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Courtesy of the Times.
Our present fragile national condition, with declining high streets and daily predictions of doom, makes any retail job precious. But can there be a more dispiriting role than to be one of those roving assistants detailed to help shoppers having difficulty with self-service checkouts? Instead of the traditional polite exchange of goods for money across a counter demarcating your professional territory, you meet the public when they are already annoyed, stabbing at a screen and snarling at robot accusations from the bagging area. Solve their problem, and you turn round to see the rest of the row swiping and slamming barcodes in a mood approaching vicious.
There may be some who enjoy the self-service boom and are pleased to have corporate profitability inflated by reducing fellow citizens’ chances of employment. But not, I think, many. And tens of thousands every year simply welcome the bleeping chance to steal. This form of shoplifting is rising, and the British Retail Consortium complains that undermanned police are not even interested in the ones they catch. Some forces set a threshold of value — £100 to £200 — before they bother. So if, like that ingenious lad in France, you pop a Sony Playstation 4 on the scales and register it as fruit, they might come. But register fillet steak as carrots, or pop a pack of smoked salmon under the tomatoes, and they probably won’t. Online chat rooms giggle: “I always do a bit . . . their prices are awful, big chains rip us off anyway . . . it’s victimless . . . serve them right for cutting jobs.”
That last accusation is tempting: a Home Office commercial victimisation survey found in 2014 that supermarkets with self-service checkouts were considerably more likely to be robbed than those without. A coupon website survey suggests that last year more than £3 billion was nicked this way, and that nearly a quarter of us do it. No doubt in distant boardrooms a calculation will have been made that it’s worth it to cut staff, and you can always whack a few pennies on everyone’s basket to compensate. All predictions suggest that automated shopping will go on rising.
It is interesting to wonder what that might do to us. Professor Adrian Beck, a longtime criminologist at Leicester University, published a paper noting that self-scanning technology has inadvertently created an environment that encourages theft. Risk is less because staffing is lower, so “opportunity theory” kicks in. But it also de-humanises trade: if no person is involved, you short-circuit your sense of community and fraternity. People who could never steal an apple from a village shop might well cheat Tesco. Another academic offers the example that if a cashier gives him too much change he hands it back, in case that individual gets penalised. But if a machine spewed it out he’d keep it. The same applies in other areas: fare dodging costs the railways some £200 million a year and crowding, delays and a scarcity of ticket collectors accentuate the temptation. Determined experts use the dark web to forge tickets or game the barcode system, but that can’t explain it all. Many, like the self-service bandits, are probably acting that way just because they can, and because it feels unconnected to any warm communal responsibility. Likewise, deliberate tax evaders might well be hardened by every report of government waste.
It takes me back to a piece of neuroscience research three years ago, which for the first time showed that lying — which is closely related to stealing — actually changes your physical brain. When volunteers told a lie related to winning a game the amygdala, the bit which registers decisions and emotion, sparked up actively with negative feelings. But as they went on lying more and more extremely, the brain cluster did less and less: it shrugged, you might say. Dr Tali Sharot of UCL said the response “fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a ‘slippery slope’. ”
