The quality and value of what customers get for their dollar these days has regressed across the board.
Yet it's customer experience that has suffered most as the basic core services like support and checkout have all been ripped up so companies can try to make more money with less.
When you shop at any retailer or supermarket these days, you'll find yourself generally funneled to self-checkout, where you're stuck watching people in front of you awkwardly fumble finding barcodes, bagging their own groceries, and panicking whenever the machine shouts at them or the screen freezes.
There's usually only one worker who's overseeing everything, and whenever a problem occurs, everyone has to wait on them for a resolution - all of which translates to a longer wait time, higher margin for error, and frustration.
To add insult to injury, you had no choice in any of this as a consumer.
Even if you wanted to go back to the normal checkout aisles where cashier scans and bags for you.
You can't because those aisles are either closed or they're so short staffed that the lines there are even longer than those at self-checkout.
All of this tech suddenly appeared nationwide in the mid-2010s.
Since the debut of self-checkout, retailers from Kroger and Walmart to Target and Home Depot have all publicly gaslighted that self-checkout is faster and that these machines are not there to replace workers, but to instead free them to be more productive.
They stuck to this script year after year, despite the continuous backlash and disapproval, and their stocks collectively grew as Wall Street applauded these investments, believing that tech innovation would unlock unprecedented efficiencies and profits for these age-old, overhead intensive businesses.
