Theorizing the Costs of Self-Service Technologies and Co-Creation by Design

In this commentary we explore how, in a market system that increasingly demands the participation of consumers as co-creators through self-service technologies, these technologies pose significant challenges to various consumers. We call this increase in demand the ‘everyday-ification’ of co-creation and consider its effect on consumers who are either unwilling or unable to co-create value. We look at how marketers are motivated to persistently replace human labor with technologies, not to primarily benefit consumers, but to discipline consumer labor and to maximize profits and shareholder value. Through this lens we examine five key issues with self-service technologies. First, we discuss how costs and benefits associated with self-service technologies are unequally allocated, before addressing how consumers’ choices are managed, consumers’ rising sense of powerlessness and increased vulnerabilities, consumers’ service failure responsibilization, and the cybernetic bureaucracy of life through self-service technologies.


Introduction
In this commentary we consider the important role of emerging self-serve technologies (SSTs) in the fundamental reorganization of a wide variety of production and consumption processes (Ritzer 1993).These increasingly ubiquitous SSTs replace traditional customer-to-employee service interactions as they require consumers to produce the service via interactions with technology (Bitner, Ostrom, and Meuter 2002;Zhu et al. 2007).SSTs are both characteristic and symptomatic of a wider transformation in the mode of capitalist value creation where marketers must now increasingly act as providers of resources to facilitate consumers' own value creation via technologies, and where consumers are responsibilized (Foucault 2008;Giesler and Veresiu 2014;Huston, Cruz, and Zoppos 2023) to perform an increasing number and array of value co-creating actions (Ritzer 1993).In our commentary we consider five keys ways that SSTs differentially impact consumers and discuss how SSTs, as a form of co-creation, are ultimately designed to put consumers to work in the production and service delivery processes as part of marketers' efforts to increasingly systematize and rationalize processes in their unceasing quest for efficiencies (Ritzer 1993;Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008).
Beyond common physical SSTs like vending machines and ATMs, are interactive terminals at gas stations, banks, hotels, airports, supermarkets, and new tools like self-serve parcel lockers.These are transaction-related SSTs (Meuter et al. 2000) and are typically for placing orders, scanning, or paying.Other types of SSTs are customer-service or information-related technologies that are increasingly aimed at delivering information to allow for the provision of customized services to customers (Zhu et al. 2013).These include interactive phone systems, information kiosks, vocal response systems, mobile shopping assistants, and website self-service.
Not surprisingly, the marketing literature examining SSTs' impact on consumers, businesses, and society is broadly supportive (e.g., Bitner, Ostrom, and Meuter 2002;Collier and Barnes 2015;Salomann et al. 2007;Sugathan, Ranjan, and Mulky 2017;Zhu et al. 2007).Consumer research shows how SSTs attract consumers for their convenience, reliability, reduced need for employee interaction and assistance, and even fun (e.g., Oh, Jeong, and Baloglu 2013;Weijters et al. 2007).Consumers' positive perceptions of SST service quality are often based on their personal input and feelings of independence and empowerment (Zhu et al. 2013).In marketing research, SSTs are touted as cost-saving devices based on requiring fewer employees and increasing productivity (Kokkinou and Cranage 2015;Weijters et al. 2007).SSTs can also improve service delivery by offering greater efficiencies and consistency of the value proposition (Meuter et al. 2000) and giving marketers greater flexibility and scope to expand service offerings (Kokkinou and Cranage 2015), which can contribute to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.Representative of the general optimism of marketing scholars regarding the diffusion of SSTs, Salomann and colleagues (2007, p. 66) suggest that: "Nowadays, the combination of self-service and technology is believed to transform the service economy in much the same way that mass production transformed manufacturing, by allowing services to be delivered at low cost in large volumes." Our goal in our commentary is not to dispute research that demonstrates how SSTs can offer advantages to various consumers.Rather, we first show how the costs and benefits associated with SSTs are not shared equally among consumers.We next discuss how SSTs are proliferating across a range of categories, to the point where they almost universalize the injunction to co-create value.This oftentimes curtails consumers' freedom to choose to co-create (Cao et al. 2022;Dholakia et al. 2021), thus increasing consumer powerlessness and exposing vulnerabilities.We next discuss how marketers' motivation to replace human labor with SSTs is not, primarily, to benefit consumers, but to discipline labor and to maximize profits and shareholder value (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008).Finally, we argue that SSTs are heightening a sense of cybernetic administration of life.

