Automated Glitches at Home Depot

This is the self-checkout line at the Rhode Island Avenue Home Depot.

It is either a crowning achievement of modern technology, another small step towards shopping automation, or a marker of the end of civilization in America.

As a technology achievement, its pretty cool. Each station processes your purchase pretty fast, and it takes cash as well as credit/debit, giving change when you’re done.

As automation, its trying to speed up the checkout scene but it wasn’t that fully automated. There still needed to be a sales clerk on hand to sort out its constant errors.

As the death of civilization, it removed one of the last “little connections” we make in a day – the small talk with the sales clerk that can make or break a buy.

In this case, I give the auto-teller a 5 out of 10. Cool, but way too glitchy to be really worth your time or effort.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Married, mortgaged, and soon to be a father, Wayan Vota is in the fast lane to mid-life respectability – until the day his brood finds his intimate journal of global traveling and curses him with the ever-eternal reply “I’m gonna be just like you, Dad!”

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