5.15 /// Automation: Convenience vs Experience & our changing habits

Have you ever wondered if automation is genuinely improving our lives, or is it just making things more convenient? Reflecting on a recent shopping trip to Matalan, where a human cashier outpaced the self-service lanes, I dive into the world of automation and its role in modern society. From the growing presence of self-checkouts in the UK to the frustrations they often bring, this episode questions the balance between convenience and quality of life. Personal stories and experiences lead the way as we navigate the rise of technology in our everyday shopping experiences.

Exploring further, I consider the broader implications of automation on industries and consumer behavior. Remember the days when craftsmanship reigned supreme, like the hand-stitched elegance of a Bentley? Those days seem to be fading as online shopping and faceless automation take over. I ponder the future of our high streets and community interaction as the preference for convenience and low costs rises. Will traditional shopping experiences survive, or will they be replaced entirely? Join me as I weigh the nostalgia for the past against the curiosity for what's to come, examining how these shifts are reshaping our world.

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Chapters

• 0:01 Impact of Automation on Society
• 12:40 The Shift Towards Automation and Technology

Transcript

Stephen: 0:01

Hello and welcome to another episode of Infinite Prattle. Thank you very much for joining me again. Today I'm going to be looking at the world of automation and things becoming automated, and is that a good thing or a bad thing? Join me.

Stephen: 0:19

Hello and welcome to Infinite Prattle, Unscripted, unedited prattle on everything Hosted by me, Stephen, Listen like, share, subscribe and enjoy the show.

Stephen: 0:41

Thank you very much for joining me today. Hopefully you are well and you've had a good week and you enjoyed the last episode, which I can't even remember what it was about. These things are a blur to me, you know. I think it's not a lack of effort. I do think about what I want to talk about to a degree, but I don't really do a lot of research, as you probably find out. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I have my computer on when I'm when I'm talking, just in case I want to google something, um, and you can probably tell when I'm doing that, because my speech will slow down. I can't do two things at once, um and uh. Oh, I've actually set my arm today as well. My, my mic arm is back set up, although I am kind of scared at some point it will fall off the desk because I kind of made like a weird wooden block attachment a little bit of a steve-o diy bodge job when I first got this elgato arm, not a sponsor, um although elgato, join me in my three listeners.

Stephen: 1:42

Um, it could be lucrative, um, and the block is failing. Uh, I wrapped it in green, um, because of the green and the logo of steven speak when I started off and the green logo.

Stephen: 1:55

Now there is still green in there, you may have noticed um, and wrapped in duct tape to like. It was just like plain wood and I didn't have any paint really to paint it. I couldn't be bothered painting it, so I wrapped it in duct tape and, uh, yeah, but it's kind of loosening away from the side of the desk that I drilled it into. So if you hear a big crash, bang, wallop, firstly it's not going to be too far from a normal episode and secondly, that's probably what the, what the noise will be. And you'll probably hear me swear quite a lot If you're new to the podcast. Welcome, by the way. But yeah, I don't really prepare too much for episodes. I try to a little bit more, but I'm always thinking about what I can do next. So once I've done an episode, it kind of goes out my brain a little bit about what I've done. I generally can't even think about what that episode was. I know I did a Timu one. Was that the last one or was that the one before? That sounded like I was in a shed. I can't remember. Um, I feel like I need to check now. I feel like that. I need to need to kind of remember what the hell I've actually been up to? Um, oh yeah it was, it was Tim. Oh yeah, it was Teemu. Yeah it was, because the one that sounded like a shadow was the film revelation one where, like you know, reveals in films that I wasn't expecting. Oh, there you go, my brain isn't completely knackered.

