Abstract
I began reading The Overworked Consumer shortly after returning from a trip to Europe. Something from the long flight had been nagging at me. The flight attendants asked us passengers multiple times to clean up our trash, like the items from our meals and drinks and anything we brought on board, and even to scour the pocket of the seat in front of us and around the floor for any other disposable rubbish. I’ve heard it all before, but this time seemed excessive. After a few hours of this regular announcement, a flight attendant said before landing that our efforts would help expedite the plane for its next flight. I thought: Aha! We’re working now, without pay, when we’re supposed to be enjoying our flights, reading, watching a guilty pleasure, suppressing anxieties toward flying, or whatever else we want to do with our time as paying consumers on an airplane. Annoying, no?
It was rather fortuitous, then, that I picked up this book a few days later, because what I experienced is part of what Christopher Andrews describes here as the vast proliferation of self-service, or “the substitution of paid or wage labor with the unpaid labor of consumers” (p. 1). Americans already work a lot. Now they’re increasingly being asked to work when they’re supposed to be at leisure. As Andrews identifies, self-service is not new. The first self-service supermarket opened in 1916, replacing the full-service general store. The idea of a customer selecting and carrying around their own items in a basket and bringing them to a cashier was rather novel at the time. Today, however, advances in automation and digital technologies as well as the desire for businesses to reduce labor costs have led to forms of self-service emerging and expanding within a wide array of service industries. Consumers have become quite used to doing for free what someone once did for them—for example, shopping for their own groceries, taking care of a sick relative, doing their own taxes, cleaning airplanes—and it’s likely most don’t even realize the implications of this change as they do so.
The rise of self-service is a fruitful topic for exploring the intersection of work and consumption today, and Andrews has chosen self-checkout lanes at supermarkets for his case. Central to the discussion of self-service is whether and to what extent it has an impact on jobs. Keeping the focus on the supermarket, Andrews discovers a fascinating paradox: “according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are actually more cashiers working in supermarkets than there were a decade ago, while employment and labor costs have continued to steadily rise” (p. 93), all at a time when self-checkout lanes have increased dramatically at great cost to stores. Why? If more and more consumers can scan and bag their own groceries, why would the number of cashiers not decline as the machines replace them? Andrews finds several reasons. First, supermarkets have notoriously high employee turnover rates and labor shortages, because most of their jobs are “bad” ones. Specifically, he uses Ritzer’s “McDonaldization thesis” to argue that supermarket work became so rationalized (which makes substituting some of the labor so easy) that the jobs became unattractive (i.e., “McJobs”). Second, when given more chances to do so, customers will apparently steal stuff. Stores therefore still need workers to monitor these lanes. Finally, through interviews Andrews finds that many consumers prefer the human touch of a cashier, leading owners and managers to maintain traditional checkout lanes.
The book presents a lively discussion of the topic and the case and aptly synthesizes much of the service work literature as well as data from an array of sources. There are a few issues. First, with so much focus on consumers, the ultimate explanation to the question of “why do businesses spend so much on self-checkout lanes if they don’t lead to lower labor costs?” goes unsubstantiated. Andrews only speculates that suppliers of self-checkout systems essentially invented the “problem” of slow checkout lanes and the myth that consumers are demanding them (pp. 118, 141). A deeper examination would provide greater insight into the foundations of the “do-it-yourself economy.” Second, in his framing and analysis Andrews hews very closely to the project’s conceptual pillars—Ritzer’s work, as well as Hochschild’s “second shift” and “outsourced self” and Glazer’s “work transfer”—without significantly departing from them or using them to advance a new conceptual understanding of self-service. Finally, while we get many examples of self-service work today (some of which are repeated a bit too often), we never get a sense of how this phenomenon varies as it becomes more common, and where supermarket self-checkout lanes fit within this economic landscape. Some forms of self-service, for instance, rely heavily on technology to get consumers to perform unpaid labor (like in supermarkets), while others do not (like cleaning airplanes), and some certainly do put jobs at great risk (like travel agents). Still, there is a lot of insight in this book, and I expect it to inspire many researchers as automation and technology continue upending worlds of work and consumption.
