Lately, I’ve seen a lot of complaints on Facebook about the lack of humans at cash registers in Walmart stores. Customers are expected to use self-checkers. I, too, don’t like to see people lose their jobs. I get as annoyed as the next older person trying to figure out machine payment systems. Twice recently, Ken and I have stopped a young, passer-by in a strange city’s parking lot to help us follow the instructions to leave our car for a few hours. Alas, these changes are considered progress.
May I point out a few other jobs that have been eliminated through the years? In the forties, my cousin was a local telephone operator. She sat before a switchboard and connected a caller from one party line to a person on another party line and rang the required longs and shorts. The automatic dialing system replaced her job. What would people do today without their cell phones?
When my husband was a teenager in the fifties, he worked part-time at an oil station. Customers pulled up to the pumps and sat in their cars while he filled their tanks and washed the windshields. He asked, “Check the oil and tires?” He provided that service if the driver said, “Yes.” When I need gas on a cold, windy day, I cuss today’s self-service.
There was a time, I prepared for a drive to an Illinois Woman’s Press Association meeting in Chicago by filling an old pill bottle with dimes. They were the easiest way to pay the attendant forty cents at each toll booth along I-90. Today, I enjoy using my E-Z Pass and not having to slow down.
Have you or someone close to you lost a job because of automation?