My friend Lee went shopping at Albertsons in La Habra, proceeded to the checkout, and discovered he is now a grocery clerk and bagger.
This is not how he intended to spend his retirement. But hundreds of automated checkout stands, like the ones at Home Depot, are arriving in Southern California supermarkets. This is great news for those seeking even less human contact and more electronic glitches.
You don't have to use the automated system. You can stand in line and do business with a living, breathing checker before they are all stuffed and shipped off to the Smithsonian. But my friend Lee got the feeling the human-interaction lines were kept intentionally long, forcing shoppers to share in the work.
"What next? Will we have to stock the shelves ourselves?" Lee asks. "And will this spread? Will my dentist charge me to pull my own tooth? Will the L.A. Times charge me to write my own Steve Lopez column?"
(Editor's note: Too late, Lee. This column is being written under Lopez's name by a contractor in India. Lopez now works as the night manager at a Del Taco in Downey.)
To get my own look at the future, I went to the Albertsons on Commonwealth Avenue in Alhambra, which has four self-checkout stations.
Only one person, a graphic designer named Tracy Carta, was using the new system. Or trying to, at least. The first words I heard from her, as she gave up and stomped away, cannot be printed in a family newspaper.
"I'd use it if it worked," Carta said.
David Hernandez, pushing a shopping cart, said he had done self-checkout before, but the stations are often on the fritz. When they work, he said, they can be the quickest way out of the store. That would be welcome relief, since manned checkout lines are often so long, perishables expire before you can pay for them.
But Hernandez, a process server, has qualms about an economy that keeps killing off decent-paying jobs.
"World domination by robots? Yeah, it scares me," he said.
It should surprise no citizen that the self-checking trend is being driven by the unimpeachable king and blood-sucking ruler of the global economy -- Wal-Mart.
Retail analyst Greg Buzek says Albertsons, Vons and Ralphs realize there's no way on God's green Earth that they could ever win a price war with Wal-Mart. So their strategy is to slay the beast with better service.
This means displaced supermarket checkers will work the deli counter, serve up prepared food, cut fresh flowers and make sure the bread is stacked just so.
