As I approached the lines at the front of the market in order to pay for my items, there seemed to be a bottle neck at both of the lines that were manned by humans. Each line was filled with 4 or 5 people. I am currently reading a book called Are We Unique? which lays out the differences between human and animal intellect; the last chapter of which lays out the inadequacy of Artificial intelligence. With or without the book I still do not like using the self checkout lanes for four reasons: (1) There is nothing that beats reading the name tag of the high school girl that sacks your groceries and watching her face freak out wondering how this creeper in line knows her name; (2) I saw the Matrix (and in the off chance that robots do actually take over the world, I want to be on the ground floor so you can say that you read it here first), I think that by checking out at the unmanned lanes is simply leading to a machine dominated world; (3) Many have hypothesized that I do not get enough human interaction anyhow, so secluding myself even farther from society is not a wise decision; (4) cant beat human interaction.
Since I was on a deadline and had to be somewhere, I decided to forgo my addiction to human operated conveyor belts and lazers and go with the readily available self checkout lane. As I walked up to the only open lane (should have been my first clue). The nice lay who did the voice overs continually reminded me that I should remove all items from the scanner. After a couple minutes of muttering to myself quietly to myself, but also loud enough for the attendant to hear that the scanner was clean, I decided to move over to one of the other occupied lanes. I move to the only line with one person in it. As a quick reminder underneath the title "Self Checkout" reads the subtitle "Express lane," meaning quicker than others.
The woman in front of me scanned her items in a timely fashion. The problem lies not in her speed of scanning but the fact that she possessed a coupon for every item that she had purchased. Her need to scan each and every coupon that had not been sorted from a coupon book roughly the size of the unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo is really what slowed the whole process down. Half of them didn't scan, so the number had to be typed in manually. The 10 minutes that this was going on the whole world, meaning every line around me, was all moving in the direction I desire; my line remained stuck. Luckily after all the waiting she was able to pay for her groceries. Swipe a card; nope. She started placing coins and bills into the slots until she had covered the cost. I did the math in my head. All the time wasted saved her almost 30 cents. Book the cruise and make the down payment on the BMW.
My transaction with 10 less items lasted a total of one minute: the definition of express.
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