Technologies of Consumer Labor

A History of Self-Service

Michael Palm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317287193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book documents and examines the history of technology used by consumers to serve oneself. The telephone's development as a self-service technology functions as the narrative spine, beginning with the advent of rotary dialing eliminating most operator services and transforming every local connection into an instance of self-service. Today, nearly a century later, consumers manipulate 0-9 keypads on a plethora of digital machines. Throughout the book Palm employs a combination of historical, political-economic and cultural analysis to describe how the telephone keypad was absorbed into business models across media, retail and financial industries, as the interface on everyday machines including the ATM, cell phone and debit card reader. He argues that the naturalization of self-service telephony shaped consumers' attitudes and expectations about digital technology.

1 Please Help Yourself

Self-Service Shopping and the “Revolution in Distribution”

In Double Indemnity, the dupe confesses into a Dictaphone.¹ The opening scene finds Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray, lurching out of his car toward an office building. Access codes and card swipes are decades away, so he bangs on the big glass doors for the night watchman to let him in. Next Neff encounters the elevator attendant and does his best to quash any small talk during their ride up together. Alone at last, Neff opens his overcoat to reveal a bullet wound in the shoulder. He collapses into his office chair, lights a cigarette, and inserts an acetate cylinder into the Dictaphone on his desk. “Office memorandum. Walter Neff to Barton Keyes, claims manager. Los Angeles, July 16, 1938. Dear Keyes, I suppose you’ll call this a confession when you hear it. …” His monologue leads into flashback, a film noir convention. The Dictaphone was also familiar to audiences, having been trademarked in 1907 (after being developed by Alexander Graham Bell). In this context, however, it provides a twist. The plot of Double Indemnity unfolds via the first automated confession in Hollywood history. Along the way we learn that Walter Neff’s office is typical is most every way. He and the other insurance salesmen are supported by abundant secretaries, and Neff’s confession is predicated on their absent presence. He plans to get away before a secretary transcribes his tale.

The Dictaphone didn’t displace secretaries, but it deskilled them by rendering shorthand obsolete. The automation of stenography also rationalized secretaries’ labor. Since they no longer needed to drop whatever they doing when a superior demanded dictation, their time management and work rhythms could be supervised more efficiently. The Dictaphone depersonalized as well as routinized stenography by inserting a layer of technological mediation between the Walter Neffs of the business world and their secretaries. For better or worse, each began using the same machinery one after the other instead of interacting directly. In offices as well as factories, automation enjoyed a golden age during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Occasionally new technology eliminated jobs outright, like the rotary telephone dial and operators. More often than not, however, automation routinized the remaining labor of office employees. Sharon Hartman Strom (among others) has documented “the conjunction of mechanization, scientific management and the hiring of women as clerical workers” during this period that led to the entrenched malaise of office work later captured by C. Wright Mills in White Collar.²

Three reels after Walter Neff begins narrating Double Indemnity, he and his femme fatale have cooked up their scheme. “You know that big market up on Los Feliz, Keyes? That’s the place Phyllis and I had picked as a meeting. … We had to be very careful from now on. We couldn’t let anybody see us together.” Inside the “big market,” Walter and Phyllis could count on being left alone. An employee never appears during their two meetings inside the store, which last about six minutes total. Other shoppers surround Walter and Phyllis but pay them no mind, with one exception – in a moment of comic relief, a short woman asks Neff to reach her some baby food and after thanking him mutters, “I don’t know why they always put what I want on the top shelf.” Audiences were still adjusting to self-service stores in their own lives and could recognize, if not relate to, the woman’s frustration. The first self-service markets cropped up in southern California, where Double Indemnity takes place, and in 1944 when the film was released (and even more so in 1938, when it was set) self-service shopping was still brand new. The automation of stenography changed office work for secretaries and for insurance salesmen like Walter Neff, but the holders of insurance policies were unaffected. In workplaces where employees serve customers, rather than bosses, the introduction of new technology requires labor management of consumers as (well as) employees. The cash register, for instance, remediated more than retail transactions. It also affected how shoppers interacted with store staff and with one another.

Figure 1.1 Shop, reverse-shop.

The bulk of consumer labor assemblages in the U.S. today entail telecommunication networks. Accordingly, Technologies of Consumer Labor is anchored by the home telephone, which over the course of the twentieth century became our most common and versatile consumer labor technology. Yet the history of consumption organized under the banner of “self-service” begins inside brick-and-mortar stores. The first self-service assemblages featured consumer labor technologies still used today in essentially their original form, such as shopping baskets and carts. Scholars of service work have pointed out the limitations of Harry Braverman’s influential critique of automation, among them a focus on labor-management relations to the exclusion of interactions between employees and their customers.³ In self-service stores Braverman’s critique was both anticipated and turned on its head. Clerks’ labor was deskilled and degraded, while consumers were subject to what Paul du Gay called a corresponding “en-skilling.”⁴

During the Great Depression, in exchange for the promise of lower prices, grocery shoppers began selecting and retrieving their own merchandise unassisted. Grocery clerks’ originally expansive responsibilities were curtailed into the routine task of ringing up whatever shoppers brought to the cash register. The economic impact of self-service shopping was initially one of scale. Beyond the labor costs savings of deskilling clerks into cashiers, self-service shopping became the ideal means of distribution for linking mass production to mass consumption, a cheaper and more efficient way for shoppers to get all their stuff home from the store. Trailblazing grocers discovered as much as invented self-service, by capitalizing on principles, practices, and possibilities already existent within industrial capitalism. They combined innovation and “progress” at several levels, including the popularization of consumer technology like the automobile and refrigerator alongside established labor management strategies involving automation and deskilling. Within these broader historical contexts, this chapter describes the discursive and experiential emergence of self-service.

