the machines say they're doing it to offer their customers "options" and "choices." Fair enough. My wife and I choose the deli clerk and his cat. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com COPYRIGHT 2011 BY CREATORS.COM 
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