Unexpected item on the belt!

 

I was queuing at our local supermarket –Tesco’s (Wal-Mart to those who are stateside) with my sarnie (sandwich) and a drink. At this particular supermarket they have a fully automated checkout which ends your purchasing experience by thanking you for your custom.I know that this checkout chip isn’t up to HAL 9000(by the way I’ll have nothing bad said about Hal –he didn’t mean to Kill Frank Poole and try to Kill Dave Bowman-he was confused) standards in regards to cognition,But is it a sign of progress to be thanked by a machine rather than a person?

Can a machine thank someone, thanks is defined as an expression of gratitude, which is a sense, a feeling .Can the Tesco’s machine feel gratitude when I purchase something?If not then what is happening –is it thanks by proxy? That can’t be can it? For thanks by proxy you would need someone to constantly be feeling gratitude, somewhere in the organisation, perhaps they are paid to feel that emotion, a gratitude operative. It could be that the person who originally was paid to work on the checkout and lost there job to a computer was reemployed as the gratitude operative?

All because ‘Thanks’ is meant to be personal not corporate.