Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Grocery Stores

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (pen name David Wong) for a look at why grocery stores are secretly incredibly fascinating. Pre-order Jason’s excellent new novel: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250195791 Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

grocery stores known for produce cereal famous for produce cereal five dollar chickens nobody thinks much about them so let's have some fun let's find out why grocery stores are secretly incredibly fascinating Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Also, this intro will be marginally longer than the other ones so far, just a heads up, because I want to cover two things in detail. One of them is this show's bleeping of certain words, and two is this episode's guest and his phenomenal new novel. Because my guest today

is known by many names. He writes for the New York Times bestseller list as David Wong. His true name is Jason Pargin. I could go on and on about how excited I am to have Jason guest on this podcast. If you've heard me do stuff before, you probably know why I'm excited. But enough about me. I want to make sure you know about his new novel. And the title of that novel is Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. It comes out in October. Publishers Weekly says this about it, quote, Biting humor and blatant digs at modern society

overlay a subtly brilliant and thoughtful plot. End quote. And I'm glad it's not out till October. In the specific sense that you have plenty of time to pre-order the book now. You know, you're hearing about it way ahead of time. And I don't know what you know about authors and the book world. Most of what I know about it involves the author Kurt Vonnegut,

who is not current, let's say. Jason Pargin is a current author. He is writing books all of the time. That's what he does full time. And so Jason depends on your pre-orders to keep that going. Because without pre-orders, bookstores won't stock it and publishers won't pay to keep the story going. And the whole industry views pre-orders as the most important form of audience excitement.

It also kind of fulfills its own success. If a lot of people pre-order, then a lot of bookstores carry it. And then a lot of people buy it from the bookstores. So please, please pre-order, then a lot of bookstores carry it, and then a lot of people buy it from the bookstores. So please, please pre-order. And again, that title is Zoe Punches the Future in the D*** by pen name David Wong, true name Jason Pargin. I am excited about that book and so excited its author is my guest today. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples, acknowledge Jason recorded

this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atsoyaha peoples, and acknowledge that in all our locations, Native people are very much still here. That all feels worth doing on every episode. And separately on this episode. And separately, on this episode of the series, I want to say something about the bleeping you hear on certain words like, uh, d***. Not everybody knows this, but podcast apps and platforms are really, really picky about how they label shows. Like, they'll put a giant all-capital letters explicit on every episode of the show, unless you make the show something that's listed as quote-unquote clean. I think there's a lot of value judgment in that word. I don't really

put that on it. But I think we can make the absolute best version of this show with a few bleeps in there that gets at that rating where kids can go ahead and listen to it, and also parents can go ahead and have their kids listen to it. On shows I've done in the past, I've been contacted by parents wondering if the informational comedy show I'm making is suitable for their child. Of course it is, but it says all caps explicit on it, so of course they're confused. So in rolling out this podcast series, I've aimed to make it quote-unquote clean. You're going to get a few bleeps on words like Zoe punches the future in the d***. And I hope that's okay with you. I'm confident everyone knows what words are being said, and I'm confident this lets, you know, the kid version of me, quite honestly, be able to hear

a show like this. Podcasts didn't exist when I was a kid. But I want that barrier to be down for people. That's why there are bleeps. I'd love to hear what you think about it, if anything, at SIFpod on Twitter, SIFpod at gmail.com on Gmail. You know, we're all kind of putting this show together together, and so it's good to know what people think. And I think that completes the setup for this pretty self-explanatory episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, all about the humble grocery store. So please sit back or lean over that self-checkout so your body

shields what you're up to, pro tip. And either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, it's so cool you're here. Thanks so much, man. This is really exciting. Yeah, it's all new and yet oddly familiar. That's good. That's why I like it. It's just enough newness to be interesting, but not so much that it's upsetting to me that's that's where i want all of my life right in these times more than ever i just want like like i've been watching old disney movies and that jordan documentary and stuff just feels good yeah you can't watch the exact same thing every day, but at the same time, it's got to be just familiar enough. That's the sweet spot right there.

And on this new show, we're talking about grocery stores today. And with every episode, I start off by asking the guests, you know, what's your relationship to this topic, the grocery store? First time I went out shopping after the pandemic became serious. And this would have been in March when they first realized, I guess, after that basketball game that everything, oh, this is, we have to shut down the world. A few days later, I went out because back then the rules were very much not in place yet. Nobody knew quite what was going on, what was allowed, what wasn't. You heard a lot about hand washing, but not so much about masks back then. But went out to a grocery store, and that was the first time in my life I saw empty shelves. They had stripped all of the toilet paper off the shelves,

all of the cleaning supplies, including just hand soap, Windex, anything that could be thought of as something that could clean was gone. And that was the first time in my life I saw that. And I think for a lot of the people listening, probably the first time it really occurred to you that your mental well-being at least partially rests on having a full grocery store to go to because that freaked me out quite a bit. Even though, logically, we weren't going to starve. There was still food there.

It just wasn't the specific stuff I wanted. I knew they were going to get resupplied. There were going to be more trucks coming. But in a country where consumerism is the mainstream religion, suddenly not having 36 brands of toilet paper to pick from was almost traumatizing. For me anyway, it was pretty specific to paper products and wipes too. Like there were one or two types of produce that started to get low here and there, but yeah, that was the key absence and that's all it took. Suddenly I was like, hold on. I thought this was the most powerful country ever created of all time.

Yes. And to the point where I think if I were to bring an alien or a foreigner or someone to try to convince them of America's greatness, I would not tell them about the moon landing. I would show them a grocery store and say, this is what every working person generally has close to them. Because historically, over time, that absurd abundance of products where you do have 40 different types of toothpaste and could not tell you how one is different from another, that is so ahistorical. That's so unusual and everything about it. That is kind of a modern marvel, but also something I never gave a second thought to my entire life until it was gone.

Was it also weird? I feel like taping this now, I have a very different relationship to grocery stores than I did like, you know, four or five months ago. I think before, if I felt strongly about a grocery store, it was mainly like regional pride in a specific chain. Like going into this show, I apologize, Florida, that we will not just talk about how great Publix is the entire time. And I apologize, upstate New York, we will not just focus on the greatness of Wegmans, you know, like that it's going to be about other stuff. But like during the pandemic, it just suddenly became a thing where, oh, the grocery store is kind of the only business now. Everybody else is closed and trying to be safe or legally required to be safe.

And the store is the one outpost of entering a business again. And even today, and if people are listening this couple years from now and going back over the archives, this is August. We're now four months into the pandemic. It feels like we're 27 months into it. But now entering a grocery store, entering a Target store, entering here, we have Kroger's, we have Publix. There's this ritual where big signs up front can't get in without a mask. They've got a rule of carts that they have sanitized. They hand you one, you can take one.

