Just watched a chain restaurant employees do their hourly picture taking of the store to send off to corporate through a locked down tablet. I asked them about it. Turns out corporations are now using tablets and Ai to manage stores. Holy shit
Now you don’t even have a human manager on-site with whom you could reason who is familiar with the facts on the ground, I guess. No possibility of the workers being able to advance, too, possibly.
Techno-feudalism is turning out to be just as awful as any of the dystopian visions we’ve seen from writers over the past few decades, but it’s also awful in new, unique ways.
This doesn’t make any sense… why would they have an employee walking around with a tablet instead of just slightly beefing up the already in place security surveillance system?
As a consumer I could have better visibility with a few hundred bucks worth of Ring cameras.
Knowing the way corporations are I would guess some vendor convinced them this was a better solution. Probably some executive got a kickback too which is why it will stay that way.
Yeah this sounds like a dumb corpo waste of time more so than AI management or something like that.
Yeah plus putting cameras to see every part of the store now requires way more cost/maintenance than just telling the underpaid manager “take these 10 photos every month or we’ll fire you”
It’s every hour, not every month. It’s a considerable expense to have a human do that 12-16 times a day.
Managing a lot of built in systems is complicated on their end. Instead, they just force their underpaid employees on location to do the hard work.
They can punish based on noncompliance
Union protection? ;-)
My guess is roi and the cost of Ai scanning a photo for out of place/damaged/dirty items. There not even going through the effort of viewing the photos or security cameras. The Ai flags the fry cooker as dirty, staff cleans again, take another picture an hour later, Ai flags fry cooker as dirty, human manager notified.
Oh that’s not new. I worked for a small utility (7 locations, < 300 employees). I was based at corporate but expected to routinely make visits to the other facilities. One time the CEO happened to be at an office the same day I was. No sooner had he walked out the door when four other people stuck their heads in the office I was working in to ask, “Who was that?”
They genuinely had no idea who the guy was. Not surprising though. He was the type of executive who thought his employees did not deserve the privilege of his attention for any reason. If you wanted to talk to him, you had to basically ask for the privilege of being summoned to his office. If he didn’t like what you had to say, you would be written up.
The people who “lead” (if you can call it leading) like that have no business being in leadership positions.
The human elements are being stripped away along with consumer protections. So services are becoming more and more like the tech sector (like YouTube, WhatsApp blocking) where for a long time, the situation has been that decisions get made by an algorithm and there is literally no one to appeal to about them.
Take banking as an example - with brick and mortar locations shrinking, it’s already so hard to get simple things done unless you download their app, agree to an unnecessarily long list of terms and conditions which can be changed unilaterally at any time, and your rights to sue are waived in favor of arbitration.
We as consumers are doing more of the work that was previously being done by employees and without getting paid for it. Think self checkouts - when it started, I was very happy that I didn’t have to talk to a person if I didn’t feel like it, but now I am essentially forced to use it because there are few to no cashiers. And I’m not getting paid to do the work for which an employee was previously getting paid, nor am I paying less for my groceries as a result of doing the work myself.
It also used to be faster, as most people used self-checkouts as an analog for express lanes. But now with folks with full trolleys using it, the lack if specialisation and theft prevention systems constantly breaking requiring the one or two employees to fix, it’s now significantly longer than a regular checkout in most cases.
Hahahaha we do this at work as well. Take pictures of everything and send it off.
Part of me likes it because it gets them to leave us the fuck alone for the most part, but it’s still a joke.
Could you not have some printed versions of the shit they ask for on a good day and then photograph the photographs any day everything is going to shit?
So, y’all would rather they burn fuel traveling around?
I would rather burn upper management right at their desk.
I’d even come to them, no need to plan a trip to the store!
Now they burn fuel running ai every hour
That human is taking a job away from a tele-presence droid.
Just take the most blurry ass photos and send em…
The Ai rejects blurry pictures apparently. But it’s BUGGY AF. and rejects perfectly good pictures. The workers said of they fail to upload pictures two hours in a row, they could be fired.
“Hi boss, the ai just rejected my picture”
“Hi again, heres the picture”
“Hi boss, it got rejected again, see picture attached”
“Oops forgot to attach it”
…
