Show Me the Way to the Next Little Dollar

Above: from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (1972).

A supermarket . . . 700 million francs a day in sales. A large sales outlet, and social theatre at the same time. Everyone's shouting . . . except the audience. Outside the factory, it's still like a factory.

Does one banter with the cashier at the end of each checkout line to make this a more humanizing economic exchange?

I take items out of a wheeled shopping cart or hand-held shopping basket, and the cashier managing the checkout lane I'm in conveys them down an automated belt with the flick of a switch, scans them for price transmitted via barcode, rings it up, maybe bags them after asking questions (paper, plastic, reusable, box, or nothing?). I pay by swiping a plastic card or with paper cash and maybe coins; if with debit card, I withdraw a little extra cash perhaps. My money is transferred via the cashier (or "sales associate"), who interacts with an automated cash register system, delivering my money to the store; eventually some of these funds make their way to stock holders as residual quarterly profits. Voila. Thanks to millions of such transactions, the Mitt Romneys and John McCains of the world can build another mansion they don't need and will never live in. Meanwhile, I have exchanged my money for goods; the cashier, who is being monitored, inspected, audited, randomly drug-tested and actively cajoled to be more efficient in every way possible, receives nothing more than a relatively low and flat hourly wage for her efforts. 

General questions about shopping in "supermarkets."

1) Why are so many lanes unstaffed most of the time at most such places I've been to in the USA?

2) Why do most American stores require cashiers to stand, instead of sit (with exceptions like German-owned Aldi stores)?

3) What impact does the U-Scan checkout line have on sellers and buyers?

4) Will buyers be forced to act more universally as prosumers? Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler noticed -- forty years ago -- a socio-economic trend toward increasing producer-consumer do-more-yourself activity, which has come to change banking (ATMs, online banking), "service stations" (self-service gas pumping using credit, debit, barcode or cash), and replaced "travel agents" with do-it-yourself online (or telephonic) travel and dining reservations. Prosumer activity is supposed to save the buyer money; in reality, it saves the seller more money, thanks to transferring actual labor exertion to the buyer -- thereby reducing the seller's own labor costs.

5) Shopping lists and wireless beacons.  Lost in the supermarket? No worries, your shopping cart mounted device will guide you right to them! No need to ask a worker for help. What's next?  

Today's Rune: Protection.