If the store has too many people in it, you have to line up outside in a socially distanced way. And then once you go in there, there's a tension. There's just a tension in the air because everyone has a mask on and it's sweaty and you're trying to not bump into people, but it's also very crowded because, as you said, it's everyone has a mask on and it's sweaty and you're trying to not bump into people but it's also very crowded because that's as you said it's the one place if people are not eating at restaurants they're eating at home more which means they're buying more groceries and then you've got your grocery list and easily 25 of the things you want are not going to be there it's not that there's there's shortage of food again you're not going to be

hungry but the specific the one frozen pizza you actually like is not there anymore because that particular factory has been converted to something else or it has shut down due to an outbreak. Whatever, the supply chains have been disrupted, and so there's just this growing tension because this is something that used to be easy. But now just the fear and the thought of contamination and then everyone around you, their faces are covered. I do understand why people freak out in grocery stores. There's

an emotional connection there that I think we didn't really appreciate. Yeah. And even we'll talk about it a little more too, but also I want to point out to non-US listeners that it at least somewhat applies to you too. Like I didn't list, I don't know, Sainsbury's for the Brits or I don't know Australian chains really. But yeah, it's like a outpost of feeling like a king grabbing stuff and paying money for it, but you know, not a crazy amount of money. And suddenly it's tense and weird and different. Strange, strange thing. Let's go from here into the first segment of the show. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics

in a segment called, I guess that's why they call it the blues. lose. And that name was submitted by at LLO bro on Twitter, who had many good ideas. We're going to have a new name for this segment every week submitted by listeners like you. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. The less good, the better. Submit your name for the numbers and statistics segment to at SIF pod on Twitter or to SIF pod at gmailcom. And, you know, they don't have to be Elton John based, but you can make me do that if you want to. So I don't know, find a tiny dancer one or something. Let's do it. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit delayed here. It just occurred to me you were singing, I guess, Stats, why they call it the Blues, because these are the Stats. Okay. Yeah, that was the core of the idea. And that's what's happened. That's what we're doing.

But enough of me performing music. Into the numbers. First number we have here is 38,307. That is the number of grocery stores in the U.S. as of 2018, according to Statista.com. And then also in terms of just huge numbers, according to MarketWatch, as of 2017, we're trying to be as recent as possible. But as recently as 2017, the average number of items in a US grocery store was 40 to 50,000. So 40 to 50,000 things per store, just for like you and me, the shopper. That's pretty mind blowing.

Yeah. And that's also very recent, right? Yeah. Because also there's some other sources here, especially the author Michael Rollman, who's the author of Grocery, the Buying and Selling of Food in America. And he's found that as recently as the 1990s, there were only about 7,000 items per store. So that's 7,000 items in the 1990s. And then, you know, about 25 years later, it's up to 40 to 50,000, which is kind of crazy. And also, if you go way, way back in the late 1800s, a US store selling food, because we didn't quite have grocery stores, but a store selling food in the late 1800s, probably had about 200 things in it, like total. And then just this overall grocery store situation is a revolution for how we eat

and how we live yeah if somebody's puzzling through how you can have that shocking like 600 increase since just the 90s you've got to understand if you're a young person there used to be a such thing as little grocery stores like in small towns you'd have like a tiny little store those are gone now it's a walmart super center now it's a like inevitably they have built something there they have built an enormous kroger they have built an enormous uh wherever whatever you've got wherever you are publics whatever that's now what you think of as a grocery store a giant hanger sized space yeah but it didn't even when i was a kid you would have multiple smaller ones and they're yeah there would only be the toothpaste shelf

was five feet wide and there were six kinds of toothpaste and that was just the way it was those stores are gone it is now all about the giant places that as you said have 50,000 things to pick from yeah and it's it's also sort of based on how the overall business of being a grocery store works. Because according to that author, Michael Roman, who's a journalist and a cookbook writer and many other things, he says that the approximate profit margin for a U.S. grocery store is 1.25%, maybe 1.5%. So it's a very, very small margin they're working on. And he says, quote, that's partly why you see so many different products on grocery store shelves. If somebody wants something and they can't find it, next time that customer is going to go to a store that has it, end quote. Yeah, and here's where I think my point of view, I think some of your listeners probably would disagree,

but I think grocery stores are like the perfect example of a regulated free market working very very well because basically competition forces you to have tons of choices for the consumer forces you to keep driving down you know the prices further and further until everyone's scraping for just the tiniest margin of profit and yes we could get into all sorts of things, but how little grocery store workers are being paid, all of that, we are going to get into all of that stuff. But just in terms of one thing that this market and the system does well is it feeds the people very well. Yeah. It's almost, it's almost a punishing level of convenience and options and stuff. Like it's just the business is based on make as many

stores at as large of a size as possible, selling as much stuff as possible. And then if we, you know, ramp up and up forever, we will make, you know, that tiny profit get bigger and bigger. Like it's just, oh, you have a decent amount of money in the United States, you will eat all this stuff. It's going to happen to you. Yeah you yeah and where when you see any of those supply lines disrupted and you have to try to understand it's like well now how can you not have why don't you have like those little tiny oranges i like why don't you have those it's like well actually you know the processing plant in wherever california or wherever that they they had to shut that down because 13 people got sick or whatever it's like but isn't there some other way to get them to me it's like no actually you

know all of modern civilization rests on a few incredibly specific and somewhat miraculous processes of harvesting this stuff and packaging it and getting it on a truck and or freezing it and shipping it overnight so it can be on your shelf and where you will stand there you know six months ago and frown like well these bananas are small where are the big bananas you know i don't like this suddenly you show up and there's no bananas today. And yeah, you want to start a riot. But I'm also old enough. I can remember the first time I saw a mango in the grocery store.

