Self-serve city
When it comes time to leave your pod to get stuff done out there, no prob. Increasingly, the mantra is: Who needs others? Just help yourself.
In the bowels of my place of employ, I tossed four quarters into a premium coffee maker and slipped a packaged pod of joe into the machine's trap door. The ensuing jolt of java propelled me along a solitary passage into self-serve city.
It's a place where everyone knows your name, because the only one waiting on you is you. Trouble is, that singular familiarity may carry a hidden cost.
In the Boston area, unionists say, the move toward self-serve is coming at the expense of workers.
Mark Govoni , political director of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445 of Greater Boston, says his union, for one, has lost 700 members from its supermarket sector statewide over the last three years, a decline he attributes to the groceries' stampede toward outsourcing, automation, and self-service.
"They're looking to cut down on labor," Govoni says of the supermarketers. "If they had their way, you and I would drive by, throw some money through the door, and then be on our way." (Brian Houghton of the Massachusetts Food Association is skeptical, saying supermarkets are always looking to add help.)
The self-serve toll may rise further when the loss to our sense of kinship is factored in. Laura L. Hansen , an assistant sociology professor at UMass-Boston, says society becomes a much colder place when machines take over.
Even the cavemen liked to gossip, she says, communicating about hunting and gathering -- and cavewomen. Hansen says she can't imagine a community where machines replace bartenders and hairdressers in the current precincts of prattle.
"If you had all this automation, you would lose all this cheap therapy," said Hansen, who works under the encroaching specter of online courses and canned video lectures.
As of two months ago, 1.5 million souls in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy area worked in the service sector, as tallied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics , and during this one day I was determined to avoid every one of them.
As a newly minted member of automation nation, my dollar entry fee meekly piggybacked onto the more than $450 billion that North American consumers spent last year while using self-service -- a number that's expected to transcend $1 trillion by 2009, according to one retail study.
That's a helluva lot more lucre than was thrown down by the ac olytes of Hero, of Alexandria, Egypt, the one-named first-century inventor credited with cooking up the world's first vending machine. In went a single coin, and out come the holy water.
I gotta say: my own simple foray into self-serve felt downright Stone Age compared with the stuff I found during a reporting side trip. There, I discovered a freaky working world that already threatens one of the premier positions in America, the Fast Food Restaurant Server, with touch-screens that allow customers to mainline their own orders into the kitchen corps.
I read about autom atons who now fill iPod orders at self-serve kiosks, as their brethren robots assist with heart surgeries.
Along the way I encountered countervailing theories on the virtues and vices of our machine-assisted society, from notions of cost-cutting and speed to concerns about job evaporation and isolation.
And at the end of the sojourn, I heard a fantastical vision that predicts robots will one day be filling all our regular jobs -- from pipefitter to airplane pilot -- while we humans sit around poolside sipping pina coladas .
Can't wait!
But first there were more mundane matters to tend to: I needed to bankroll my hand-to-machine existence with a $20 withdrawal from an ATM, one of self-service's first rudimentary robots. ATMs have been spitting out cash -- and, during some economic cycles, workers -- since a crude version debuted in New York in 1939.
While the future of ATMs is shiny -- surveys show the number of transactions has already swelled from fewer than 10 million in 1975 to more than 7 billion today -- the fate of the financial work force continues to be bleak. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that wage-and-salaried jobs in banking will decline by about 2 percent over a decade through 2014 , continuing a downward trend from the 1980s and 1990s due to consolidation and new technology.
Still, I was on a hard-line mission of serving my inner and outer self. Since my shower was cold and short that morning, I was looking for a cheap second rinse anywhere I could find it.
Alas, I was unsucces s ful. As I drove off, my car resembled a woman who'd jumped out of a Calgon bath to greet a too-early date: Its body was still covered in froth.
Who cares? If I was going to do all the work myself, I ought to get a better price than the $8.95 car wash up the street.
After all, that's why Barbara McGonagle , a drinking water specialist for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, in Boston, regularly pumps her own petrol, a practice that historian s say came into vogue as consumers sought bargain-basement prices during the gas shortage of the 1970s.
I found McGonagle at a self-serve station in South Boston, putting $18.71 worth of gas into her
"It's bad enough we have to pay this," said McGonagle, 65, nodding toward the 225.9 cents-a-gallon sign beside her.
Still, she volunteered that she won't use the self-checkout line at the supermarket. "That's not right," said McGonagle. "That leaves another person unemployed."
At the Super Stop & Shop at South Bay, Loc Nguyen of Dorchester was hurrying out of the store after self-scanning four bags of groceries.
