Most of us do not like to wait in lines, but there are always exceptions of course. I know someone who when he waits in a line can find out the life history of the person next to him by the time he gets to the front. When I was in college, I wrote a paper about EPOS systems. If my memory is correct, there were two stores in Lincoln that were the first to have an Electronic Point of Sale System. This is the system where a scanner reads the bar code on items and automatically rings the price up. One of was a grocery store and the other a big box store.
Imagine now having to wait for a grocery clerk to manually punch in the prices of each item from a full cart of groceries for the person in front of you. And then you had to wait for them to write their personal check and the clerk to write the customers driver’s license number on the check. That was the norm 40 years ago. Now many high traffic stores have self-checkouts and more and more shopping is done from home online. I wonder what it will look like in 40 years from now.