I can remember the first time I saw a kiwi in a grocery store. It's like, what is this little furry mutant? It looks like an animal testicle. What is this? It's like, well, no, that was a market that opened up. That was something, you know, they shipped that stuff. And gosh, when I was a kid, I don't remember the last time, the first time I saw like an avocado that was bought from a grocery store. That stuff wasn't there back then. And then also there's, as you mentioned, there's another phenomenon that we'll talk about in all kinds of ways, but just not everybody has the same

that we'll talk about in all kinds of ways, but just not everybody has the same access to the grocery store as everybody else. And another number here is almost 10%. The number almost 10% is the amount of the U.S. population that's in what's known as a food desert as of 2012, and those numbers are coming from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The qualifications for a statistical official food desert is low income area, and more than one mile from a grocery store. And we've got a map here that'll be linked in the Patreon. That is, it's just like the US covered in green splotches, like the green is marking a

food desert, and they're urban, rural, they're, they're kind of all over the country. Yeah. And these are cases where it's not for a bunch of different reasons either they've decided it's not profitable to open a grocery store there or there's not enough like foot traffic or you know these things like what i'm used to it's a giant space with a huge parking lot so if you're in the part of a city where you cannot buy that type of space you know with that type of parking you create a situation where or or if they judge there's like not enough well-to-do customers to support a whole foods there yeah where they wind up shopping at convenience stores bodegas like little spaces that don't have fresh produce and you wind up buying a lot more processed stuff a

lot more frozen stuff because you've got a little freezer section a lot more processed stuff, a lot more frozen stuff, because you've got a little freezer section, a lot more canned stuff. It's like objectively kind of a less healthy food, but it's also kind of, it winds up being built into your habits. Because if you grew up only eating frozen food, if you grew up only eating processed stuff, then that's kind of what you are accustomed to. But it has real health impacts because again, as miraculous as it is what the modern grocery store is, that is the other side of the regulated free market. And if they decide,

well, there's just not enough profit to be had by opening one here, then those people just don't get one. If anything from the fear of crime or of, you know, any damage to the store or theft or anything like that, if that, it doesn't take a lot to dissuade them from, from opening one there, even though I, you know, again, it's the availability of certain types of food should be considered like a public good, but that's not the way we do things in America. The way we do things in America is we kind of, it's kind of we worship the consumer,

but we worship the consumer that has the money to spend. Yeah. So if you are in the middle class, you're in one of the classes that can shop at Whole Foods, life can look pretty sweet. But it often comes at the expense of everybody else at the bottom. There's also another number here is 1518. And 1518 is the year in which Michelangelo, the artist, hand illustrated a shopping list for his servant. According to Atlas Obscura,

he illustrated each item on his handwritten shopping list because his servant was illiterate, because 1500 is not everybody can read. And the list is now part of the collection of the Florence Museum Casa Buonarroti and it tours with his art. Like you can see their set of Michelangelo art and sketches and stuff. And also this shopping list where he wants like a lot of fennel for some reason and some other weird things. Please don't do that any artists out there once they're dead please only show the stuff they wanted shown please please don't dig into like the thing with writers where they're like hey we've recovered an unfinished manuscript and we've hired

a guy to finish it that is my nightmare please if i die tomorrow in an accident i'm gonna ask my my wife it's gonna be in my will find my computer and just destroy it don't let any don't let people dig up like oh gosh we found this the great writer jason pargin we found this message board post on a chicago bears message board from 1994 where he he said the Green Bay Packers are all gay what did he mean by that it's like no no no no please that's not that's not representative of the writing I want in the world that's that's not and it feels like I'm sure Michelangelo would be thrilled to know his freaking illustrated grocery list people are looking at it right alongside the stuff he was actually proud of it's like oh here's another example of his work this thing he crapped out

in two minutes because he needed fennel yeah i even i even called him weird like i got to see it and then i said oh his diet's strange like that's not. They should just leave it alone. And then one more number here for folks. The number is more than 275 degrees Fahrenheit. So 275 degrees Fahrenheit plus. And that number is really the reason that French grocery stores do not bother refrigerating milk. Hey, gross. I know. milk. Hey, gross. I know. Because in French grocery stores and also just the French dairy industry,

they pasteurize milk differently than we do. In the US and elsewhere, people heat milk to 60 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and then it's the milk that you're used to if you're in the US. It stays fresh for a week or two, you need to refrigerate it. But according to Frenchly.us, quote, the French use ultra high temperature processing or UHT that heats the liquid to above 275 degrees for a few seconds. This method means that as long as it remains sealed, the milk has a shelf life of six to nine months unrefrigerated. And Reader's Digest says, quote, the high temperatures make UHT milk taste a bit more cooked than US.S. and Canadian milk. By the way, some people are going to point out you can absolutely buy UHT milk now in grocery stores. If you look carefully, you'll see, yeah, there will be an odd brand of milk that you'll notice that it doesn't expire until like December. Even though you're there in the summer, that's your UHT milk.

I've not tried it. Uh, even though you're there in the summer, that's your UHC milk. I've not tried it. I don't know if it actually tastes different, but they actually, if you go to the warm milk section where they have like the boxes of almond milk and stuff, you'll see they've actually got unrefrigerated cow milk there that I guess you could, if you want to keep some on hand for an emergency, like if you lost power or whatever, you, you could have some milk that would not go bad. But anyway, it's out there.

I had no idea. Because that's another thing that I think of modern grocery stores doing is like destroying the milkman. Like apparently in black and white photo times, a milkman would bring bottles of milk to people. And now you just go to the grocery store and you just get it. But it's always refrigerated. And then it's like a race against the clock to get it in the fridge at home. But in France and elsewhere, and apparently some U.S. grocery stores, you just have this other option. I would love an entire episode just about Milkman.

Because when I grew up, every cartoon, every old sitcom, the Milkman not only was a part of it, but was central to it. There were always jokes about the housewife having sex with the Milkman. central to it like there were always jokes about like the housewife having sex with the milkman yeah or about them you know it's oh and the milkman came and he would bring like four glass bottles of milk and leave it on the stoop and i didn't know at the time like that was you know i grew up in the the early 80s that was totally foreign i did not know a single person still had a milkman but when i watched leave it to beaver or bugs bunny the milkman was just a staple like that was how you got milk now i to this day don't know why milk was getting delivered instead of people just going to the store and getting it do you know no i think my best guess is that just grocery stores became very convenient

and also maybe cars became cheaper i'm totally. Well, he wasn't bringing all the groceries. It was just the milk. You still had to go to the grocery store to get your canned ham and all the other stuff they ate back then. But not the milk. The milk was brought to your door. But then again, also, when somebody got sick, they would go lay in bed and the doctor would come to the house. Right. I mean, that's in every you watch forrest gump any movie that's

set like in in olden times the doctor's got he's got like a leather doctor bag and he'd show up right at the house it's like man why did they why'd they stop doing that that would be something yeah maybe maybe the answer is life just got worse yeah because somebody did the math and it's like well in the time it took that doctor to drive out there, he could have seen four other patients and written 12 more prescriptions. So dollar per hour or whatever, it's like, no, it's just not worth it. But I'm getting off the subject. I want someone to investigate why we can't just have the doctor come to our house anymore. Or the milkman come by where also I am very also familiar with the main trope about milk men

being that they're going to have sex with the woman of the house. Like that's a weird, I hope nobody did some kind of weird actuarial statistical thing of like, well, it's very inefficient sex. Like we should have him, you know, in some central location or something. Because isn't the milk going bad out in his truck while he's in there? Maybe he doesn't take that long. Because isn't the milk going bad out in his truck while he's in there? Maybe he doesn't take that long.

