Anna Sam used to be completely anonymous; she worked on a supermarket checkout in France for eight years. She was employed eight hour days as a beepeuse. This translates as a woman who beeps, the French colloquialism for the role.
But now she has written a best-selling book, The Tribulations of a Check-out Girl, which will be published in the UK later this year. The book has caused quite a stir because it focuses on a subject that should be required reading for anyone in human resources - the dehumanisation of work. Sometimes, says Sam, mothers would admonish their children within earshot. "If you don't work hard at school you'll end up like that lady behind the counter," they would say.
The book has struck a chord among readers because it charts the degradation of human relations in one of the few situations where strangers meet - the so-called 'point of sale'. Supermarket transactions have been sapped of their humanity through processes that even govern the way people say 'hello' and 'goodbye'.
I shop at Waitrose where checkout staff smile and say hello in a genuine way - but even here I know there is coaching. Anna Sam would say 'goodbye and have a good day' around 250 times in every shift. When pleasantries become a routine they lose their meaning. No wonder she remembers the time - it didn't happen often - when a man leaned over the counter and shook her hand.
Sam, who took her checkout job initially to fund her French literature studies, went back to the supermarket when she graduated and stayed there for eight years. Anyone who works in retailing will know that many of their counter staff are students supplementing their income, or they may be older people with a wealth of work experience behind them. What they all have in common is the need to earn a little extra and, sometimes, a desire simply to get out of the house.
Perhaps the only way to deal with this kind of work, ultimately, is to automate it completely. As a man I'm quite proud that I'm a fully-trained hand-held gizmo operator who can check the goods in to his trolley as he shops. It means that my transaction is limited to a credit card swipe.
But herein lies a future where all human interactions have disappeared. It's already happening. I needn't visit a bank to get cash. I needn't visit shops to buy goods that I can get on the internet. In fact there are many days I do not see or speak with anyone beyond my immediate family. Is that what we want from life?
My mother used to shop at the market every Wednesday and Saturday. She went there on the bus, speaking with people in the bus queue and fellow passengers.Waiting at the fruit stall she would chat again with strangers and there would usually be a lively exchange with the grocer about the weather or possibly the price of fruit. Stall holders didn't always say 'have a nice day' after receiving an ear-bashing if she discovered they had short-changed her. But there was mutual respect between customer and retailer and, most of all, there was life.
The sadness of the job we call human resources is that much of what it does isn't very human at all. It conspires, with other management processes, to squeeze the life out of work. People become 'headcount'.
When engineers program cash registers so that they beep in registering every item, do they realise that operators like Anna Sam will go to sleep hearing those beeps in their head? Wouldn't it be great if the beeps could be varied to add a little spice - an electronic giggle or a rude burp, perhaps? What joy that could inject to our shopping.
But joy is not a word you hear very much in association with the workplace, particularly in a recession where HR can often prove a joyless task. Anna Sam writes about re-socialising the workplace. Could that be a job for HR?
- Richard Donkin is author of 'Blood, Sweat and Tears' and 'The Evolution of Work', richard.donkin@haymarket.com
