CVS: REALLY, REALLY DEPRESSING STORES

I used to love CVS.  I’m not sure why.  It seemed like they had everything.  The prices seemed fair.  The employees were generally smart and helpful.  Now, CVS is, in my opinion, a human wasteland.  I get depressed every time I go there.

What happened?  Robots happened.  CVS checkout is now a series of robots where consumers scan their items.  Most times I walk in the door to CVS, there isn’t a human being in sight.  There’s one checkout aisle for folks unwilling or unable to use the robots, but, generally, that is unattended.  Walking into the store feels like walking onto the set of a post-Apocalyptic movie.

Maybe humans will adjust to this kind of horror show.  Maybe walking into CVS won’t feel like walking into someone’s house and realizing no one is home, and you probably shouldn’t be there and should call the cops to look for corpses.

The depressing stuff doesn’t end there.  Once I gather a few items and head to the checkout, I can anticipate the robot yelling at me in a synthesized voice to do various things, in perfect order.  It is trying to turn me into a machine.  I also haven’t noticed CVS prices going down and rather resent being hijacked into being a checkout clerk myself—scanning and bagging items.

Since there is an imperfect weight mechanism of some sort that determines if you have scanned all your items and placed them in the cage designated for them, I frequently am told, in front of anyone else checking out, “Please scan your item before placing it in the bagging area!”  I haven’t stolen anything, but the machine thinks I might have and summons an employee:  “Please wait while …”  In other words, “Please wait while we figure out if you’re a crook.”

Gone are the days when simple things like banter at the checkout with a friendly face fueled folks’ serotonin levels, when there was someone to tell, “Bye, have a good day.”  These things didn’t seem to matter to me, until they were gone.  Now, we’re all being coaxed to be automatons without human connections.  And CVS is making bank on it.

Here’s a solution:  Hire a greeter to stand at the door of the store.  Have the person say, “Hello,” to everyone who enters and, “Goodbye,” to those who leave.  Resist the temptation to cede that function to a life-sized image of a fake human on screen or, worse yet, a hologram.

Will CVS and other stores do that?  Probably not.  Because we humans turn out to have an Achilles’ heel that threatens to make us all less than we are:  The profit motive combined with fascination with technology.  It’s like crack cocaine and fentanyl with a candy coating.  And it is going to wreck havoc with our world and could completely destroy human empathy, along the way.

Keith Ablow, MD is a New York Times bestselling novelist and was, for 12 years, a national Contributor to the Fox News Channel.