Amazon is ditching it's Just Walk Out program. Aside from that, the tech, which seemed fully automated, was just staffed by invisible workers.
Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
I worked long enough in a grocery store to be completely unsurprised, totally horrified, and grimly amused by this news. Management used to tell us that we cashiers were being monitored through the cameras above the checkouts by remote security forces, so, you know, WATCH YOUR STEP! No idea if it was true, but it was often said.
And when I worked the meat counter, it was like, 'look, I'd love to give you extra complimentary spices as I've done so in the past, but see that new camera? That's not watching you, it's watching me, and I'm not getting fired for you, so . . ."
Problem is, your average civilian has no idea just how intertwined the supermarket is with the security apparatus. Hell, Johnny Rube heads into the Aisle 7 to pick up his six pack of caffeinated alcohol for The Big Game and he has no idea he's in a fecund swamp of a whole fucking multitude of iron-winged brain worms. Meanders into the Cheeto aisle for a little taste of salty spicy crunch, never suspecting he's wading through one of fascism's most fertile breeding grounds. By time he leaves the supermarket, his psychic apparatus is packed full of more dormant parasitic larvae than a survivor of The Place God Forgot. He's so depatterned and driven that he might as well be strapped to a gurney with Donald Ewen Cameron hovering over him. Goes home just waiting for the trigger codes.
A goddamn test site.
Not that you can tell anyone about any of that shit. Bad enough, they've come to enjoy the experience and, if not enjoy it exactly, then to crave it. Depend on it. That's what a lifetime of exposure will do to a brain. No, you're not just dealing with self-interest and self preservation, but with a whole other swathe of dime-store psyops.
You pull one of these people aside and start telling them that self-checkouts can only go one way and that's a straight line to bag-checks, pat-downs, and TSA like screening measures, or that you're being watched by cameras manned by armies of invisible foreign security forces, and that's just to cut costs and juke shareholder value, and you can watch them glaze over. They've heard about people like you. People who interfere with a seamless sensory shopping experience. They're not going to listen. And even if they did, then what?
You'll discover you've gone barking mad. Real talk about a supermarket is like talking about the actual adventures of the CIA in mixed company. You can do it, sure. But you're going to sound like some wild-eyed Dale Gribble. Might even develop a good froth. No sense even wasting your words. No one wants to know the history of the banana or why the Tide is locked up. Getting through the fucking place depends on not knowing.
No comments:
Post a Comment