Manley: The self-checkout took my job

Published 12:21 pm Tuesday, January 14, 2020

I can remember after getting my driver’s license I was ready for my first date.

Lisa and I had been together since we were 13, and now that we were 16 and driving, I was ready for actually going out on dates together.

I felt like an experienced driver, as I’m sure all 16 year-olds do, but Lisa’s father was not as confident in my skills on the road.

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That is why he limited our first date to no further than Winchester.

This created a problem for me since I had already planned a grand evening in Lexington.

What was there to do in Winchester? So I took her bowling.

I like bowling. It’s right up my alley.

Bowling was a bit different back then in Winchester. There was no automatic score board. Along with your payment, they handed you your shoes, a pencil and a paper score card. It was up to you to learn the system for points and how to keep track manually with no calculator.

Automatic scoring was not the first major change in the history of bowling.

There used to be a whole position for someone called a pinsetter. Usually called a ‘pin boy,’ they would wait at the end of the alley and replace the pins between each turn.

However, with the invention of the automatic pinsetter in the first half of the 20th Century, the paid position of pinsetter was phased out.

I wonder if there was an uprising for the lost job of pinsetter?

Why don’t we have those great jobs of local telephone operators, carriage manufacturers, town criers, encyclopedia salesmen, gas pump attendants and other jobs?

I would think we all agree these jobs are not making a comeback any time soon.

Just like 100 years ago, technology is still replacing jobs today.

I see people on social media jokingly waiting on their W2 from a grocery store where they ‘worked’ for them in the self-checkout.

True, we are losing cashiers, but these low-skill jobs are being replaced with high-skill jobs.

Think about who manufactures the self-checkout kiosks, who programs the software, who installs and makes service repairs.

These are all highly-skilled jobs connected to one piece of technology with higher wages.

Higher wages are great, but, there is a catch.

Higher wages and higher-skilled jobs require higher education.

Higher education does not always mean a four-year university degree; it means additional training beyond high school in as little as two years.

This is what we do at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

An engineering and electronics technology degree at BCTC can have an average wage of $22.02 per hour.

Computerized manufacturing and machining degrees can potentially earn $21.61 per hour.

And computer information-related degrees can earn a median wage of $30 per hour according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We might not need an elevator operator to take us to the top floor, or pinsetters to reset the pins in the end of the bowling alley, but what we do need are more people to go to college.

We need more people to fill new jobs like app developers, podcast engineers, social media managers and driverless car engineers.

The next time you use the self-checkout at the store, remember you are helping create a demand for higher-wage jobs.

Now that Lisa and I are married, we don’t go bowling as much as we used to; we just don’t have time to spare.

Bruce Manley is campus director at the Bluegrass Community and Technical College Winchester-Clark County Campus. He can be reached at bruce.manley@kctcs.edu.