But, you know, the other thing is, like, it portrayed it as being like a good job. It was always like this clean-cut guy in a uniform, you know. Whereas now, you know, if I'm ordering Instacart or whatever, I know that I'm basically abusing a worker. Like, there's somebody who's got, they've got to fill a huge number of orders in a short amount of time. They're doing it in their own private vehicle. They're hurrying around in a mask and you almost like feel bad because I know some people don't tip them very well

and all that. So, you know, delivery is coming back, but I'm now fascinated by, it's like we've circled back around to, you know, the person bringing it to your house again. It's just, we somehow degraded from a guy in a branded truck that was just the milk truck bringing it to your house every morning. There was like this ritual and this person got paid a full-time wage to just deliver

milk. Like did milk used to be super expensive back then? Uh, I don't know. So, but now we're back to a delivery economy where it's always gig work it doesn't pay nearly enough um you know it's done like frantically and on a tight deadline by someone who wishes they were doing anything else uh i don't know it's interesting how the economy changes and that might uh be a nice lead-in to one of our two big takeaways of the episode we have two this, and here comes takeaway number one.

Self-checkout incited a worldwide crime spree. Which I think maybe some people have a vague sense of, but I don't think people know how comprehensively people have both on purpose and accidentally started stealing from grocery stores because they installed those self-checkout machines. Yeah, I have accidentally stolen a tremendous amount of merchandise. I do not doubt that at all. Same. If you ask me how guilty I feel about that, also, not at all. I sleep very well.

Not at all. I sleep very well. That is almost like this is the tax you pay for not having a person check out. If you want me to do your work for you, then if I'm not working as hard as your employees are to make sure that everything is scanned perfectly right, then that's the price you pay if you wanted it done right you should have hired a professional checkout person i am not a professional checkout person i am imperfect so if i get a bunch of bananas and the thing like instead of weighing them it surprises me as happened at target where it pops up and says enter the number of the item and i entered one because i thought well that's one bunch of bananas they're all bundled together And then it charged me like 39 cents because it thought I meant one banana. It's like, you know what? You need to fix that on your end. I'm sorry. Your system was not clear. I'm sorry that you're going to come up short on your banana charges this month. But you, again, if you're that worried about it, a human being to to check out my bananas for me yeah especially the fact they're dealing with a robot in an airplane hangar instead of like the friendly almost almost like those homespun milkmen of the past like if it was a friendly

grocer in an apron with a sweaty brow i'd be like oh how do i help but it's a robot in an airplane hangar i don't care you know you can figure it out machine yeah and they they don't have very many lanes open even though it's self-checkout so there's a line stretching out behind you and they're now all like their eyes are bearing down on you because if you're doing it slowly you're doing a bad job even though it's not your job you're the person paying the money and people are looking at you like, he can't figure out how to work their credit card reader. It's like, well, no, I can't. I don't work here.

I'm sorry. I'm a volunteer at this grocery store. I'm sorry you're impatient with how long it's taking me. I can't get it to scan the UPC thing. And no, I don't know all the tricks to make it scan because this is not my job i'm paying money to do this but and you can just feel the you know because again especially now they have to have the socially distanced line so the lines stretch back into the shelves and you're in

everybody's way uh so no i'm sorry that i've stolen accidentally stolen a lot of food or i guess if i noticed my error and just proceeded on, I intentionally stole it. But too bad. I'm sorry. I think that what you're going to talk about here, there's now a whole thing where people practice ways to do it. I think it's kind of the same feeling behind it, where it's like, screw them. If they're that worried about it, they would try harder. Yeah, we're all sort of in solidarity with human labor rather than this crummy automated making us do it thing. Because there is an entire worldwide culture of people

actively doing schemes to steal stuff through self-checkout. There's an amazing article from The Guardian that picks out that there used to be a whole subreddit dedicated to it that as far as I can tell got banned in the most recent banning of subs. But now it's partly cross-posted to r slash IllegalLifeProTips, if you want to find it. And there's a few nicknames for the schemes there. One of them is called The Banana Trick, which is where you ring up an expensive item by weight, but then input it as a banana or some other very cheap by weight item. So it's not the numerical issue you had, Jason, but it's the weight of like, oh, this thingy of several steaks, they're bananas.

And then they get charged by banana weight, which is apparently very cheap. Why do I say apparently? I know bananas are cheap by weight. I've shopped for groceries. Another trick here is the switcheroo, which is where you take a cheap barcode and put it over a pricey items barcode and scan it that way. And then there's also sweethearting, which is where a checkout supervisor only pretends to scan an object before handing it to a loved one free of charge. So that sweethearting is where you have somebody on the inside, probably being the one employee trying to handle like 10 self checkouts all by themselves. Yeah. Because just to be clear, there's no way they can spot you doing this because all of the measures they have in place to do, like to verify the weight of an item, things like that, or verify

that you actually paid for a thing. Like you can swipe something and then choose to skip the bagging and put it directly in the cart so if you've swiped something that's actually the wrong weight for like when they swap the upc codes onto a more expensive item you know the normally in the bagging area it's got a scale there where it's like well that doesn't weigh as much as a coffee maker yeah um or vice versa well but you can skip the bagging well the reason that's there is because otherwise that thing is constantly throwing out error messages and you're constantly having to have an employee come help you. So in order to avoid that problem,

there's a button you can push that says, no, I just put this directly in my cart. I skipped the bagging. Again, to minimize them having to pay anyone, but it leaves an opening to do this or any number of things. These are just, any child could come up with a way to thwart this system if they wanted to. Yeah, that's the thing.

Like these tricks are not hard to understand. Like I read us through them pretty quickly because they all just make sense. And you've shopped for groceries before, you know how it would work. The switcheroo in particular has been used pretty elaborately. There's an Evening Standard article about one woman in Australia who stole more than $3,600 American worth of merchandise over 31 shopping trips. And she did it by printing barcodes at home for ramen noodles, and then just sticking them on expensive stuff like mead and coffee machines, and then did 31 trips before being caught. She got greedy.

Yeah. You can't get greedy. That's the thing. You push her too far, yeah, they're going to notice. Right, right. Because also there's a story here from good old USA. Consumerist has a story about a Walmart shopper in Monroe, Louisiana, who took a plasma TV off the shelf and then took a

barcode off a DVD that cost $4.88 and then tried to scan the TV for $4.88. And somebody noticed they got caught. Didn't work out. Yeah, because you're trying to buy a giant item. They're going to notice the person with the giant TV. Again, you got to show some restraint. Because also like the scale of this phenomenon between on purpose and accidental theft, according to a trade journal called Produce Blue Book, there was a study by the Loss Prevention Research Council and something called Wakefern Food Corp. But those businesses and groups did a study and found that retailers are losing 21.7% more stuff than they would otherwise as a result of the devices. There's a term called shrinkage, and shrinkage is the term

for just stuff you lose for all sorts of different reasons as a store. And it's up 21.7% across stores because of self-checkout. There was also a study in 2015 by criminologists at the University of Leicester, and they audited 1 million self-checkout transactions over the course of a year. That was $21 million in sales through those million transactions. But they found that nearly $850,000 worth of goods left the store without being scanned, without being paid for, and kind of mainly through the accidental theft. Like people are just busy and not being observed and refusing to volunteer for the store more than they need to.

