Pseudo-Automation: How Labor-Offsetting Technologies Reconfigure Roles and Relationships in Frontline Retail Work

TL;DR

This paper explores how self-checkout machines in retail, which shift tasks from employees to customers, alter frontline cashier roles, increasing problem-solving and relational work, and often creating adversarial customer interactions.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how pseudo-automation reconfigures frontline labor roles and relationships through interviews with cashiers, highlighting new challenges and coping strategies.

Findings

Self-checkout increases multitasking and problem-solving demands for cashiers.

Cashiers often act as adversaries to customers due to conflict with self-checkout.

Workers engage in relational patchwork to manage customer interactions and machine-related conflicts.

Abstract

Self-service machines are a form of pseudo-automation; rather than actually automate tasks, they offset them to unpaid customers. Typically implemented for customer convenience and to reduce labor costs, self-service is often criticized for worsening customer service and increasing loss and theft for retailers. Though millions of frontline service workers continue to interact with these technologies on a day-to-day basis, little is known about how these machines change the nature of frontline labor. Through interviews with current and former cashiers who work with self-checkout technologies, we investigate how technology that offsets labor from an employee to a customer can reconfigure frontline work. We find three changes to cashiering tasks as a result of self-checkout: (1) Working at self-checkout involved parallel demands from multiple customers, (2) self-checkout work was more problem-oriented (including monitoring and policing customers), and (3) traditional checkout began to become more demanding as easier transactions were filtered to self-checkout. As their interactions with customers became more focused on problem solving and rule enforcement, cashiers were often positioned as adversaries to customers at self-checkout. To cope with perceived adversarialism, cashiers engaged in a form of relational patchwork, using techniques like scapegoating the self-checkout machine and providing excessive customer service in order to maintain positive customer interactions in the face of potential conflict. Our findings highlight how even under pseudo-automation, workers must engage in relational work to manage and mend negative human-to-human interactions so that machines can be properly implemented in context.