Are automated services there to help or hinder?

“Modern psychologists believe that everything we do is in our own self-interest.” (Raj Persaud)
Which sums up how much business is concerned with improving our customer experience.
First stage in defeating the automated till is to tell it you have a bag and then place a lightweight poly bag on it, as I did my first time. (My Booths bag on a Sainsbury’s auto-till!) The ‘software engineer’ (‘programming’ it seems is a thing of the past) didn’t predict that, did he. But there again ..… why does it need to know?
In their desperate attempt to make it usable by the masses, computer literate or otherwise, they design a system which is slow, inefficient and tiresome to use. Has anyone tested it with chimps? The level of programming is so crude that it’s best compared with elementary CSE Computer Studies of three decades ago (Only older readers will understand that analogy!).
My wife refuses to use them because: (a) there’s nowhere to rest her handbag while she gets out her credit card and (b) the firkin thing chucks out the receipt onto the floor (there being no catch tray) and she doesn’t see why she should have to bend over to pick it up.
For my last visit to local Sainsbury’s (believe me, I rarely go near these places) for a couple of items I saw eight of the ten checkups unmanned, long queues at the remaining two – instantly I was angry at the managerial incompetence that allows such staffing (i.e. already stress level significantly raised) before I decided to attempt a quick get-out by engaging with the auto-till.
Ah ……. but I haven’t brought my close-vision lens with me so I can’t read the firkin thing. (one firkin= a ninth of a beer barrel). Actually, the eye-screen distance is too short for my distance lenses but too great for my Zeiss Office variables (significantly: special equipment for use with computers), even if I had them with me. Answer: take pity on the assistant standing in bored attendance. She really perked up and was all smiles when this other human spoke to her and justified her tedious existence by needing help.
Since the supermarkets are counting on one assistant to supervise four auto-tills, the customer fight-back strategy is for every user to beg for help with every stage of the process. Organising a ‘flashmob’ (as a twitter contributor has suggested) to stand in line behind causing a ruckus with such shouts as ‘Get on with it, will you’ and ‘What the **** have you done wrong now?’ or ‘For Christ’s sake get on with it, will you, can’t you see there’s a queue’, et cetera, et cetera ……. with, of course, the addition of as much colourful vernacular as possible, should surely bring the issues to the attention of the management. I suggest we all head for our local stores at a predetermined time: say, at the ringing of the church bells on St Brice’s Day. (historical reference: if not known, look it up)
Seriously, like you Richard, I like the online shopping and such like. Come to think of it, I almost never go into shops any more. And I like communicating with all around the world. Such fun as buying on ebay from Germany or America or Hong Kong, say. So I see and live with and use the benefits of the internet. But, after more than three decades of computer and IT work (yes, yet another 65+ technophile), find myself being cut off from the world by a complete inability to communicate. And even if you get a real person to talk to he/she doesn’t know anything and will only read to you from a screen things he/she doesn’t understand in a near-incomprehensible Asian accent with rapid-fire delivery. When, in conversation with an BT engineer, I complained about this I was warned: “We tell them too, it has no effect but, if you think that’s bad: just wait ‘til they move it to the Philippines!”
British management fails to understand that what customers want is someone who can hold a conversation in fluent comprehensible vernacular English.
So, when will ‘Richard Wilson On Hold 2’ be broadcast?