Happened to watch a little advertisement last night for the new Amazon Go Store. Haven’t heard of it? Let me ‘splain, or sum up. Basically, you walk in, swipe some kind of card, walk around the store, put stuff in your bag, and walk out of the store. As you walk out, the store charges your Amazon account. You don’t then have to “check out” by going through a line. Amazon uses technology to identify what you took and charge you. Sounds amazing, sort of. I mean, what wouldn’t be awesome about just walking in and out.
Or, because it’s time to be a Christmas BaHumbug, it could be a thing that is not a very good thing. I took the immense trouble of listening to the Art of Manliness recently interview someone about technology in general. (Can’t remember who it was, you could probably just search the AoM site.) This person unplugged completely for a while and then wrote a book about what it did to her. You won’t be shocked to learn it made her into a better person. But of course, once the time was over, she plugged back in. As indeed most all of us would.
She talked about the foolishness of getting rid of All the Burdens. When you make everything completely smooth and easy, you stand to lose something essential. Most of us struggle with this in the realm of housework, or at least I do. Because everything is supposed to be Easy, it is psychologically disturbing to have to do something like load the dishwasher three times a day, to cook the same meals over and over again. It should be like the phone. You push a button and you’ve achieved something. We believe in technology, in this age, because it’s become like breathing, which means that when we have to do something with our hands and bodies, we chafe under the horror. There’s no category any more for caring for the body in a physical, material, non technologically oriented way. (Which is why my cupboards are filled with mechanized appliances.)
So now shopping will fall into that category as well, as indeed it has been tending to for quite a long time. We don’t, after all, go out into the field and dig up our own potatoes, we go to the store and pick up bags of them and put them in our carts. But when we walk out we still have to pause and make some kind of calculation, have some moment of interaction with another human being. This is true even in the dreaded self check out line that doesn’t work and has a person standing there to help you swear at the machine. I go to the store, fill my cart, and then I take out a big stack of filthy lucre and count it out to the person sitting on the stool. Bill by bill. Money, as it were, changes hands. And while I stand there I consider how it is that I have that money, If all the things I’ve bought will feed my six children, if I forgot anything, and whether or not I should reach out and add a pack of gum. The business of standing there, just for a moment, and enduring the ritual of buying food is helpful for my whole week. I come home and cook that food. I cut it up and add heat and then we all sit around the table for at least an hour with the candles lit, chewing it with our mouths and savoring it with our tongues.
Cooking and eating food is a burden that shouldn’t be got rid of. And I’m really thinking that the burden of shopping, already so slimmed and lightened by the glories of technology might be another one that is not ultimately worth flinging out the window.
And, evermore, stores like these will further divide the unworthy from the worthy, the poor who counts out her tattered bills from the hip Amazon credit card possessor. As if we aren’t classist enough. At least a poor person can shuffle into Wegmans and pick up a single donut, pay for it, and leave. What if that person can’t get online or pay an Amazon bill? No donut for you.
These are just a few objections to a store I will never likely see with my own eyes. And now I will go do the terrible task of taking actual pieces of clothing and moving them from one magical machine to another and then exhausting myself by pushing the buttons that makes them both clean and dry.
Pip pip
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