Zombie Butchers in Aisle 5
After some analysis of California supermarket strikes and a not-too-far-off-topic (but-still-kinda-self-indulgent) digression into Where I Shop And Why, Evan finally drifts into my favorite topic of the week and makes a few excellent points:
Wal-Mart is simply on the leading edge of a very large price signal, and the ultimate end of this process isn’t Wal-Mart’s current $9 per hour with no benefits, but zero dollars per hour: ten years from now, no matter where you shop or whether the management is good or evil or indifferent, there will be no such thing as a human bagger or checkout clerk in any discount store….one trivial application of universal radio-frequency tags in products will be taking a cartful of goods and rolling it through a radio scanner with a credit-card slot on the side. Human baggers are going to vanish much faster than human telephone operators did.
and
[T]he very notion of a “supermarket” rests on the destruction of a long list of what once were lifelong professions: all those small bakeries now replaced by machine-made loaves of bread trucked out from a central factory in the dead of night; all those butcher shops, delis, pasta-makers, crafters of sauces and pickles, photo-development booths, and all the other specialties now rolled into one building with fewer people in it. I’m guessing that each job of “supermarket bagger” is built on the grave of a dozen or more former jobs.
I can’t help but think that this is a great premise for a very wonky horror movie. The Wal-mart is built on the economic graveyard of long-dead professions . . . that now rise from the dead as zombie butchers, zombie bakers, and zombie checkout clerks with a taste for brains!!