Hello? Where Is Everybody?

The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head downstairs to find the checkout registers. Instead of encountering a friendly face that helps with the payment process, we’re greeted with closed registers resulting in too long lines. The only open ones are self-scanners. There goes the possibility for some lightweight banter. Our fridge is empty. We bike to the nearest supermarket for some quick midweek resupplies. No long queues this time, but just as little employees waiting for us at the checkout: only the occasional self-scan verification makes chitchat possible. I see that they closed yet another “human checkout lane”. The System Works. On one of the campuses where I teach, as part of an experiment, a small physical Amazon store…