Stephen: 3:19

Anyway, today's episode is about like automation of things, you know, you know kind of society and the world making things easier, uh, scientists making things easier, inventors making things easier, um, but also, does it make things nicer? I suppose is is the, is probably the. The thing here, um does having a lot of conveniences, like like, for example, like one of the big ones is like self-service checkouts. I I find in in shops nowadays, and I'm sure this happens all over the world, but a lot more in shops. Even local convenience stores now, uh, in in the uk have self-checkouts and they've been, they've been around for a long time. But you'll you'll get like a bank of maybe 20 self-services which have replaced uh, five manual, like traditional kind of I don't know. You would call them servers, servers, desks, like cashiers desks. That'll probably be the one on it, um, and and yes, I use them. So, before I start ranting about how crap they are.

Stephen: 4:23

I will admit that I do use them, but for my own convenience. I use them as a convenience, like for me they are there if you've got only a few items. Like, say, you pop in for a meal deal or something at Tesco's and you know there's a queue for the people queuing up for petrol or something and you can just nip in and out. For doing anything more than that I don't think they're convenient. They have got a lot better. I remember when they first came out and you'd put something on the scales or you'd scan it and it'd put it on the side and it'd be like put something. Either it would be like you've not put the right thing in the basket or it would not register.

Stephen: 5:02

And I think that we're kind of getting past that now. Obviously things have improved a little bit, but it's still not great. It's still not amazing like these things do still like not work. For example, I went to there's a shop in in britain called matalan. It's a clothing shop uh, kind of cheapish, it's like high street brand and does some good deals and they've got self-service. And I was in there with my wife and her mum and I decided to wait for the human person to serve me with my shirt that I wanted to buy, and my wife and her mum went to a self-checkout and I won, even though there was a bigger queue.

Stephen: 5:43

There was a queue for the actual cashier. There was no queue for the self-service. I got there first because of all the process that you have to go through. You still have to wait for a person to come and remove the security tags and to make sure that's been done properly. Then the system didn't work properly and then they couldn't scan the Malang card. They had to put it in manually or search their email or something like that. So, even though I had to stand in queue for a few moments, I actually finished, probably about a minute before they did so. For me that's, that was a win, that was a justifying people.

Stephen: 6:13

Um, and I think probably one of the biggest things in all this like removing um, kind of adding convenience, potentially reducing cost for the people that own the shop remember in general, like you're kind of taking people's jobs away and you're replacing it with a machine that doesn't need brakes or anything like that is is the workforce. You know you're taking people's jobs. Take my job, um, as south park uh hilariously did in one episode. Um, and I think this is this has been industrial wide for a long time. I mean this. This is not a new thing. Obviously, you have ticket machines at train stations now so you don't have to queue for a ticket. Um, it happens so much like factories etc. Most of the stuff that probably I have in my room was hardly touched by a human and that's sad in some sense, but it reduces cost and it reduces cost but it massively increases profit margins. I think the biggest thing is human impact, so it's the job losses. It's the five people you just replaced on the self-checkout. You maybe kept one of them to monitor the self-checkout, but fundamentally you've replaced a load of staff with machines and they either will have to go on to a different job, maybe have a different job in the store, maybe lower paid, or be out of the job completely, and I think I don't know how we're going to address this in the future.

Stephen: 7:39

I think that's what's scary, especially with the advent of AI recently, and I must admit I use AI on my podcast, not for me, I am real, as you can probably tell by the chaos, but just when I upload stuff, I pay for a facility that it basically scans my podcast and it produces a synopsis, synopsis and and um, a transcript etc. Which isn't always spot on. I quickly briefly read it. If you do ever see any massive faults in it, then let me know. But um, it's just, it helped me kind of streamline my process. So it takes a while for it to like go through everything and actually produce it, so probably like sometimes up to half an hour, I guess it's depending on how busy the servers are.

Stephen: 8:25

But then, once it's through, it kind of gives me an idea for a potential name for the podcast, because I have to name every episode and that's kind of hard. Like I don't want to just put it. I kind of want to put something catchy. The whole idea of trying to increase viewers to a point is to have some sort of catchy tagline. But I also want it to be something that I want. So there's a compromise there. So to generate ideas the AI thing it generates like six or seven names for the episode. That's really helpful.

