Year: 2004

First, Burger King made itself my friend again by accepting debit and credit cards. Now McDonald’s has joined the fray as well, making my life that much easier as I drive through their assembly line of cholesterol-laden, and yet somehow yummy, death.
I’ll admit it, I’m a debit card kinda guy. I never have huge piles of money on the card at any one time, tied in as it is to a small checking account I keep open just for the card. I never even write checks off that account, I just use the debit card. No interest, only a one-dollar monthly fee to have the card, sign me up.
I’m actually not a big fan of plastic. I’ve only ever held one credit card in my life, and I have long since chopped it up and closed the account – something to do with not digging Capitol One’s sixty-five-point-eight-gazillion-percent interest rate. If only I could get my wife to ditch more plastic, I’m convinced we’d be happier and – financially speaking – wealthier. I understand the convenience and occasional necessity of deferred payment, but I also understand that it can become nearly habitual to depend on such things.
And while I applaud the addition of plastic as legal tender at fast food restaurants, just for the sake of convenience, I’ve gotta wonder sometimes how the other half lives. When my account’s balance reaches zero, the debit card is useless – I have the account set up in such a way that it doesn’t create overdrafts at all. Otherwise the card would happily keep accepting every transaction, to the tune of $25 per overdraft transaction. And if that sounds crazy, think about this for a second, credit card people: if you swipe an actual credit card at McDonald’s, you’re now officially paying compound interest on a cheeseburger. There’s just something about that concept that boggles my mind.
Another place the debit card has come in handy is at a local Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market. For those unfamiliar with this particular sub-genus of the world-spanning Wal-Mart franchise/empire, they’re regular-sized Wal-Mart stores set up almost entirely as grocery outlets. And the Neighborhood Market in Fort Smith has converted several of its checkout aisles to self-service, letting you walk into the store, pick your groceries, scan your own items, pay for them and leave, all potentially without speaking to another human being. One unlucky manager gets to walk a beat near these aisles to make sure no one’s trying to slip one past the machine (although I’ve noticed that even getting ahead of myself and picking up more than one thing at a time off the conveyor belt, or allowing the contents of the bag to shift their weight, sets off an alarm), and I’ve noticed that almost every time I go there, she’s having to bail someone out of a snafu that, more often than not, boils down to operator error.
For those of us who really do encounter some bizarre problem – in my case, the aforementioned case of bagged items shifting their weight, causing the terminal in question to begin loudly issuing a verbal warning about removing items before I’ve paid for them, which suspended any remaining operations (i.e. the other box of Hot Pockets I was trying to buy) and forced the voiding and re-processing of the entire checkout – the human operators are a godsend. Though I did once see a man in an adjacent self-checkout line get really belligerent with the roving operator and her completely innocuous “Everything working OK for you?”; apparently, to this gentleman, this constituted “checking up on me,” something that he felt exposed some suspicion of him on the operator’s part. I was there the whole time, and felt that the most suspicious thing going on was the customer’s out-of-left-field insinuation that he was being accused of something.
I still prefer a checkout line with a human operator, even if that person’s job is to essentially moderate the computer-and-user interaction that takes place without a middle man in the self-checkout line. But I actually like human beings (well, some of them) and human interaction from time to time. And the aforementioned incident demonstrates why – the self-checkout line is nice if you’re in a hurry and know exactly how to operate it, but it’s also a handy option for – and I can’t really find a better word to say this here – the antisocial.
But what, really, is the social implication of being able to go to a store – a real, physical, public space – and make purchases without a single human interaction? It’s like e-commerce, only you get a little more exercise. You can interact with other people as you see fit, but there’s no longer any guarantee or any obligation to do so. This is a bit worrisome on numerous levels. The local Wal-Mart Market that I mentioned earlier eliminated five or six human-operated checkout lines to install the self-checkout terminals. Does this means that five or six checkers, multiplied by two or three shifts, are now unemployed? Is there really that much demand for the ability to check out one’s groceries without even the barest formality of a human exchange?
I do see the advantages for some: the terminals can, with the touch of a “button” on the computer touch-screen, speak fluent Spanish, a growing necessity in this and many other areas. But that advantage aside, there are sociological implications about this innovation that nag away at the back of my mind.
Buy It Now! Now, Dammit, Now!
In the realm of cyberspace, few places have been so affected by this social shift as online auction sites. I have five years of eBaying experience under my belt as both buyer and seller, and when I started my journey through the online auction world, it was a very, very different place. If you were buying something, you actually interacted with the seller at the end of the auction. Had some sort of exchange with them to discuss the total price with shipping of your item, and how they expected to be paid. These conversations could still be perfunctory at times, but you were dealing with a real person on the other end of the transaction, and not someone’s autoresponder or automailer. If you were a seller, you were expected to provide that information and do so courteously, because you were now the equivalent of a mom-and-pop store off the side of the information superhighway.
Not so much now. We’re all expected to be supermarkets – or seasoned veterans of the self-checkout line.
The advent of Paypal and other online payment services has drastically changed the expectation of the online auction experience (especially after eBay itself absorbed Paypal in a corporate buyout and started relentlessly pimping the use of that service). Me, I’m okay with firing off a money order or a check and waiting a couple of weeks for the transaction to be complete – a week for my payment to get there, a week for the item to come back to me. Maybe longer if I cheaped out and had it shipped via Media Mail. The point is, as was the case in 2000, I expect it to take a few days for the transaction to be completed. But I’m a bit of a dinosaur in that regard. Now, it seems, payment is expected instantly – unlike the days of old when a seller would wait ten days to send you a reminder that you still haven’t paid up yet, you can now expect the nastygram if it takes you over 48 hours to fire off a payment via Paypal.
48 hours?! My problem here is the lack of a Paypal account. With a debit card as my only form of plastic, I won’t sign on for Paypal; the service made mince meat of the last debit card account that I tried to use on it, with double-charges out of nowhere and other problems. I try to deliberately steer clear of auctions that demand Paypal and nothing but Paypal these days; in a very few cases where that was the only method of payment available or practical (i.e. international sellers), I fire off the money to a long-suffering friend who does have a Paypal account. And oh, the adventures we’ve had…but that’s another story for another time.
The point here being that the online auction interaction has become much more mechanical; it’s not uncommon now to complete a transaction without ever having spoken to the live person on the receiving end of your payment. And if that payment takes longer than expected, or in some cases if you’re not using the “preferred payment method” of Paypal, the other party will show up – and bare their teeth at you. I’ve had eBay transactions where I’ve paid my money, gotten my merchandise, and suffered through some barely-civil interaction in between. It’s not eBay’s fault, but this shift in the social psychology of online auctions has seen me cutting back significantly in my use of such services.
When I was a kid, I was tremendously impatient. I wanted it now, no matter what. I’ve gained much in the way of patience with age, only to see what sometimes seems like the rest of the world passing me headed in the opposite direction. Patience and civility and social interaction seem to be on their way “out” sometimes – the ‘net has forever changed our perception of buying and paying for goods, and it seems like we’ve now decided to ape the e-commerce experience in person as well. It’s up to us to talk to the cashier, or the other customers in the store, as we’re gradually eliminating the reasonable expectation that human interaction will take place with any given purchase. As with “I’m not doing anything wrong! Why are you here?” guy from the next aisle, I suspect that this shift in the responsibility for initiating human contact will bring out some people’s true colors.
But maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, this is now a society where we’re willing to pay interest on a cheeseburger.… Read more