THE THIRD WAVE
In 1973-74 the oil squeeze triggered by the Arab embargo sent gasoline prices soaring. Giant oil companies reaped bonanza profits, but local filling-station operators had to fight a desperate battle for economic survival. To cut costs many introduced self-service fuel pumps. At first these were an oddity. Newspapers wrote funny feature stories about the motorist who tried to put the fuel hose into the car radiator. Soon, however, the sight of consumers pumping their own gas became a commonplace.
Only 8 percent of U.S. gas stations were on a self-service basis in 1974. By 1977 the number reached nearly 50 percent. In West Germany, of 33,500 service stations some 15 percent had shifted to self-service by 1976, and this 15 percent accounted for 35 percent of all the gasoline sold. Industry experts say that it will soon be 70 percent of the total. Once more the consumer is replacing a producer and becoming a prosumer.
The same period saw the introduction of electronic banking, which not only began to break down the pattern of “banker’s hours” but also increasingly eliminated the teller, leaving the customer to perform operations previously done by the bank staff.
Getting the customer to do part of the job—known to economists as “externalizing labor cost”—is scarcely new. That’s what self-service supermarkets are all about. The smiling clerk who knew the stock and went and got it for you was replaced by the push-it-yourself shopping cart. While some customers lamented the good old days of personal service, many liked the new system. They could do their own searching and they wound up paying a few cents less. In effect, they were paying themselves to do the work the clerk had previously done.
Today this same form of externalization is occurring in many other fields. The rise of discount stores, for example, represents a partial step in the same direction. Clerks are far and few between; the customer pays a bit less but works a bit harder. Even shoe stores, in which a supposedly skilled clerk was long regarded as a necessity, are moving to self-service, shifting work to the consumer.
The same principle can be found elsewhere, too. As Caroline Bird has written in her perceptive book, The Crowding Syndrome, “More things come knocked down for supposedly easy assembly at home . . . and during the Christmas season shoppers in some of the proudest old New York stores have to make out sales slips for clerks unable or unwilling to write.”
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