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“It’s not actually broken, it just doesn’t trust you.” That’s what the teenager in the neon vest told me last Tuesday when the self-checkout machine at the grocery store decided that my single organic lime weighed exactly as much as a grand piano. I was standing there, pulse rising, staring at a screen that refused to acknowledge my existence until a ‘team member’ swiped a plastic card. I’ve spent roughly 23 minutes this week waiting for someone to give me permission to buy things I’ve already bagged myself. It is a peculiar kind of modern purgatory, a space where the consumer is transformed into a low-level, uncompensated employee of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, and we’re all just supposed to pretend it’s for our own convenience.
The scale is the worst part. It’s calibrated with the sensitivity of a bomb squad technician, yet it possesses the intelligence of a damp brick. You place the bag. The machine chirps. You place the item. The machine screams. You realize, with a sinking feeling, that you have entered the ‘shadow work’ economy. This isn’t about saving time. If I wanted to save time, I wouldn’t be navigating a 13-step menu to find the SKU for a bulk bin of almonds. This is about the systematic offloading of labor costs from the corporate balance sheet onto the literal shoulders of the customer. We are the cashiers. We are the baggers. We are the IT support when the printer jams. And yet, I don’t recall seeing a line item on my receipt for a ‘labor discount’ reflecting the 53 minutes of work I’ve put in this month alone.
The Final 23% of Manufacturing
As a packaging frustration analyst, my job-my actual, paid job-is to figure out why people can’t open the things they buy. My name is Kendall A., and I spend my days staring at those heat-sealed plastic clamshells that require a chainsaw and a prayer to penetrate. I’ve seen 83 different ways a human can injure themselves just trying to reach a new pair of scissors. This trend of ‘making the customer do it’ isn’t just limited to the checkout line. It’s in the packaging that we have to dismantle like we’re disarming a landmine. It’s in the furniture we assemble with an Allen wrench that was clearly designed by someone who hates thumbs. We are living in an era of DIY everything, not because we’ve become more capable, but because it’s cheaper for the manufacturer if we provide the final 23% of the manufacturing process ourselves.
Injuries Seen
Labor Offloaded
I remember trying to explain the modern internet to my grandmother a few weeks ago. She’s 83, and her patience for ‘the cloud’ is non-existent. We were sitting in a cafe where you have to scan a QR code to see the menu, then enter your credit card details into a form that has 13 mandatory fields, then fetch your own water from a station near the bathrooms. She looked at me and asked, ‘Kendall, why am I doing all the work if I’m the one paying them?’ I didn’t have a good answer. I tried to explain that it’s ‘streamlined,’ but as I watched her struggle to scroll through a PDF of sandwiches on a four-inch screen, I realized I was lying. It’s not streamlined. It’s just fragmented. We’ve broken the service experience into a thousand tiny tasks and distributed them across the population like a digital chain gang.
The Tax on Our Time
There is a specific kind of cognitive load that comes with this. When you go to a bank now, you are directed to a machine. When you book a flight, you are the travel agent, the baggage handler (at the kiosk), and the gate agent (with the app). This shift has happened so slowly that we barely noticed the 103 little tasks that have been added to our weekly routine. It’s a tax on our time that doesn’t show up in any economic report. If you calculate the hourly wage of the ‘customer labor’ performed in the United States every year, the numbers would be staggering. We are talking about $453 billion in shifted labor costs-wait, that number feels high, but even if it’s half that, it’s a robbery of our collective leisure time.
And what happens when the system fails? That’s when the IT support role kicks in. I’ve spent 43 minutes on hold this morning trying to tell a robot that my billing address hasn’t changed in 13 years, only to be told I need to upload a scan of my utility bill to a portal that only accepts .tiff files. Who uses .tiff files in 2023? Apparently, the legacy systems of major utility companies. So now, I am also a file conversion specialist. I am an amateur archivist. I am a data entry clerk. And I am doing all of this while sitting in a chair I had to assemble myself from 63 pieces of particle board and a handful of mysterious wooden dowels.
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[The silence of the machine is the loud part]
The Death of the Social Contract
This is why there is such a profound sense of burnout in the modern world. It’s not just the 40-hour work week; it’s the 23-hour ‘shadow work’ week that sits on top of it. We are constantly navigating interfaces that were designed to minimize corporate friction while maximizing consumer effort. Every ‘Help’ button that leads to a list of ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (none of which are the question you actually have) is a deliberate wall. It’s a way to say: ‘Please solve your own problem so we don’t have to pay a human to talk to you.’ It’s the death of the social contract where money was exchanged for service. Now, money is exchanged for the ggongnara for the digital footprint we leave behind, which is why platforms like ggongnara feel like a small act of rebellion.
The Slow Erosion of Service
Pre-1990s
Cashier interaction provided full service. Human friction was accepted.
Mid-1990s
Self-service sold as ‘skipping the line,’ labor shifts begin subtly.
Today
Customer performs 100+ fragmented tasks; interaction becomes lonely and digital.
The Future: Self-Stocking Shelves?
I wonder what the end-state of this is. Will we eventually be required to stock the shelves ourselves? ‘Get 10% off your milk if you move 13 crates from the back to the fridge!’ It sounds ridiculous, but so did the idea of scanning your own groceries 33 years ago. We are being conditioned to accept the ‘participation trophy’ version of consumerism, where we do all the work and the reward is that we get to leave the store. My grandmother was right. We are doing the work. We are the ones paying. And the red light on top of the kiosk is just a reminder of who is really in charge.
The Hidden Value Matrix
Perceived Speed
The initial promise.
Actual Load
The hidden cost to process.
Loneliness
Trading connection for sterility.
I’m currently looking at a box of lightbulbs that requires a specific type of screwdriver I don’t own. I’ll have to go back to the store. I’ll have to scan it myself. I’ll have to bag it myself. And if the machine tells me there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area one more time, I might just leave the lightbulbs there and go live in a cave. Although, knowing my luck, the cave would have a QR code at the entrance and a 23-page terms of service agreement I’d have to scroll through before I could enter.
Proving We Are Not Robots
The irony is that we are more ‘connected’ than ever, yet the experience of being a customer has never felt more lonely. There is no human to complain to, no manager to speak with, just a series of ‘if-then’ statements programmed into a touchscreen. We’ve traded the messiness of human interaction for the sterile, frustrating efficiency of a loop that never ends.
I’ve probably spent 123 hours this year just trying to prove to various machines that I am not a robot. Click the images with traffic lights. Click the images with crosswalks. I am proving my humanity to a computer so that it will allow me to do the work of a human for no pay. It’s a beautiful, dark comedy, and we’re all the lead actors, working for free, forever.
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We’ve traded the messiness of human interaction for the sterile, frustrating efficiency of a loop that never ends.