Yeah, and also this shows how desperately the stores do not want to pay human beings. They actually, like this theft is just built in. They knew. Yeah. They knew when they put, I mean, they're not idiots. They knew when they put the self-checkout in, a lot of stuff is going to get stolen or get not scanned properly. They don't care.

That's how badly they want to automate. That's how badly they, the obsession with getting the humans out of the workflow is so high that I, I have no idea how the replacement of a couple of minimum wage employees is worth losing $800,000 in stuff over whatever period of time. Um, but apparently it is cause like that's, you know, the, the scanner machines are not going to try to unionize. Uh, and you know, if you can train people to, to audit, to self automate all those tasks, it's like, you just don't have to worry about the pesky

humans. That's the hardest part of running any business is the darned people you have to deal with and pay and let them have breaks or whatever. Yeah, and especially because they more or less have no defense. Like they're just letting this happen and knowing they can't prevent it. Like there's a story in The Atlantic that tracked just what police departments are doing about this. And they said that in 2012, the Dallas Police Department enacted a new policy where officers would not respond to shoplifting calls for less than $50 worth of stuff. And then in 2015, they ramped that up to if it's less than $100 worth of shoplifting, the Dallas police will not intervene. I don't know if that's the current policy. Please don't steal in Dallas based on what you heard on a podcast.

But they had to, as a police policy, say, look, so many people are stealing so much from stores, mainly due to self-checkout. We're just going to stop enforcing law. Now it's just up to the store. They got to figure it out. There's a great article from Vox that interviewed University of Leicester criminologist Adrian Beck. He was the lead in that study finding $850,000 walking out the door. And he says, quote, for the self-checkout user, they have what I call the self-scan defense. You simply apologize and say that you thought you would scan the item. It is hard for the retailer to prove otherwise. End quote. Like it's just, it's like there's an old Steve Martin joke about you can get away with any crime if you say, I forgot. Like you could just do armed robbery and then say, I forgot armed robbery was illegal. That's basically self-checkout theft. You really pretty much can do that. Right. Although it would be a huge omission if we didn't stop here and point out that if you see on the news where there is like a police shooting scandal or police brutality thing and they're like, well, we responded to a call that someone had stolen a box of cigarettes or whatever. Yeah. Keep that context in mind because I could go into me as in looking like me at my age,

I could probably go into Whole Foods or Target and pick up one of their cash registers and just walk out the door with it and they would assume that I was there to, like that was my job, like I was there to repair it or something. Like I could tell the cashier, hey, I'm here to get the register. Let me let me just okay i'm just going to take that out there is a double

standard by how we choose to enforce the law because people like me even if they were 99 sure i intentionally didn't scan the stake it would just be oh sir go you know it looks like you forgot to scan it the The reaction would be very different at a different store in a different neighborhood and a different person doing it. Yeah, a thousand percent. And with or without self-checkout involved, we've seen that happen very tangibly with George Floyd and others. Yeah. I, like you, could, especially if I wore a milkman uniform, I think, I could just go start grabbing uh anything i wanted like i could i could walk a jet ski out of there no problem yeah like the steve martin bit like yes

steve martin could get away with anything saying he just forgot it is not the situation for everyone but this is why these numbers that's why these stats about how much they lose through and the fact that the business just calls it shrinkage yeah like there's no like more moralizing like theft or or the evil hooligans have stolen it's just let's just cost it in business some of the stuff's going to walk out the front door like it's just the way it is you deal with humans they're going to take some of the stuff and they actually that's part of the price of the stuff it's built into the profit margin we're very selective in our outrage because we're very quick to say,

wow, if they didn't want this to happen, they shouldn't have broken the law. It's like, man, it's the same thing as like, you know, watching Joe Rogan, you know, smoke a joint during his show on camera and then knowing there's thousands

and thousands of young black men in jail for weed possession when it was illegal and they're still in jail. And then here's like this podcast host just laughing it up and smoking weed with Elon Musk or whatever. It's kind of the same thing. We have very different moral standards, even forgetting about the law, just among middle class people, what we choose to get outraged about. It's like, well, he shouldn't have stolen that pack of gum if he didn't, you know, if he didn't want to get arrested and then shot. It's like, man, you have accidentally stolen gum. You have been dishonest on your taxes.

It's like we, I don't know, minor crimes like that, we are very selective about what we choose to respond to. I feel like self-checkout is underrated as an inducement to millions and millions of people to do more stealing. According to University of Manchester criminology professor Shad Maruna, he says, quote, Individuals can neutralize guilt they might otherwise feel when stealing by telling themselves that there are no victims of the crime. No human being is actually being hurt by this. Only some mega corporation that can surely afford the loss of a few quid. In fact, the corporation has saved so muchcheckout machines caused a massive wave of millions of people feeling more able to steal stuff. Right, but this person's almost criticizing it. But the reality is I think there's more with the internet and social media. I think there's more kind of like class consciousness than there was in the past where you just say look this door

would happily steal from me if they could yeah and when i have detected like the few times in my life i've looked closely at a receipt because something didn't sound right i think 80 of the errors i found were in the store's favor where there was a sale it was i grabbed two of something because it said two for one but somehow the sale didn't make it into their register. And maybe it's an innocent mistake. Maybe they just don't work super hard to make sure those sales are loaded into the system before it goes live, whatever. But I think the feeling that you want me to feel tremendous guilt

over getting something for free, you you know there was just a class action lawsuit where you were making your employees work overtime for no pay and you felt nothing like no one in your corporation felt one millisecond of guilt from the manager to the store to the ceo no one felt anything about stealing wages from these people or stealing time and you want me to feel awful because my candy bar didn't ring up like no it's all in the game you again you want to ask my ring it up for me fine i'm not going to intentionally steal but if i found out my friend was stealing my main concern would be well don't don't if you get caught it could screw up your job prospects whatever my my feeling would not be a sense of like moral outrage. It's like, how can you, you steal from Publix? Publix has always

been there for us. It's like, man, that Publix would rob you blind if they thought, if they thought they could get away with it. That's very true. Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break. We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

