You’re Working at Walmart for Free
Every time you scan an item, you’re performing unpaid labor
I try not to shop at Walmart for a variety of reasons, but recently I walked into our local store for the first time since pre-pandemic days. I was shocked to find that all but a handful of checkout lanes were gone, replaced by two crowded corrals of self-checkout stations.
Of the few traditional checkout lanes, only one was open, and the line of customers was long. My choice was to stand in the long line to pay for my single item, or use the self-checkout and perform what amounts to unpaid labor.
You’ve probably seen the meme going around social media urging you not to use self-checkouts because they’re putting store employees out of work. This is true, and the proliferation of self-checkout lanes irks me for that reason, but also for another: these big box retailers, who are already making billions of dollars of profit, are exploiting their customers by making them work for what they are going to buy.
The Prosumer
In our family, we jokingly refer to the process of shopping as “hunting and gathering,” alluding to the activity of non-agrarian civilizations. We are aware that shopping requires physical and mental exertion: searching for the correct item, comparing prices, putting purchases in the car, bringing them home. It wipes us out.
We may not realize it, but we are intuiting an important economic idea: every consumer is also a producer in some way or form. In fact, we may be more correctly called prosumers. The term prosumer is a portmanteau of producer and consumer and was coined in 1980 by futurist Alvin Toffler in his book, The Third Wave. Toffler used prosumer to describe how technology is blurring the line between production and consumption, but even he could not predict the extent to which those lines are dissolving.
Sociologist George Ritzer has applied the idea of the prosumer to our 21st-century technologies. Production of goods has always included at least a little consumption, he explains, even if it’s just the acquisition and use of raw materials. But today’s electronic and digital technologies have tipped the scale: the process of consumption these days requires a much greater amount of production. Today we are primarily prosumers because, as technology has advanced, we have been required to become more involved with the production process. We’re living in a do-it-yourself economic culture. The lines between production and consumption aren’t blurred; they’ve disappeared. Ritzer indicates we are at the state where “the interrelationship of production and consumption where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one from the other.”[1]
Digital Work
Self-service shopping has been around for a long time — consider the automats of the 1920s and 30s — but the growth of electronic and digital technologies has increasingly shifted the task of production to consumers. Today, we use ATMs for cash, pump our own gas, book our own flights and hotels, order pizza, even use our smartphones to tour real estate. These are all tasks that, not so long ago, paid employees completed for us or helped us to accomplish. We know this, because we are old enough to remember the changes, or we know people who used to do these jobs.
But in the case of social media activities, we are performing work without even realizing it, just by participating.
When Canadian researcher Dallas Smythe studied the phenomenon in relation to television, he called it the “audience commodity.” The viewing audience, he argued, is performing unpaid work every time they watch a commercial. For the privilege of watching television shows, they provide the labor of their attention to the TV screen.
Perhaps it is a small price to pay for entertainment, but that price has increased since the world went online. Browsing the internet and using social media require not just our attention but our personal data: who we are, what we like and dislike, where we go, who we associate with. Social media companies and others collect and sell this data for profit.
Oddly, this hasn’t deterred too many of us. More than 80% of Americans use YouTube and nearly 70% are on Facebook, according to the latest data from Pew Research. Worldwide, the total number of social media users is in the billions.
Not only do social media users pay with their personal data, they also pay with actual labor. Social media platforms exist only because of user-generated content. Without people posting on Twitter, there is no Twitter, for example. Sure, some people make millions as social media influencers, but most of the rest of us (including writers on Medium) earn little to nothing. We provide posts, record videos, create memes, manage groups, and so on — without any expectation of remuneration.
Ritzer suggests that we don’t mind because we are enjoying ourselves.[2] How can it be exploitation if we do it voluntarily and we are having fun while we are doing it?
Communication researcher Christian Fuchs agrees that the activity can be enjoyable but maintains it’s still labor, and capitalism is indeed using consumers unfairly. Our leisure time has “become subsumed under and exploited by capital,” he argues in a 2012 study. He asserts that “the boundaries between play and labour have become fuzzy … Exploitation tends to feel like fun and becomes part of free time.”[3]
So why does the labor of self-checkouts bother us so much? Is it because it’s not as much fun as an Instagram post or playing Candy Crush? Or something else?
In-Your-Face Exploitation
Maybe scanning bar codes is fun for some people, at least for the first dozen times. But for most of us, it’s physically and mentally demanding. The process of unloading the cart, twirling the boxes and jars across the scanner, and placing them in bags takes exertion and concentration, especially when there are people waiting behind us in line and the scanner mechanism malfunctions or hiccups, as it often seems to do. We recognize it as work, especially since we remember that just a few months ago, somebody was getting paid to do it. In fact, as Ritzer points out, we can often see the few cashiers still employed, just a few feet away, doing exactly what we are doing. The exploitation is clearly visible.
Companies claim that self-checkouts save them money and that the price of goods would rise without the cost savings. Our work is paying off for us in the long run. But is it true? Ritzer says no, that supermarkets “do not pass the full savings directly on to the prosumers who are doing the work, who are providing the free labor.”[4]
How do we know? For one, while you’re checking out your groceries at the self-checkout, you are paying the exact same prices as the consumers standing in the traditional checkout lanes. You have earned no discount for your work.
Moreover, it’s easy to see where the cost savings are going — straight to the top, to corporate profits and to executive pay. Over the past couple of decades, the gap between the pay of executives and workers continues to widen, even as companies replace their employees with technology. The Economy Policy Institute reported a few years ago that CEO pay grew by 940% while the average worker’s pay increased by just 12%.
Technology is Not the Culprit
Although well-intentioned, the message in those memes going around, urging you not to use the self-checkouts, is futile. Your refusal to scan your own bread and milk won’t solve the problem. That’s because the problem is even bigger than Walmart or self-checkouts: it’s a systemic problem caused by unregulated, unchecked predatory capitalism.
Simply put, we are being used. All of us, both workers and consumers. We are just a means to an end, and that end is profit. As Ritzer explains, “Prosumers meekly, if not eagerly, do what they are led — and are expected — to do. In the process, they increase the profits of the capitalists.”[5]
Sad part is, we are so enmeshed in the system, we participate whether we want to or not. Yet, on some level, some of us are beginning to realize it.
[1] George Ritzer, “Prosumer Capitalism,” The Sociological Quarterly, 56: 3, (Summer 2015): 413–414.
[2] George Ritzer, “Prosumption,” in The Oxford Handbook of Consumption, ed. Frederick F. Wherry and Ian Woodward, Oxford, (2019): 83.
[3] Christian Fuchs, “Dallas Smythe Today — The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value,” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10, no. 2 (2012): 734.
[4] Ritzer, “Prosumption,” 83.
[5] Ritzer, “Prosumption,” p. 87.