Stephen: 8:50

But I'm not employing anyone to do that. For me that's kind of created a job because someone's got to maintain that system and and and service I suppose. Uh, whereas I wouldn't in a, in a small scale operation like me, which is me. I'm not employing anyone, so I'm not taking anyone's job way as far as I can see from my viewpoint, whereas in a supermarket or any establishment where they start taking tills away and replacing them with self-service and it's happened a lot In the UK some places have started putting people back again, which is good. I think it was the supermarket chain Waitrose actually decided to reinstall cashier desks and employ more people, because it's basically one nice segue into what I'm coming to.

Stephen: 9:34

Next is human interaction. As much as we go, oh, bloody hell, don't want, don't talk to anyone and I can be like that as well. I can be a very, very social person and I'll talk to anyone strangers, etc. Um, but I can be very, very like, focused in my I do not want to talk to anyone as well. So I think that the human interaction when you go to a service outlet, it doesn't matter where it is.

Stephen: 10:01

I mean God, you can check into an airport now and fly a plane and hardly have to speak to anyone, which is insane really, if you think about it, Because you don't really speak to the security staff, they literally just point about where you need to go. So you can really do lots of things. You can buy a car online, like online shopping, like Amazon, you know, you don't have to have any interaction, you don't have to go out to the shops, which is another thing probably driving the cost savings in these places, because obviously, with the advent of, obviously, online shopping, it's, you know, killing the high street. And I must admit, I'm a massive advocate for high street shops, but unfortunately I shop online a lot. It for high street shops, but unfortunately I shop online a lot, um, because it's so convenient. It is so convenient, um, and I I do miss going into town, but our town is, unfortunately, where I live, in Crewe and Cheshire. The town is dead, uh, partly due to jackasses like me shopping pretty much exclusively online. But it it's all that balance, isn't it? Because I know that the, the fees that they charge shops are so astromon, astronomically high that, um, they have to keep their prices higher and obviously wages go up and it's it's all a big shift then that you know they have to then try and cut corners or have smaller shops, which then don't you know. You can't then have the stock, you can't still sell it at the same price and you're expecting people to come to you. Like, the kind of ideal thing of online shopping is the inconvenience of sitting at home waiting for your delivery to arrive, which has kind of been kind of cut out with, you know, pickup points and Amazon lockers, because we're quite lucky, we have an Amazon locker literally about 50 feet away from our house, which is dangerous as well. But yeah, you'll probably never get a high street shop that's as cheap as online.

Stephen: 11:52

What I want to do when I go to the high street shop is see the thing, and that's the thing you can't do in your online shop. You can see the thing and I will pay a slight premium for that experience. If it's something that I really need to see or it's something that's a bit more bespoke, like, I don't mind paying a few extra quid to actually have seen it and got that customer service and actually pay for that. Um, but for most things in life, especially because, like online, shopping's got so easy now you can see everything, you can do little videos, you can read reviews, see people's pictures, you can google it from all these different research like viewpoints, that it's non-essential really to go somewhere. I don't know if I'd buy a car online. Let's face it, I'd like to sit in a car and drive it, but it's not essential now to go and visit these places.

Stephen: 12:40

Which is driving all this faceless um automation? I know it's been the same in factories for years, like robots building cars etc. But there's still people supervising that probably not as many people as would have been building the cars originally. Um, even where, where I in Crewe, bentley's are made. It's one of the biggest Bentley factories. I think most Bentleys are actually made there or finished there. It might be exclusive I can't remember now because I know they moved some operations to Germany when Rolls-Royce kind of become Bentley, but they do a lot of stuff by hand still. They still hand-stitch the seats etc. So you know there's still stuff and craftsmanship like that. But I can't afford a Bentley. You're paying for that craftsmanship and I think that that's kind of the juncture where we're at at the moment. I think the people that are realistic and want to save money. That kind of outweighs the need to go into a shop and that's sad.