Allocation of Costs
Consumers are often pressured or compelleddirectly or indirectlyto co-create in the increasingly unavoidable selfservice spaces erected by interactive technologies (Dholakia et al. 2021;Ritzer 1993) and an inability or failure to do means they lose out on the many benefits and advantages afforded exclusively to others.SSTs are often rather mundane navigating a digital menu to order a meal, designing a travel package online, making a payment via an automated phone service, etc. -yet constitute maybe the greatest number of co-creation activities, and thus overall co-created value, today.These activities typically occur away from public view and can be sites of consumer struggle, failure, loss, and feelings of inadequacy when one is unable to reap the benefits of SSTs.
An obvious cost associated with SSTs is financial, specifically when marketers charge for the privilege of the human touch.Consider Ryanair, a company who is relentless at costcutting and is unequivocal and unapologetic in its intention to impose on consumers the responsibility to use SSTs or face steep costs.From the Ryanair website: Ryanair recommends all passengers to either print their boarding pass prior to arriving at the airport, or to access their mobile boarding pass on their phone in order to save time and money at the airport.Customers that do not check-in before arriving at the airport are required to pay the Airport Check-in Fee of €/£55 (Ryanair 2023, see also The Independent 2023).This is a prime example of a 'push policy' (White, Breazeale, and Collier 2012), where customers are not explicitly coerced into adopting SSTs, but subtle or less subtle nudges are applied for them to 'work' by using SSTs over having a fullservice experience.Beyond airlines, customers in other fields (e.g., financial services), can choose between free self-service or traditional options for a fee (Zwick 2015).
SSTs come with other costs, like temporal ones (Andrews 2018;Glazer 1993).In stores customers can pay with their time by 'choosing' between the plentiful self-service lines (or, in Walmart's terms, a "customer-led self-checkout experience" [CTV 2023]) to which they are often directed, or the humanoperated checkouts that are now often less plentiful and slower with longer lines (White, Breazeale, and Collier 2012).Although evidence about the increased efficiency and speed of self-checkout options remains mixed (e.g., Andrews 2018), they become the relatively quicker option when they are added at the expense of full-service lines staffed by store clerks.As human service levels are reduced, requesting it can mean significantly longer wait times.
Another cost, and ethical question that arises from a marketplace of services increasingly operated through machines, is whether marketers should consider how their actions contribute to consumers' well-being and quality of life (e.g., Hill, Felice, and Ainscough 2007;Sirgy 2021).Although proliferating SSTs can isolate, reduce engagement with others, and increase challenges and stress for many, quality of life considerations seem largely absent from marketers' decision-making about their implementation.People generally can feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the constant demand for communication and participation (Dean 2010), which gets amplified by the everyday-ification of co-creation and the increasing spread of automation into service interactions.Suggestive of a wider set of losses being suffered by more people, co-creation, as an injunction for consumers to work, fits neatly within capital as the aim is to totally subsume labor by extending productive labor into all facets of life.Lambert 2015, in the context of proliferating SSTs and the increasing obligations they impose on people, describes the gradual creep of "shadow work" to describe how people are socialized to take on more timeconsuming consumer "work" roles.In this "middle-class serfdom" consumers' time, energies, capacities are increasingly captured by marketers for profit (Lambert 2015).
Finally, marketers often tout lower prices by way of cost savings as a benefit of more SSTs.Many such cost savings stem from the problematic large-scale elimination of employment (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014).Thus, a facet of much co-creation simply means that specific service tasks have become sufficiently deskilled for most consumers to perform them and make paid workers redundant (Ritzer 1993).And importantly (for consumers and marketers in different ways), cost savings that materialize from implementing SSTs are not all passed on to consumers (Zwick 2015), so Darmody and Zwick even those successful in navigating SSTs are likely saving less than the revenue potential of replaced labor for savvy marketers.

