Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work

TL;DR

Self-checkout is widely deployed but does not automate cashier work; instead it offsets labor to customers, creating new relational and governance challenges for frontline workers. Using 22 interviews, the study shows two main task shifts at self-checkout (parallel demands and problem-oriented work) and increased physical strain at traditional checkouts. This leads to cashiers taking adversarial stances toward customers and employing relational patchworking techniques like scapegoating and hyperservicing to maintain service quality. The findings highlight the need to consider relational labor and surveillance when designing labor-offsetting technologies in retail and other frontline contexts.

Abstract

Self-service machines are a form of pseudo-automation; rather than actually automate tasks, they offset them to unpaid customers. Typically implemented for customer convenience and to reduce labor costs, self-service is often criticized for worsening customer service and increasing loss and theft for retailers. Though millions of frontline service workers continue to interact with these technologies on a day-to-day basis, little is known about how these machines change the nature of frontline labor. Through interviews with current and former cashiers who work with self-checkout technologies, we investigate how technology that offsets labor from an employee to a customer can reconfigure frontline work. We find three changes to cashiering tasks as a result of self-checkout: (1) Working at self-checkout involved parallel demands from multiple customers, (2) self-checkout work was more problem-oriented (including monitoring and policing customers), and (3) traditional checkout began to become more demanding as easier transactions were filtered to self-checkout. As their interactions with customers became more focused on problem solving and rule enforcement, cashiers were often positioned as adversaries to customers at self-checkout. To cope with perceived adversarialism, cashiers engaged in a form of relational patchwork, using techniques like scapegoating the self-checkout machine and providing excessive customer service in order to maintain positive customer interactions in the face of potential conflict. Our findings highlight how even under pseudo-automation, workers must engage in relational work to manage and mend negative human-to-human interactions so that machines can be properly implemented in context.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: A 1947 comic from Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller bushmiller_nancy_1947. The comic depicts how offsetting work in a self-service store to untrained customers can lead to more accidents that workers need to rectify.
• Figure 2: Summary of findings