There's an interchangeable, overpriced, soulless gas-station chain on nearly every street corner in my town. When I fill up my tank at any one of them, I'm forced to listen to the sound of 9+ pumps puke out celebrity-gossip, advertainment pieces, and PSAs telling me about the coronavirus. You can't mute them anymore. Inside, the shelves are lined with nearly identical selections of overpriced merchandise.

I could be anywhere in the midwest.

I still have have a preference for the station I use, because the staff and I at a couple of the stations recognize each other, and have developed rapports over the course of many 30s smalltalk sessions. It's superficial, but it helps build social trust. We exchange small favors. I forgot my wallet one day, and the guy behind the registered covered for me and told me to pay him back when I could. I've told off a belligerent customer or two in ways they couldn't without being fired. We've discussed the local jobs market, and at points turned each other on to different employment opportunities.

I'd pay higher prices if I knew it got them more money (and got rid of those damn telescreens).

Nevertheless, I wouldn't pay for that kind of interaction directly if I could. I have a couple groups of regular friends. If I wanted social interaction alone, I'd get with them.

It's not really about the interaction itself, it's about having some semblence of place and community in a world that's too big, too standardize, too indifferent, and too increasingly automated to think about you as anything other than an instrumentalizeable commodity, or a function to be optimized.

Every technological step forward like this puts us under increasing surveillance, dedifferentiates the spaces in-which we live, and obviates the labor of large segments of our society while reducing the power of all but a select few.

Hyperbolically, I feel like we're all just a few years from being stuffed in padded rooms with an ad-supported games console and permanently affixed morphine drips to optimize mortality, health, and quality of life metrics.

I hate those auto-playing advertisements at the pump with a perhaps inexplicable passion. The worst is that they often can be muted by pressing one of six unlabeled buttons. As if they knew there would be people who would find the adverts obnoxious and want to mute them, but wanted to ensure that only people so enraged as to take to blindly smashing buttons would find the mute feature before they bashed the screen with the pump handle. Such blatant distain for their customers.

> You can't mute them anymore

Just for the record, I've found I can still mute them if I do the right combo of button presses.

Most of these pumps in my state have a column on either side of the screen of four or five unlabeled buttons. If I press the left side top to bottom (usually by running my finger straight down the line) on the left column, then the right, then the left, that shuts up 90% of them in my area.

Still sucks though

> You can't mute them anymore.

Oh but you can! A pin, paper clip, etc through a couple of the speaker openings will do the trick nicely.

It sounds like you guys could use a YMCA or community center catering to these types. My grandmother was lonely so I convinced her to go to a YMCA for exercise reasons and she made a bunch of friends.

Very true, and young people too! I think these shops could reduce loneliness as customers may talk to each other. There's more chance of interaction with a shop than no shop. The concern is where technology is used in place of staffed-shops, but perhaps you would have to make small talk with the security guard instead.

I don't think there is even a security guard there.

Perhaps in cities, where there is more footfall, it might save money to employ one. But you're certainly right, in these rural Swedish shops, there doesn't seem to be.

I used to shop daily when I was poor.

Shopping daily does not implies being poor, I'd argue its mostly cultural, for example, many Japanese prefer to buy daily and keep low stocks on their pantries.

If you are poor, by definition you have low or no stocks.

There are supermarkets here that have a special slow lane for those people. I use the self check one.

I would recon that isn't a problem in small rural communities, especially if the alternative they have now is no shops.

I could see this being beneficial for some communities real far out in the sticks

If major chains is all a small rural community has left, then I'd liken this to cracking open the bones of a well-pecked carcass and sucking out the marrow before discarding the corpse

What's your point? That people should be indentured in low paying jobs to be old people's friends?

It's a little bit... weird to think of "working in a grocery store" as indentured servitude. You know, not everyone has to be a software engineer or full-stack whatever. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working in a grocery store, it's a fine way to make a living!

> it's a fine way to make a living!

The problem is that they don’t make a living. People who work in grocery stores aren’t working there because they want to, but usually just because it’s their only option. If they quit their jobs they would be homeless by the end of the month. Do you understand what their living conditions are like? It’s really sad and it makes me uncomfortable to talk to them. Minimum wage workers in high cost of living cities are just slavery as a service.

No one's forcing you to be full stack dev, you could always hang out with the mole people. Errr... I mean linux sysadmins.

People aren't indentured to work in Sweden. They don't have to work and have choice of where to work.

It's also nice, to talk to people, instead of talking down to them.

I have done plenty of jobs that are shit pay in the same tier of manual labour (stockist, hospitality) and have never met anyone in that field who didn't want to do somethinge else if possible.

In the Nordic countries, those manual labor jobs are union jobs. Sure, pay is lower than other jobs, but thanks to collective bargaining and the union having your back in case of unforeseen overtime, it isn't "shit pay" like it might be in, say, the United States. I worked some of those jobs when I was in uni, and many of my coworkers were older people who had decided to stay for the long haul, because it does feel like a stable, acceptable working environment.

In the USA, we used to have union grocery stores.

It seems like every year we are loosing more union jobs than ever.

Safeway has always been a hated place to work, but it used to pay their employees a decent salary with benefits.

Now—they have a weird semi union status. They load up the stores with desperate people, and still manage to make them maybe the most angry workers I have seen. I overheard one manager tell an employee yesterday to drive to a store two hours away, and be there by 7:00 am! The employee just looked crushed. That kind of crap didn’t happen in union shops.

I guess the future will be self checkouts, security cams everywhere, and facial recognition to track.

That there is more than one facet even something as simple as a shop? Kinda like chatting with a Cab Driver.

Don't underestimate the satisfaction of a job where you don't have to prostitute your brain and where you can send a smile to people a couple of times a day.

worked in restaurants for years before moving to software engineering. despite being 'good' at coding, it screws me up a bit that I was a lot happier in many ways while working at a restaurant. i felt I had a lot more brain bandwidth for my personal activities outside of work, too

Isn't people work at these jobs because there's no other options available for them?

Where I'm at, the vast majority of employees working "grunt" positions in supermarkets are high schoolers along with some elderly and disabled folks. Given those demographics, I strongly suspect most of them are not working there to make a living.

Disabled people work for fun in grunt, manual labour, positions?

Seems hard to believe.

I never said anybody was working for fun. The disabled people to which I am referring are certainly dependent on others for their care. The livelihoods of most people in the demographics I mentioned are not dependent on a part-time job like that.

You may want to brush up on the concept of 'service' before you start a business selling to the public

Or that the government could subsidize these jobs if they have positive output not captured by the businesses.

Thanks for posting