"It's quicker, faster than waiting for the whole line," said Nguyen, 30.
Nguyen says she works as a supervisor at Polaroid, but says she hasn't stopped to consider whether she was contributing to the loss of jobs by using self checkout. "I never thought about that," she said.
Labor watchers worry that the kind of wholesale move to machinery that has increased production -- and unemployment -- on the assembly line will do the same on the self checkout line. As one survey last year showed, we don't mind getting down with machines if they push us along the conveyer belt of convenience. A whopping 94 percent of the responders in North America said they've used self-checkout systems; 27 percent use them more than 70 percent of the time.
While the AFL-CIO says the manufacturing industry has hemorrhaged 2.5 million jobs since 2001, retail is trickling blood: down 58,000 employees nationally from December 2005 to December 2006; down 1,700 employees statewide by early count from November 2005 to November '06; and, though adding people locally since last January, down an expected 3,000 employees from a decade ago in the Boston/Cambridge/Quincy area measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Still, the bureau also predicts that 1.7 million new retail jobs will be added nationally over a decade through 2014. Indeed, analysts say the smart retailers are not lopping off workers, but merely redeploying them as concierge-type assisters.
"The number one thing that drives customer service is a smiling face," said Greg Buzek , president of IHL Consulting Group , a Tennessee-based retail-analyst company that did the aforementioned self-service study.
Yet heading down the fast lane is a bold new system known as radio frequency identification (RFID) . It's a radical tool for retailers being sharpened by Boston firms that holds the potential to wipe out the need for barcodes -- and, unions warn, the workers who scan them.
During the next decade, retailers predict, shoppers everywhere will be able to load their items directly into bags, scoot through an area that will automatically read all the prices from the carriage as they pass by, and then pay with a debit card, using a fingerprint instead of a PIN number.
"It's inevitable," Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com , said in a phone interview from his North Carolina home.
As the robots grow more sophisticated and affordable over the next several decades, he says, companies seeking cheaper labor will happily have them replace humans in the workplace. Take robotic truck drivers.
"They can drive 24 hours a day," Brain said. "No falling asleep at the wheel. No talking on the cellphone while driving. . . . It doesn't take sick leave or vacation. . . . If one gets into an accident, it gets reprogrammed so it doesn't happen again."
By 2055, Brain predicts there will be millions of displaced workers. He suggests society support them with annual stipends. That would enable us to paint and write and make music -- or find the cure for cancer.
"In a society where people are freed up and robots are doing the work," he said, "we can create just about anything you can imagine."
I'm in. But right now, I'm sorely missing that human touch. I decided to get a full-body massage. Per my no-contact rule, it was given to me by a chair.
It's at the mall in Cambridge. I whipped out my CharlieCard , and tried to take the T. At the station, the instructions on the screen were available in English, Spanish, and Chinese. They could be written in my native tongue -- pig Latin -- and I still wouldn't understand why I couldn't add six dollars in quarters to my card.
By the time I finally got inside the gate, I'd missed the train. My right arm felt like that of a granny who stayed too long at the slot machines.
On the train into town, Dorchester resident Judy Johnson , 60, said she gets flummoxed by the new system, too, and guessed why the T converted to self-serve: "To aggravate us."
As the Red Line rumbled, my stomach grumbled. I stopped by the vending section at Mass. General Hospital and picked up a $2.50 egg salad sandwich. I mean, it wasn't as delicious as the wine lunches that some of the state-of-the-art machines now discharge. But neither was it as gross as the fishing worms you can buy from a machine north of Boston.
Tired of vending for myself, I plopped into the black synthetic-leather chair at the mall that goes for $4,295 . I hit the button for a "deep" massage, and expected a "slow kneading" rubdown that would "relax" my "tight muscles."
Instead, The Chair pulverized my back. It shook me like a passenger on a bad flight. In fact, my lunch was ready to take off and land, somewhere. I wanted to escape. But The Chair clamped down my arms. It tightened around my ankles. I felt the only way out of this high-class death seat was to have a bolt of current rush through my brain.
Before joining the departed, I could dream about the good old days, of starting off the morning by having the smiling coffee-shop breadwinners pouring my regular brew before I'm even asking for it.
Instead, I waited for The Chair to stop, jumped out, and headed for the local supermarket. At a Redbox DVD vending machine, I swiped a dollar off my debit card, and rented a movie I suddenly longed to see: "Clerks II."
Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com. Globe correspondent Richard Thompson contributed to this story. 