And remember, no running in the halls. I think it plays also right into the other big takeaway of this episode. Let's get into it. Takeaway number two. America is on a 105 year quest to automate every part of grocery shopping. is on a 105-year quest to automate every part of grocery shopping. I think a lot of people came away from noticing that self-checkouts were popping up and thought, oh no, a job is being automated away. But there's a couple of big things here, and one of them is that this process has been going on for a long time. And in a lot of ways, it's also been what makes it so nice for a lot of customers. The automation and the streamlining of stores leads to huge stores, huge carts, 24-hour shopping,

and every other convenience we love. So it makes every consumer who has a nearby store and has a basic amount of money to spend just feel much richer than their grandparents or even parents felt. Yeah. And automation is such a tricky subject because you and I are both working in an industry that was, is being wrecked by automation at the moment where once upon a time, like you would, you would create something or write something and then there's a process of, of like, you know, a consumer would buy it. And now there are these algorithms that manage what information is shown to who these systems that has driven down the price through the floor to

where basically it's not profitable to run any kind of publication at all unless it's like unless it's a giant like the new york times or else it's just publishing garbage and so you you know, it's, it's very easy to be cavalier about automation. If you're not in an industry that's, that's in a state of upheaval over it, but at the same time, automation itself is not evil. It's the reason why we have so much food. It's, you know, if you see a farmer on a big, like combine a big har harvester that's automation that used to be hundreds of people working out on the hot sun picking the stuff by hand now it can be done by one guy and a big machine and he's sitting in there in the air conditioning just you know doing it all on a day that's great that's that's one reason why there's you know the percentage of people in the world

that are starving is lower than it's ever been. But at the same time, there's always this transition period. And right now, it doesn't seem like anyone likes self-checkout, but I think they are training people to kind of expect it at the very worst. Automation has come along, and it's like, well, who was asking for it? It was supposed to be about supply and demand. along and it's like, well, who was asking for it? Who, you know, it's supposed to be about supply and demand. Where was their demand to not to, to have to do the task yourself? It's like, well, the demand was on the store's end because they're trying to increase that 1.5% margin up to 1.7 or whatever. Yeah. And that, that specific process is, I think people don't know that it's fundamental

to the entire history of grocery stores, which is a relatively recent history and a very, very American history. The thing with describing the U.S. versus the rest of the world is you don't want to fall into traps of thinking they're more pastoral or traditional than we are. But for one thing, we'll get into the, uh, very American specific invention of grocery stores. Um, but also if you like try to find ways that other countries do it differently, uh, there's not great sources, but I found a junkie business insider article. It's called what grocery shopping looks like in 10 places around the world.

And it includes stuff like French and German grocery stores closing much earlier and closing on Sundays. Um,ries like Greece having a lot of specialized butchers and green grocers and bakers instead of a grocery store, and France having bakeries everywhere. Open air markets are very big in China and South Africa and many other countries. They have supermarkets too, and American capitalism has kind of formatted a lot of how the world shops for food. But at least in those places, maybe there are kind of other options that are a little more common.

But in the U.S., like grocery stores, supermarkets, that is quote unquote traditional. That's what we're used to. And if you go to a farmer's market, it's alternative. And you're up to like some kind of different thing on purpose. Yeah, I have family that lives in Switzerland. They were talking about how like their grocery store store closes that closes at five uh so there's a whole issue with being trying to make it there when the their shift ended at work because otherwise like if you had to pick something up for dinner that night and just have to plan around it it's they keep

normal like like work type hours whereas i've had a 24-hour grocery store close to my home, gosh, since I was a teenager, I think. And this is why I have this theory that in the middle of people listening to this in the future, there's these viral clips of people going nuts here in the mask era, and they're usually having meltdowns in grocery stores, and they're tearing apart the meat department, or they're yelling at somebody, or getting into a fistfight

because they've been asked to wear a mask, or they've been caught doing something, and grocery stores are where they have their freak out. And I really do believe, based on what I said at the start of the episode, there's like a psychological, almost a religious comfort in the idea that this place serves every possible consumer desire you could have.

Every product you could possibly want, every super hyper-specific taste is catered to, all hours, convenient, just ultra-convenient, fast, it's always there, they're never out of anything, and just, I try to, I feel bad for the people having the free counts because I do get it. I get it. It's such a weird feeling of being told what to do, of being told how you have to shop, what you can shop for. It's just, it's such a, I know it's such a minor inconvenience. I get it.

But the way we cater to consumers, especially a certain class of consumers in America, the moment you sense any kind of a restriction, it just feels like an insult. It's like being told you're not allowed to pray. It's like being told you're not allowed to read a certain book. It's like we just have such a knee-jerk reaction to it. And there's nothing in the constitution about your right to be able to get a certain type of ice cream at three in the morning or did not have to wear a mask, but it feels like there is because that is as central to America and the American way of life as any of this other stuff. Yeah. And I think especially we're just identified with it across the world, maybe, maybe in large part, because we invented the modern grocery store in the US. It all comes down to like one guy, one date, one place, which I think would be surprising to people. There's one businessman named Clarence Saunders who opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916. That was the first grocery store. And I'd say

that in the sense that their innovation was self-service shopping. They let you walk in and take things from aisles and then bring them to a cashier. Before that, apparently, groceries and dry goods were sold on a credit and delivery basis. Customers presented their orders to clerks, and the clerks filled them. Accounts were tallied, bills prepared. That's according to American Heritage and some other sources as well. I understand it once I read it, that we haven't always had to American Heritage and some other sources as well. I understand it once I read it, that we haven't always had aisles full of food where you grab stuff. But there was a specific guy and time and place that invented that as an American practice.

And before it was some kind of clerk that I associate with the Old West or the frontier or something where you give him a list and he gets you the stuff. I'm trying to think of the Westerns I've seen seen i guess they don't really do a lot of grocery shoppings in the shopping in the westerns in our westerns i guess that doesn't come up a lot right um that like the the whiskey they always have on hand it has to come from somewhere so i guess i can't visualize what that looks like the idea that you just got like a tab and they you have an invoice you pay later and so you show up at like this dry goods store and do they have to order the stuff do they have it on hand i i don't know i'm picturing like

this little dusty space that doesn't have like a huge storage area in the back it's almost my closest touchstone is the menu in Oregon Trail 2 when you haven't set out yet and you're buying wagon parts and bullets and stuff like because it's got a guy with a mustache and suspenders and some stuff on a shelf like immediately behind him like the entire store is about the size of I don't know a bedroom or something it's very small. It's like hearing something that's so fundamental and hearing how recent it was invented. Just to be clear, the first one occurred in 1916.

