My new
favorite thing in the whole wide world. It's not really all that
techy or
geeky, but there's a lot to be said for the desirability of
pure, unadulterated novelty. If you haven't seen these yet (I found my first one at
Albertsons), they're essentially the same as a
self-serve,
pay-at-the-pump gas station. You swipe your own
groceries, you pay with cash or your card. The key difference is that most people (who don't live in Oregon) are more or less
competent at pumping their own gas, or consider themselves to be, and thus don't mind having the entire
transaction involve only themselves and a
computer.
Grocery shopping, on the other hand, is an area where the
31337 can be clearly seperated from
the rest of the herd. In the context of a
grocery store, our time has come.
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
If you don't see what I mean, try and picture the
shopper you never want to see ahead of you
in line: the
elderly person with
sensible priorities that don't require hurrying everywhere so as to feel fulfilled, the
single parent with multiple young,
unwieldy children, the guy who has to attempt to
flirt with all the
cashiers by regaling them with stories of his
fishing trips.. These people will not use the self
check-out aisle. At least, not for a very long time. No, these aisles are for the
geeks, for people who aren't
afraid of machines, who do not seek out
social interaction in any form they can find it, who want a shopping experience as
streamlined and
elegant as possible, like any
well-functioning system should be.
Just when you thought the
dumbing down of
PCs and the
internet threatened to allow the
technological-have-nots to invade our turf and stall the fight for
intellectual evolution, everything switches and we invade the fortresses of
mainstream society. Good or bad, it's interesting to watch.