BBL Speaker Series: “Please Wait, Help Is on the Way”: How Automation Changes Roles and Relationships in Retail Work

Talk Title: “Please Wait, Help Is on the Way”: How Automation Changes Roles and Relationships in Retail Work

Speaker: Pegah Moradi, PhD candidate, Information Science at Cornell University

Location: HBK 2105 and Zoom

Abstract: While much discussion on emerging technologies and work focuses on the potential for future job loss, these systems are already changing how we do our existing jobs. In this talk, I present two related studies of how emerging technologies are reshaping work for cashiers and other retail associates, who together constitute approximately 7 million workers in the United States. First, through an interview study of cashiers, I show how self-checkout technologies create more rule-enforcement work for frontline workers, making their relationship to customers increasingly adversarial and shifting their role from cashier to cop. Second, drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, I show how intelligent crime-control systems—increasingly prevalent due to narratives of rampant retail crime—intensify managerial surveillance and create new relational demands for workers. Through these studies, I show that attending to how technologies reshape roles and relationships, not just tasks, offers a more complete account of how automation is transforming work, with implications for a variety of different workplace contexts.

Bio: Pegah Moradi is a PhD candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, where she studies how digital automation and artificial intelligence affect work, organizations, and social life. Her dissertation focuses on how self-checkout machines, crime-control tech, and other kinds of automation in retail stores have been changing the nature of frontline retail work. Pegah’s work is supported by the NSF GRFP, Microsoft Research, the Siegel Family Endowment, and the MacArthur Foundation (through the Cornell AI, Policy, and Practice Initiative).