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
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
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.