It did not immediately become to where everyone had one of these within driving distance or walking distance until much, much later. Like, that was the prototype. It took decades after that to get to where everyone had this in there. Like, you don't have to go far back at all to where a small town still would not be expected to have one of these. They would still have the general store or, I'm guessing, six different places you had to go. Here's the butcher. Here's the dry goods place.

Here's the milk guy. And everything you needed came from eight different places. Yeah, absolutely. While this guy Clarence Saunders had success with Piggly Wiggly, it just didn't grow that fast. And it took until the 1930s and 40s for this to even kind of be a frequent or common thing in the US. And also his advertising for it was immediately about that consumer freedom that we now all

expect. There was a Piggly Wiggly ad that showed a woman with a shopping bag, and the tagline was, a nationwide vogue in shopping that leaves women free to choose for themselves. And that's the tagline, but also this guy Clarence Saunders, his entire deal was automating everything about a store that he possibly could. He thought of self-service shopping to get rid of that clerk labor and just have a cashier instead. And also his next project after Piggly Wiggly was a store called Key Doozle. And Key Doozle is a name you don't know because it didn't take off, but the name was a branding word for key does all. I'm sure for that. As early as 1937, he opened a key doozle

where shoppers look at glass cases and use electric keys to get a piece of tape printed out that says you want that item, and then you bring it to the front and they give it to you. And it was as much of a robotic store as he could do. And the technology wasn't very good and people didn't like it, so it didn't work in 1937 but the inventor of the grocery store their whole deal was how can this be as convenient and robotic as it possibly can be also i wonder how much of that not taking off was just due to the

terrible name yeah really bad it's just it's just so hard to like how could you embarrass me at the key doozle like that in front of everyone or hey we've got we had an armed robbery at the key doozle like no one like that you can't no one wants to like force yourself to say baby talk all the time so yeah changed history by coming up with the world's worst not i guess piggly Wiggly is not a great name for a store either. What was this person's problem? Is it like a children's book author? Yeah, according to Time Magazine, Clarence Saunders would be asked why he picked the name Piggly Wiggly,

and he'd say, so people will ask that very question? He just picked dumb names to increase the popularity of his stores. But I feel like there's a limit to that. Eventually, someone does not want to be the head manager of a key doozle. They quit. Not doing it. Yeah, because you, the whimsical people of the world, the rest of us don't need as much whimsy in our lives as you seem to think.

It's fine to just keep it, keep it private. You can, like, you can name your kids some whimsical thing. I'm not going to say anything, but don't make me call the place. I get my food, the key doozle. I'm not going to do it. I'll, I'll prefer, I'll just go somewhere else. And also that style of wanting the food and soap and everything else is like, uh, traditionally American and like seen as American worldwide. Because you've got, while Clarence Saunders is struggling to build his stupid name, Key Robot Store, other people were founding the first truly modern-style supermarket chains. There's a guy named Mike Cullen who started the King Cullen chain in 1930 on Long Island, and it had the giant display advertising featuring

prices that you're used to. And the goal was to scale up and then slash prices so you can scale up even more. And everybody kind of copied that system from there. And we had the shopping carts we're used to by 1946. We had scanning by 1974. By 1960, supermarkets were selling 70% of U.S. groceries when less than 50 years before they did not exist. They were not even a thing. Prince Philip came over from the UK to visit the US in 1957. And in 1957, supermarkets were so novel and such an American thing that like the Queen and Prince Philip went to a grocery store in Maryland. And the Queen was reportedly, quote, been used by the grocery carts, little collapsible seat, saying it is particularly nice to be able to bring your children here, end quote. Which is like, you know, the Queen of England is the most distant from using a grocery store at all. And so to have her come and check one out, like, really shows how much America focused on that B&R thing. Yeah, and the fact that you can't afford a babysitter, so you have to bring the child everywhere with you.

Yeah, how could she? How could she do it? Because... They can't just hang out in the castle. There like swords and armor in there you know terrible this is the era of the 1950s and then like the tv show mad men takes place in the 1960s and it's basically about the rise of modern advertising well that's this it's those post-war years when the consumer marketplace and the consumer economy really got into full swing. It came back from the war, and that was kind of like America was the center of that. But what you mentioned above, like the first guy to really have the big, loud advertising, tons of floor space think about in those circumstances how suddenly how important it is to have packaging that is bright and flamboyant how important that your mascots are how important slogans become how important all advertising becomes tv radio because again televisions

1950s when those start to become common in homes get to the 1960s or so that's when suddenly everybody's got one. So you've got these products on your shelf. And see, people are going to see this brand of beer in your fridge and know you're a blank. You're sophisticated or you're a tough guy or you're a playboy. All of this stuff with how you see yourself and your self-image that is tied into the brands you buy. This is where it started. It's all in grocery stores.

And you wonder why people have an emotional attachment to grocery stores or why they freak out about having to cover their face. It means everything. We could do an entire episode about Trader Joe's, about the fact that they have set themselves up to be inconvenient, to give the impression that it's more of like a friendly neighborhood hipster market thing and so they intentionally arranged these shelves in kind of a haphazard way and the checkout is this kind of just cluster of registers it's not clear where you stand but it's all inefficient because upper middle class people prefer a little bit of inefficiency. They don't mind like ugly vegetables because it looks more like farmer's market. You see, because now it's gone the other direction.

Because now that you have democratized grocery stores so that everybody's got one, the rich people want something that looks more like a farmer's market. Or they will literally go to a farmer's market. Like they will start doing it the way it would have been done 100 years ago. Because now that's the fancy version is when you, you know, it's, we got to be there at six in the morning when they've still got the fresh turnips and it's less convenient. But the whole thing is it's like, well, yeah, because I'm rich enough that I don't need the convenience. I can go to this thing just to get the freshest strawberries at the farmer's

market. And now that's the status symbol. I don't need the big fluorescent grocery store. And so now you've got these stores like Whole Foods and these other chains that are competing to kind of make it seem more rustic. Yeah, I keep thinking of this post offices episode I did because everybody, at least a little bit, has the same post office. It works the same for everybody, more or less, because it's something that was developed as a public utility. And grocery stores were developed as a way to make money and to automate and earn better than the existing system did. So we have these evolutions of it where if you're fancy, you have a fancier store.

And if you feel less fancy, you don't. And if you're a big dumbo, you go to Key Doozle. And it's whatever it's going to be for people because we're all choosing it. Yeah. And then it ties into what type of person you think you are and what class you think you're a member of. And with the automation in general, I think it's just worth knowing that the self-checkout type system has been the whole point the entire time. You have a new book coming out, and it's great. And also the previous book to it in the series is called Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits. And it has one of my favorite automation jokes where there's a car chase involving two self-driving cars.

