As IF Times

Recently, I had the misfortune of dunking my mobile phone into a lake.  Not on purpose of course; the phone was in the pocket of my swim trunks and I’d forgotten that it was there when I waded into the water.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having these kinds of mishaps with their cell-phones.  The aggravating part is not so much the moisture permeating the phone and causing it to not work.  It was the reality that without access to the information and features on the phone, I was somewhat handicapped from doing everyday things that I’d taken for granted.

Who amongst us can easily recall the actual telephone numbers or co-ordinates of our regular contacts….much less casual friends or especially of business contacts? We’ve all programmed the phones to access them via voice or key strokes.  What about access to doors whereby we wave our phones over a Bluetooth sensor?   Don’t forget the most important function of all phones these days and which is responsible for their high cost….the camera.  Once that’s out of commission, our everyday shortcut for recording events is no longer available.  Of course, without camera phones, how does one eat food or take vacations? Girls would be helpless. It’s like the old chestnut about preventing an Italian from driving by breaking his middle finger.

Our dependence on such devices has been such that people are more anxious without their phones than they are about almost anything else.  That’s rather frightening to think that our lives are tethered to a 3 by 5 piece of plastic and silicon. This transition has been gradual, so gradual that we’ve failed to notice our increasing dependency on our phones.  Like all consumer items, the hook is convenience.  Who doesn’t want more convenience?  The issue with convenience is that our minds naturally ignore the processes involved in finding a solution and we become dependent on ‘things’ or others for decisions.  Once routine things are taken care of, we presumably turn our mental efforts to more worthwhile things.

Except that this doesn’t happen. If anything, we are likely to become lazier.  Why go through the trouble of researching anything in depth when by merely clicking a few keys, a ‘source’ will provide the information for us.  The onset of Artificial Intelligence will only make this worse.  We have as a society, offloaded lots of our critical thinking to sources that make our minds up for us.  The advent of the phenomenon of social media has created an entirely malleable generation of people whose opinions are shaped by prolific posters.  The veracity of this claim is proven by the amount of money that corporations are willing to throw at ‘influencers’, in order to shape views and opinions and of course, hawk goods.

To be sure, corporate television and media still exert their influence, but distrust of them has grown so much that few take any media utterances seriously any more.  They have collectively become America’s version of Pravda or Xinhua. For those that have outsourced their critical thinking of major issues to media, their ability to grasp simple realities withers and suddenly their ability to logically assess situations disappears.  They may have positions which they parrot on any given issue, but not the ability to defend them critically.

The real wake-up call for people is that people whom have been relied upon to provide rational responses and opinions have been outed as being utterly incompetent or incapable of rendering any views at all.  They are like a virus; their stupidity has the ability to infect untold naïve minds.  For example, recently, a politician offered an idea to fight rampant crime in her famously violent city of Chicago.  Her brainstorm: ask gangs to only shoot people at night.

In a previous post, I postulated that a school child will tell you that 2 plus 2 equals 4; not so much because they can prove it, but mostly because the teacher told them it was so.  It’s a rather frightening thing to agree to a set of beliefs just because it’s convenient to agree with everyone else.

link: https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/lululemon-workers-fired-calling-police/

By now, most people are aware of the trend towards self-checkouts in many retail store chains.  From Wal-Mart to Whole Foods to Home Depot, we’ve all encountered those electronic kiosks at which you can scan and pay for your goods instead of having a live person do it for you.

Someone must think this is a good idea since they have gone way beyond the experimental stage and such kiosks are everywhere.  Someone must have done some calculations and determined that not having to pay wages, employment taxes and dealing with troublesome employees would result in huge benefits to the bottom line.  We can see the marketing spin on this; the customer can do it as fast as a clerk and it will be more “convenient”.  In reality, anyone who has stood behind someone unable to properly scan an item is already aware that this is neither faster nor more convenient,

There’s that key word, convenient.  This one word is the basis for so much change in the consumer landscape over the past decade and a half.  Marketing of any product or service must have at its core, the aspect of convenience.  In reality, it’s a euphemism for catering to lazy people. We may still recall when that concept was applied to grocery stores with limited items where one could ‘conveniently’ buy a loaf of bread or a jug of milk without having to go through the horror of wading through an entire grocery store.  This concept became the basis for the 7-11 store chain; although in practice, 7-11’s sell mainly meat jerky and sugary drinks the size of small kegs. They also serve as training grounds for robbers.

Whole Foods is pushing the idea of convenience even further by inviting people to experiment with chips embedded in their hands that would allow someone to not have to go through the onerous process of taking out a wallet to pay for their goods.  Just wave their hand over the scanner and they can be off to pursue their urgent lives.  Of course, this is sold as convenience.  Not lost on some is the similarity to cattle that have electronic sensors attached to their ears for tracking purposes.

While all of this push for convenience is going on, some businesses are pushing the envelope even further.  As the linked story above details, a Lululemon store has punished some employees for having the temerity to call the police on some clients who were only enacting their advanced ideas of convenience by just walking out the door without paying at all.

This is a whole new level of retail technology.  Not only do you not need cashiers, you don’t even need to pay.  Clients can simply browse through the goods and leave with whatever catches their fancy.  This certainly eliminates the trouble of having any kind of seasonal sales campaigns, because they’re no longer needed.  This whole notion dovetails with the oft proposed idea of a cashless society.  Who needs cash or currency, when you can just take what you need?

Strangely, this is at odds with another trend we see more often in certain urban centers wherein the aisles of the retail stores are encased in glass doors and an employee is required to retrieve the goods for the customer. What’s especially odd is that these stores often serve exactly the same customer base in the same city.  Gee, I wonder which model of customer convenience will prevail?