GROCERY STORES BACK IN THE DAY (COMMENT). Long before Walmart and Costco, stores were shifting tasks to customers. Kids, when I was young, my mother would take us on a two-block walk to the grocery store. My mother would tell the clerk at the store what she wanted and he would get the items from the shelves. There were shelves near the ceiling, and he would use a long-handled tongs to fetch those items (usually light things like cereal boxes). When supermarkets came in, the task of getting the items from the shelves was shifted to the customers and fewer clerks were needed. The very high shelves and the tongs disappeared as well.
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In Sweden customers do all their own bagging.
My dad told me that when he was a child they sold sticks of dynamite at the store in Howardsville, VA. This blew my mind as a little kid. As for the self-bagging, one episode of the No Agenda podcast (featuring the great Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak) talked about this being the norm in Holland too. Apparently there are stores in California testing the bag it yourself model. Bagging my own groceries I can handle, but I’ll be damned if I want to battle that recalcitrant self-checkout scanner every time I go to the store. Annalisa can back me up on this.
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