When self-service was new, advertisements promoted the method of shopping itself. The first self-service stores, as well as the products for sale inside, became the subject of national mass marketing campaigns. Some ads promoted the new shopping experience as superior to being served – more independent, autonomous, and efficient – while most marketing characterized self-service work as fair exchange for greater savings. Beginning in the 1920s, and gaining steam during the Great Depression, shoppers by and large accepted their new tasks and responsibilities as part of what Sharon Zukin has dubbed, in her history of shopping, “the new bargain culture.”⁵ Self-service not only offered a rationalized method for the mass distribution of commodities; over time, it also became a reason to manufacture other commodities, big-ticket items like ATMs and self-payment kiosks purchased by merchants and service providers. Other consumer technologies, from cars and refrigerators to cell phones and laptops, are sold directly to consumers who use them for labor as well as leisure, prosumption as well as playbor, for routine tasks in the social office and factory alike.

Many tasks and activities performed via consumer technology qualify as consumer labor. Their history includes, if not begins with, self-service shopping inside “big markets” like the one in Double Indemnity. In this chapter’s first two sections, I track the discursive emergence of the self-service shopping assemblage, first in how-to manuals written by pioneering grocers for other grocers and then in retail and marketing scholarship devoted to supermarkets. As self-service spread across retail sectors and throughout service industries, many of the duties and obligations of retail distribution were transferred from clerks to consumers, legally as well as technologically and managerially. Shoppers began handling merchandise before paying for it, and the management of this new interval required new customs, rules and even laws. Some employee protections were extended to shoppers inside self-service stores, but shoppers assumed more liability than merchants for injury and damages. In self-service stores the merchandise on display was for the first time brought out from behind the counter, and this spatial reorganization of stores introduced into retail a new gap between possession and sale. A physical distance as well as temporal lag emerged between “shopping as choosing” and “shopping as making a purchase.”⁶ Several formative lawsuits, reviewed in the third section, entrenched consumers’ responsibility for goods that they had assumed possession of but not yet purchased. The final section elaborates the cash register’s pivotal role within the history of self-service shopping assemblages, before the conclusion returns to the contemporary supermarket and to the self-check out assemblage.

Setting the Table

In the decades between the Civil War and the First World War, a pattern of retail shopping emerged in the U.S. organized around attentive service, store credit and home delivery. Clerks were not employed to take your money; they were there to handle the merchandise. They were also there to help shoppers decide what they wanted. The job of sales clerk in this formative era of retail service was a skilled position, one charged with full responsibility for the customer’s satisfaction and imbued with the expertise to ensure it. Sporadic efforts to implement “impersonal selling,” “display merchandising,” or “unattended retail” date to the nineteenth century, but retail service featuring knowledgeable, available clerks remained the dominant format for selling virtually everything. First in large cities and then rapidly spreading across the country, “Mom and Pop” stores (regularly staffed by unpaid family members) and independent merchants lost market share to department stores, such as Filene’s in Boston and Marshall Field’s in Chicago, which during the 1880s began selling an exponentially increased volume and variety of goods. Customer service expanded along with the inventories and economies of scale, while credit and delivery services expanded to include installment payment plans, layaway, and return policies. Inside department store, clerks remained responsible for helping customers make their selections, for locating and retrieving goods, for charging the customer the proper amount, and for organizing delivery.

Self-service shopping was anathema to department stores. Service in department stores helped set them apart as elite or luxurious, in distinction from variety stores and five-and-dimes, such as Woolworth’s, which also emerged during the late nineteenth century.⁷ The first self-service stores sold groceries, seemingly one of the few genres of merchandise not for sale in department stores. The two new venues for retail consumption polarized American retail into “going shopping – an open-ended, pleasurable, perhaps transgressive experience – and doing the shopping, a regular task to be done with the minimum expenditure of time, labour and money.”⁸ Susan Porter Benson began Counter Cultures, her 1984 study of department store clerks, expecting to extend Braverman’s deskilling thesis from the shop floor to the selling floor, but she found that the class and gender dynamics of training and self-presentation among department store clerks were too complicated for her to adhere to his model, in large part because rationalized labor control was disrupted by the presence of a third party, customers “going sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Phoning It in, or Consumer Labor and the Telephone
• 1 Please Help Yourself: Self-Service Shopping and the “Revolution in Distribution”
• 2 Phantom of the Operator: Rotary Dialing and the Automation of Everyday Life
• 3 Then Press #: Touch-Tone Phones and Digital Interface
• 4 What’s in a PIN?: ATMs and Keypads Beyond the Telephone
• Conclusion: Smart Phones and the Costs of Payment