| Please Insert Your Union Dues |
| Written by Koop Kooper |
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the 'cook your own steak' grill. It will be up to Woolworths to go the next step, creating a restaurant where you cook the meal, clean up afterwards, and then process your own bill. They'll use their expertise in weighing machines to make it all possible. You'll be weighed as you walk in, weighed as you leave, with any additional kilos whacked onto your credit card, charged as fillet steak. Bulimics should love it. Since when did we have to do everything and still be charged for the privilege? What's wrong with providing workers to actually help the customer? Business says, 'We're trying to reduce costs, which we then pass on as savings to our customers.' Oh, yeah, sure. And when has this ever happened? Everywhere, companies are in love with the idea of the customer as unpaid staffer; all we lack is the free uniform. Ring almost any company and you find yourself pressed into duty as an unpaid switchboard operator - listening to an interminable list of options, so that you can direct your own call to '4' for accounts, or '10' for service. You don't even get the fun, like a real switchboard operator, of listening in to all the private conversations. At the photo shop, I now process all my own photos and put through my own payment. The staff busy themselves explaining why I should pay extra if I want the photos this side of Christmas. Meanwhile, the internet bubbles and churns with sites offering 'peer-produced content' - a slippery phrase describing how you can run a media business without having to pay a single journalist, filmmaker or songwriter. Nice work if you can get it. At Qantas, frequent flyer members are now asked to print out their own boarding pass, using their home computer. According to the airline, it's all for the convenience of the customer: no way is it just to save Qantas from using its own paper, ink, and staff time. You now turn up at the airport, gripping your self-printed boarding pass, half-expecting them to throw you the keys and pilot's uniform. 'We're only asking you to fly the plane to Canberra, which is pretty much due south, and it's only for your own convenience.' Where, exactly, does this stuff stop? I'm planning on getting my haircut next week and am waiting for Bob to hand me the clippers and a mirror and suggest I have a crack myself. Maybe that's what happened to Van Gogh - an early victim of the do-it-yourself hairdressing movement. The self-serve customer is like the self-milking cow: a great convenience for business but you do have to wonder what's in it for the cow. |
