I worked in a supermarket for a while and there was plenty of old people who came to that shop almost daily just to interact with another human being.
I could be anywhere in the midwest.
I still have have a preference for the station I use, because the staff and I at a couple of the stations recognize each other, and have developed rapports over the course of many 30s smalltalk sessions. It's superficial, but it helps build social trust. We exchange small favors. I forgot my wallet one day, and the guy behind the registered covered for me and told me to pay him back when I could. I've told off a belligerent customer or two in ways they couldn't without being fired. We've discussed the local jobs market, and at points turned each other on to different employment opportunities.
I'd pay higher prices if I knew it got them more money (and got rid of those damn telescreens).
Nevertheless, I wouldn't pay for that kind of interaction directly if I could. I have a couple groups of regular friends. If I wanted social interaction alone, I'd get with them.
It's not really about the interaction itself, it's about having some semblence of place and community in a world that's too big, too standardize, too indifferent, and too increasingly automated to think about you as anything other than an instrumentalizeable commodity, or a function to be optimized.
Every technological step forward like this puts us under increasing surveillance, dedifferentiates the spaces in-which we live, and obviates the labor of large segments of our society while reducing the power of all but a select few.
Hyperbolically, I feel like we're all just a few years from being stuffed in padded rooms with an ad-supported games console and permanently affixed morphine drips to optimize mortality, health, and quality of life metrics.
Oh but you can! A pin, paper clip, etc through a couple of the speaker openings will do the trick nicely.
Just for the record, I've found I can still mute them if I do the right combo of button presses.
Most of these pumps in my state have a column on either side of the screen of four or five unlabeled buttons. If I press the left side top to bottom (usually by running my finger straight down the line) on the left column, then the right, then the left, that shuts up 90% of them in my area.
Still sucks though
If major chains is all a small rural community has left, then I'd liken this to cracking open the bones of a well-pecked carcass and sucking out the marrow before discarding the corpse
It's also nice, to talk to people, instead of talking down to them.
It seems like every year we are loosing more union jobs than ever.
Safeway has always been a hated place to work, but it used to pay their employees a decent salary with benefits.
Now—they have a weird semi union status. They load up the stores with desperate people, and still manage to make them maybe the most angry workers I have seen. I overheard one manager tell an employee yesterday to drive to a store two hours away, and be there by 7:00 am! The employee just looked crushed. That kind of crap didn’t happen in union shops.
I guess the future will be self checkouts, security cams everywhere, and facial recognition to track.
Seems hard to believe.
The problem is that they don’t make a living. People who work in grocery stores aren’t working there because they want to, but usually just because it’s their only option. If they quit their jobs they would be homeless by the end of the month. Do you understand what their living conditions are like? It’s really sad and it makes me uncomfortable to talk to them. Minimum wage workers in high cost of living cities are just slavery as a service.