Stephen: 13:42

Even when I was a kid, I remember Crew being a thriving place and you didn't have the option to online shop because the internet wasn't a thing. Yes, kids, that's true, and you had no option. If you wanted a CD or a tape as it was when I was a kid or a record or um, anything, literally anything there was. There was very few deliveries. Pretty much the only thing I remember being delivered on as a kid was, um home shopping stuff. So like your avon, uh, which came by the Avon rep and couriered stuff from catalogue purchases. If you bought something off a catalogue, they used to come via courier. I can't remember many things when I was growing up that we got delivered. Stuff came through the raw mail, which was generally normal post, just letters, et cetera but we never really had nothing delivered.

Stephen: 14:35

It's crazy how that shift in like technology and culture has has driven like humanless jobs, um, and it does make me wonder. It really does make me wonder what it's gonna be like in like 20 years time. Will we have a high street? Will high streets be dead? Will it all be like I was gonna say people, places, I meant like apartments and homes and offices and will we have lost that local handmade business kind of structure? And, yeah, and companies always get bigger and bigger, uh, as they move to online.

Stephen: 15:19

And the weird thing is my I have a convenience store next door, uh, which is, um, it's currently in asda, which are owned by walmart, walmart, uh, and it's a petrol station as well. So, uh, gas station, you few american people, um, and I never go and get fuel there, really, unless I really really really desperate or I'm in a rush. There's another petrol station I always go to because I can collect points and, uh, it's normally cheaper, uh, so I I use that shop as a convenience store more than a petrol station, which, fundamentally, when it opened, it was a petrol station, it wasn't a convenience store. Uh, and these, these, these are the places that, to be fair, it kind of annoys me when you have a petrol station with a shop, because for me, petrol stations are petrol stations and I think they should have.

Stephen: 16:07

Um, that's one of the only times I don't actually mind using self-service exclusively as a petrol station, because they've kind of shot themselves the foot with the fact that I, if I want a shop, I'll go to a shop, I'll go to a supermarket or I'll go to a convenience store. Um, if I want petrol, I'll go to a petrol station and I, when they mixed the two, that kind of annoyed me because you'd be in a queue waiting to pay for petrol and there's literally someone in front of you and they've done a whole week's shop in the freaking convenience store and you're like, really Like, firstly, this has cost you a lot more money because there's a premium on these products because of convenience you don't have to drive to the big supermarket and secondly, it's meant to be a petrol station. I've bought petrol, I want to come in here and just pay for my petrol. That used to annoy me. The one I go to is a is a chain called sainsbury's and I I drive a few miles to go to that one because save a bit of money and you get your next card points, which is a incentive scheme in the uk not sure they have it anywhere else, to be honest, and I'll drive there and film my car up.

Stephen: 17:15

But the shop next door to me, which is a petrol station I use as a shop, um, I'll go and steal bargains they've got they always have like reduced items and stuff and I'll just go and get milk and and and. Um, just you know last minute bits if we're cooking and we've run out of something or we need some extras, that's that's what I use it for. Um, and it is a shop to me. That that's. And it shows that like kind of like weird juxtaposition, the fact that, um, petrol stations have become convenience stores but it's then no longer to be, it's no longer convenient to get petrol there because of everyone buying all these offers they've got. And well, the one next to me is pretty much a mini supermarket it's. It's quite small but it has loads of stuff.

Stephen: 17:58

So I don't mind at petrol stations when they have self-service on the actual petrol pumps. Um, it's probably the only time I pretty much exclusively use that. But if I go in somewhere, like say, the shop next to me does have one self-service thing and I've never used it just because there's a person there and there's never really a queue and the only thing is you can't use that self-checkout for the petrol, you have to go to the person. So it's a weird like missed opportunity there. And I think that I was listening to Michael Palin's diaries. He's released a new diary and, if you like Michael Palin or the Pythons or anything like that, it's a great list and he literally has documented his life. I did an episode about me writing a diary and it did not last very long at all, but the quote that he came from from the 1999 diaries kind of really struck a chord in me.