So the passengers just kind of wait for it to end. Like there's none of the James Bond whipping the wheel around kind of thing. Right. They kind of have a conversation through the chase because there's not, they're not really involved. They're kind of just spectators. Yeah. And I feel like cars are almost going that way. Like we already kind of have self-driving cars and it's a thing that seems designed to nuke the jobs for truckers and cab drivers and uber drivers and it seems like almost every grocery job could be in that same boat if if just uh you know key doozle technology gets better and better yeah because it's weird because

for example like right now especially during the pandemic there is a huge uptick in people using delivery services like instacart like i talked talked about um so on one hand they've automated a lot of the processes but on the other hand you've created a new human process but here's the key the new human process is garbage like what it pays what it pays for how stressful that job is and how the the pace that they're expected to do it. The fact that they're putting wear and tear on their own vehicle, you know, in the way that they calculate that they keep some of their tips. That sort of thing was a controversy. That's one thing with automation is it's not that the work goes away.

It's right now what we're seeing is that it replaces the work with like lower and lower quality jobs. And we've seen that in journalism where, you know, a job that used to be a full-time thing, writing copy for a paper that could sell, you know, for a lot of advertising dollars, things like that, to pay that full-time journalist. Now, you know, it's like in many cases, like a below minimum wage thing where your job is just to sit there and scour for stuff that you can aggregate. And the very second they can come up with a piece of artificial intelligence that will just grab a story and rewrite it slightly using different adjectives and post it to social media, they'll do it.

And same thing, once they come up with an automated car where the worker at kroger whatever just loads the order into the instacart self-driving vehicle and that vehicle drives itself to the home they will do that they will cut the human out of it just as fast as they can but it's and this is why going back to how grocery stores kind of symbolize everything about america like the fact that the grocery store was the first place, because literally within hours of them announcing the lockdown, that was the first place you saw it. First place you saw shortages, first place you saw like panic buying, whereas all of that stuff would spider out to all parts of the economy eventually, you know, even going up to professional sports and now schools and now colleges, everything else. But the first place you saw it was at the grocery store.

And it's kind of like that's almost on the vanguard of the culture. It's like when something changes about the economy, something changes about how we live, grocery stores are kind of like the first place you see it because that's the one, the first thing we need is food and soap and those things. And then maybe in closing, there's also, I think, like a really weird thing of especially modern grocery stores where we are the customer and we do have a lot of say in what they're supposed to be, right? Because we're spending the money and we're choosing to go there. But also, it seems like they are choosing to make us shop a particular way, whether or not we want it. Self-checkouts are pretty wildly unpopular with people, or at least people complain about them frequently. But looking at the trade journal Produce Blue Book again, they said, quote, 50% of retailers surveyed said that the benefits of self-checkout outweigh the disadvantages, and 86% of retailers surveyed agreed with the statement, self-checkout is a critical factor

in my company's strategy for the future, end quote. So 86% of them are saying like, no, self-checkout is going to be the way, even though it's pretty clear people don't love them and they are on purpose or accidentally encouraged to steal by them. It doesn't seem driven by consumer demand at all. Yeah, I think that's the thing I would leave people with. When you look around your life, when someone suggests a change to your job or to where you shop or anything about your life, and they phrase it not as this will make your life better, but this is the future, and so we just have to get on board. And we could say that about our industry.

You could say that about all sorts of them where it's like, well, cars, instead of having a knob for your radio, it's got a touchscreen. It's like, no, that's worse. That's much worse. I like being able to reach down and just feel the knob and turn it. That was fine. Why did you change it? It's like, well, it's because that's the future. Says who?

Who decided that and so i think that's that's one of the misconceptions about the world where it's like the future just means time that has marched forward it doesn't mean that you have to live a certain way that someone has told you it's like well no this this job has to be like we you know all restaurants instead of having waiters and waitresses and servers uh you have to get to where it's just there's like a kiosk and a little cart, a little robotic cart rolls the food to your table. It's like, why? Why can't we just keep it the other way

if this is what people would prefer? It's like, well, that's the future. It's like, okay, I would like to get rid of that argument. Yeah, it's hollow. It's not necessarily backed up by anything. And it's also usually, it's sometimes coming from someone who's spent like months and months

having many meetings and sessions and going over schematics and stuff of what the future is going to be. Like they had a pretty active role in choosing it. Yeah. Is that the future or is that a contract you signed and you're now trying to, you bought a bunch of these machines and now you've, you're trying to force us to use them. Ultimately, consumers can be programmed to think a lot of things. But at some point, I admire the people that will be old and cranky and say, no, I liked it better when a person did this. There was no reason. There was no reason to do it this way. Yeah.

I miss the milkman and not for gross reasons. That kind of thing. Yeah. Bring him back. Bring back the doctor that comes to my house. All of them. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Jason Pargin for getting the band back together.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic, the slotting fees secret war. I know I gave it kind of a comic book-y title, but this is the thing.

It's something you probably haven't heard of, slotting fees, but they're what determine the entire contents of grocery stores in the US and the UK and Australia and maybe elsewhere. We haven't been able to verify it, but those three countries for sure. Visit sifpod.fun to hear about that and back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring grocery stores with us.

Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, self-checkout incited a worldwide crime spree. And takeaway number two, America is on a 105-year quest to automate every part of grocery shopping. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow our guest. Because Jason is at JohnDiesAtTheEN on Twitter. That is at JohnDiesAtTheEN.

It's one letter off of John Dies at the End. His new book is entitled Zoe Punches the Future in the D**k. It's phenomenal. It's out October 13th. Search the title at your favorite bookseller's website, or call them about that name, or use this episode's links at SIFPod.fun. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones.

A great article titled Grocery Stores and American Miracle, by Joe Pinsker for The Atlantic. That is a comprehensive interview with Michael Rollman, who is a journalist and cookbook writer and the author of Grocery, the Buying and Selling of Food in America. And then another pair of articles to shout out in particular for the self-checkout takeaway. One title here is Wouldn't It Be Better If Self-Checkout Just Died by Caitlin Tiffany for Vox. And the other title is Nation of Shoplifters, The Rise of Supermarket Self-Checkout Scams by Alex Moshakis for The Guardian. Find those and more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Get more Budos into your life by visiting daptonerecords.com. That site has the new Budos Band single. It's called Long in the Tooth. They have an album coming in October.

I'm as excited as you are. This is going to be great. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. See more of Burt's art on Instagram at Burt Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. And special thanks to Jason Pargin for all kinds of help, not just on this episode. He's been a very supportive and thoughtful and caring person with a lot of things I've been handling and some other things too. And so I'm so grateful to him for, you know, just everything. I'm so excited I got to podcast with him again, and I predict that will keep happening, you know, way on into the future. Anyway, extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show with the Slotting Fees Secret War. And thank you to all our listeners.

I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.