The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-it-Yourself Economy by Christopher K. Andrews (review)

Utilizing the case study of self-checkouts in supermarkets, The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do-it-Yourself Economy by Christopher K. Andrews is a cogently argued and well-supported book that provides key insights into a number of major debates surrounding the use and consequence of self-service technologies. Andrews bases his analysis on a multimethod study of a regional supermarket chain he refers to as "Super-Food" that includes: eight months of nonparticipant observation of people in checkout lanes in seven Superfood stores; 77 semi-structured interviews from a combination of store managers, assistant managers, employees, customers, and union representatives; and a variety of secondary data sources. The strength of Andrews' analysis lies in showing how many of the pronouncements regarding self-checkouts are variously misguided, off-the-mark, and/or more complicated than their claimants suggest. Thus, this book sheds new and important light on a major transformation in consumption. However, it should be noted that the title of the book is a bit of misnomer because the issue of consumers feeling overworked as a result of self-service technologies is only one of the topics this book addresses. Below, I will outline what I see as the five core questions that The Overworked Consumer seeks to answer.

As mentioned above, and as book's title suggests, one question Andrews addresses is: does the use of self-checkouts lead to consumers feeling overworked? Andrews argues they do and positions self-checkouts in particular, and self-service technologies more generally, as part of an ongoing trend of unpaid work being pushed onto consumers. As Andrews notes, shifting work onto consumers is not new and supermarkets have a long history of doing this. However, what differentiates the introduction of self-checkouts from such past transfers is that while the latter were accompanied by a reduction in the costs of goods, this is not the case with the former. As such, Andrews shows how consumers are being asked to perform work that used to be done for them, this seems to be contributing to a sense of time-poverty among many consumers, and that this work is unpaid both directly (in terms of compensation) and indirectly (in terms of lower priced goods).

A second question Andrews addresses is: do self-checkouts lead to job loss? While some have theorized this to be the case, and thus fear the widespread adoption self-service technologies will lead to a workless future, Andrews shows this is not the case with self-checkouts in supermarkets. In fact, Andrews highlights how there are more supermarket cashiers now than 10 years ago when the large-scale adoption of self-checkouts began. To explain this gap between what was predicted and what actually occurred, Andrews adopts a Ritzerian perspective to show that self-checkouts produce a number of "irrational" outcomes that thwart their promise of being a more rational and efficient means for consumers to procure their goods. Thus, Andrews shows how even if self-checkouts eliminate some kinds of work, they also create others such as the need for workers to help customers who struggle with these machines and to monitor self-checkout customers for (intentional and unintentional) theft. Also, the managers Andrews interviewed were in desperate need to add workers, not to cut them. This was because supermarkets faced a chronic labor shortage that Andrews attributes to supermarkets' own cost-cutting policies that made being a cashier an unattractive occupation. Given this, Andrews suggests that the introduction of self-checkouts was more a means for stores to cope with the poor work conditions they produced than a driver of them.

A third question Andrews address is: what are the motivations of consumers to use, or forego, self-checkouts? While the makers of self-checkouts promise that their technologies are beneficial to consumers and thus...