Stephen: 18:51

It's kind of related to this, but he said he felt like he was living in a living in a world with less rules and formalities, and I think that kind of like goes into this scope of kind of what I've been talking about with like human interaction, um, and also kind of the thing I was talking about like people's moral compasses and people's behaviors that I spoke about in another episode. I really think that the less we interact with people, the worse we get in, and I think that all these self-checkouts, etc. I've kind of honed in on that one You're removing these low-paid-skill jobs that students and stuff have always had in the past. You always think of students getting cashier jobs, coffee shop you know coffee shop jobs. You know mcdonald's fast food restaurant jobs. It's removing them away and it's reducing people's interaction. I know people before that. You know if you've got anxiety, you don't want to speak to people. They're a good thing, but in general, the more you avoid something, the worse that thing becomes. And I think that covid, um, and we're going to relate to covid so many times aren't we through our lives? We were, you know, they're affected generations of that, I think in 2020.

Stephen: 20:05

When covid hit, everyone was like yearning for kindness and exploration and human contact. Uh, it also made us too comfortable to not see people um very much, though, and that kind of hurts as well. But kind of people were like I'm gonna do this for myself, I'm gonna do this for myself, I'm gonna spend money on myself, and if I meet a friend along the way, then that's kind of good. When I don't see my friends half as much, um, and that's partly my fault, I'm not gonna blame my, blame my pals for that, um, but I don't. I don't see my friends half as much, and that's partly my fault. I'm not going to blame my pals for that, but I don't have kids A lot of them do, so there's a lot of responsibility on them to make the time for me, and it's probably easier for me to make time for them.

Stephen: 20:47

But organising stuff is so hard now. Just being an adult is just harder, isn't it Like one of the days when you're a kid and you just fly around someone's house on a bike, but not from a right tangent here, but you know what I mean. I think that Covid did kind of push us all in a direction where we know we crave human interaction, but we also have kind of come out with that of you know it's okay to be alone, and then people's mental illnesses are kind of more heightened now. So if, if you know you've got anxiety or or you know adhd or autism stuff, it's okay to kind of go and segregate yourself, I can't help but think that that maybe is a bad thing, um, yeah, I just don't know where we're going to be.

Stephen: 21:36

Are we going to be like the Matrix, where, you know, humans will start handing over jobs to robots and we'll just oversee them? How do we generate money from that? Surely the employment level would go through the roof and we can't sustain that. I don't, I don't know. It's a weird one, isn't it? And I know climate change is like a massive thing and maybe that'll kill us before this becomes an issue.

Stephen: 22:02

Uh, but I think that the increased, the increased automation things and the increasing pressure for companies to save money and automate things, which isn't always a bad thing, don't be wrong. I'm not not completely against stuff, but it's uh, someone's on my front door.

Stephen: 22:23

Someone's on my front door. I think that might be my call to leave this podcast where it is. Um, as you can hear my dog probably going mental in the background, but yeah, I just don't know where we're going as a society and as a nation and as a world. Where are we going with this, I don't know. Anyway, I'm going to leave that there because I'm really nosy and I want to know who's at the door as well. So, right, take care of yourselves and yeah, let me know what you think in the comments and chat and send me a message. You can do that if you look in the description of the episode. You can send me a text message and, yeah, I will speak to you all soon. Take care of yourselves.

Stephen: 22:57

You've been listening to Infinite Drattle. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, go back and listen to some others and please continue to listen. Your support is much appreciated. Please like, share, comment and subscribe and I'll speak to you all again soon. Take care, like, share, comment and subscribe and I'll speak to you all again soon. Take care.