If you feel like everything keeps getting worse and your quality of life is increasingly compromised by annoyances great and small, I’ll wager that started in the early 2000s, around the time retailers introduced self-checkouts on a wide scale.
The checkout has long been embedded in our retail model. You pick your goods from the shelves and visit a cashier who rings them up. You pay. You leave. With a drive to cut costs following the 2001 recession, supermarket chains began implementing self-checkout lanes in the United States and, soon after, in Canada. The technology promised a faster, more convenient experience for the shopper and, of course, labour savings for the retailer. In the process, retail giants shifted the checkout burden from employee to consumer. You still had to collect your bread, milk, and bananas and queue up. But it was now your job to also scan, pay, and bag the items while dealing with the inevitable errors and confusions that left you frantically flagging an overworked attendant to come and fix things as a dozen other people did the same.
