Imagine walking into a department store and never having to speak with anybody while making purchases.
It seems J.C. Penney shoppers will experience human-less checkouts by the end of 2014, making obsolete one of the staples of a department store shopping experience.
In fact, in some J.C. Penney’s Levi’s shops, employees already are using iPads to checkout customers.
So it seems we’ll have two types of shopping experiences to choose from soon — sitting in our homes, clicking through pages of items to buy before clicking our virtual shopping carts and checking out, or physically walking into a store and using an iPad to check out.
In both scenarios, there nearly is no need for human interaction.
How sad is that? Yet, despite the fact that J.C. Penney has yet to disclose how many people will lose jobs because of this shift, few people seem to be up in arms over it.
I guess we’re OK with being nothing but a recluse.
But seriously, how sad is it that we try to refrain from as much interaction as possible.
I talked with a few friends about the J.C. Penney news. None of them seemed to care, infact, most were excited because of the ability to truly be on your own in a store from the moment you walk in until the moment you leave.
That’s just awful that we don’t even want to be bothered by a fellow human being able to check us out for, what, maybe 2 minutes at a time? What’s next — the mailman, the deli counter gouy the Trib....).
I, for one, enjoy talking with someone at the checkout — or in some process of what I do in a store.
I can’t fathom a time when we don’t speak to someone we’re buying something from.
We struggle so much trying to build relationships, social connections and just become well-rounded individuals willing to learn new things, but we can’t give a few minutes to the person ringing out our overpriced shopping mall attitude.
We already refuse to call friends and family, opting to send a bland text message that offers little emotion and takes several times longer to send than picking up the phone or being in person.
I just cannot imagine how being on your own without any social interactions can be healthy? Part of what makes us human is our ability to work together — in person — to solve things.
I can’t imagine walking through a department store and not engaging in a person to help.
The loss of cashiers at J.C. Penney might seem to be minor, but as soon as one large corporation does it, before you know it, we’ll be living the “Wall-E” movie so much.
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