Choice Administration
Choicelessness, "is the inability, extreme difficulty, or the impossibility to adequately exercise choice [and] … can be understood primarily as a stark reality for many underprivileged and marginal groups" (Dholakia et al. 2021, p. 66).A significant aspect is marketers' ability to manipulate consumers' choice-making contexts and create choice sets from which consumers choose in ways that are skewed in the marketer's favor (Bilic ́2018;Darmody and Zwick 2020).Consumer choice scholars advocate for consumer autonomy and for consumers to be empowered to make unfettered choices (Schwarzkopf 2011).Frequently however, consumers are restricted in their choices and must acquiesce to using SSTs for service delivery (e.g., Cao et al. 2022).SST consumers do not have their choices limited absolutely, insomuch as they are still being offered the chance to share in the fruits of capitalist production, but when SSTs are required for use, not everyone can share in them equally (Jokisuu et al. 2016;Viswanathan and Gau 2005).
Consider the case of the Canadian national pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart, part of the Loblaw Companies Ltd, which has come under fire for its policies related to SSTs.In recent years, rolling out self-service checkouts has been a pillar of corporate strategy (CBC News 2019).Numerous news reports over several years have covered customer complaints (supported by employee statements) about consumers being "pushed" (White, Breazeale, and Collier 2012) to use selfcheckout machines, with the limited in-person lines only available for cash-paying customers (e.g., CBC News 2019, 2021).Some customer sentiments are captured in the following three statements: They're forcing me to use it and I don't think that's fair.When they basically say, 'If you don't have cash, we're not even taking you at our cashier' … that's where it started to be a bit of a line in the sand for myself.I want the option to deal with a real human being… They're trying to maximize their profits by having [customers] do the work.
These stories have captured the public imagination, based on the high number of reads and thousands of comments on the CBC website.Additionally, when one considers that Shoppers Drug Mart is the largest Canadian retail pharmacy chain, often with limited or no local competition, it further highlights how choice is being restricted when consumers are directed to SSTs.And, while Loblaws publicly claims it is not looking to remove choices but rather offer greater choice and convenience (CBC News 2019), in earnings calls it has emphasized the "efficiency initiatives" (CBC News 2021) that SSTs provide in its ongoing cost-cutting efforts (Ritzer 1993).
Other settings in which consumer choices are attenuated are when they are required to engage with automated technologies that are based on algorithmic choice-guiding techniques (Dholakia et al. 2021).To date, automation has mostly been considered in online service interactions, where consumers receive inimitable service offerings based on the personal data that they provide to machines, which are part of massive algorithmic architectures (Darmody and Zwick 2020).When choice is mediated and aided by algorithmic decision-making technologies, the consumer can receive hyper-relevant offerings, which represents "a mélange of meaningfulness, personalization, and appropriateness, with marketers needing to connect with consumers contextually and at their precise moments of need or want" (Darmody and Zwick 2020, p. 6), yet is founded on often problematic methods of continuous surveillance (Andrejevic 2019;Gekker and Hind 2020), and ultimately presents a delimited set of choices.
These algorithmic decision-making techniques are increasingly being applied to self-service delivery, where consumers' accumulated data are used for SSTs to individualize service offerings (current and future).Every choice that a consumer makes with such SSTs provides the marketer with further data to better hone individuated choice contexts (Andrejevic 2019;Darmody and Zwick 2020).Two arch surveillance capitalists operating in this space are Amazon and Alibaba.In Amazon Go stores, customers simply walk the aisles putting their choices into their bags as they go, and leave without scanning when done, with these frictionless transactions facilitated by cameras, sensors, and pre-approved access to customers' payment and other personal details.Alibaba's travel arm Fliggy have their Flyzoo test hotel, where every conceivable aspect of the hotel experience has been automated: there are no check-in counters, receptionists, or concierges; check-in is via facial recognition, as is the keycard-less room access; every room is serviced by a virtual voice assistant; while robotic arms serve at the bar and robot porters provide roomservice (CNBC 2019).Each example is as much a test case of technologies to sell as they are solely direct extensions to the corporate behemoths' retail and hospitality operations, but they are characteristic of how data management principles popularized online will increasingly come to underpin SSTs' face-to-machine transactions.Marketers will seek ways to make SSTs evermore hyper-relevant to consumers based on their personal data, while likely treating privacy, security, unfettered consumer choice, and price fairness with the same disregard as do current digital marketers.

Powerlessness and Consumer Vulnerability
In a similar vein to choicelessness is "powerlessness," where consumers feel that events are not within their control (Rucker and Galinsky 2008) regarding marketers imposing SSTs (Cao et al. 2022;Feng et al. 2019).Feelings of powerlessness can lead to resistance from consumers and result in negative attitudes toward SSTs, perceptions of poor service quality, negative attitudes toward and lower levels of satisfaction with the marketer, and an increased likelihood of switching (Reinders, Dabholkar, and Frambach 2008).In addition, powerlessness can increase consumer complaints about SSTs and result in them having unfavorable attitudes toward the marketers (Blut, Wang, and Schoefer 2016;Feng et al. 2019).Finally, when consumers perceive their powerlessness as being unfair, they show their intent to decrease future spending, and increase their negative word-of-mouth and switching intentions (White, Breazeale, and Collier 2012).However, if suitable alternative choices are not readily offered, per choice-attenuated examples like Shoppers Drug Mart, possibilities for consumer resistance are limited.
SSTs present a complicated idea, as their widespread distribution means some consumers are empowered as others are exposed to new vulnerabilities (Baker et al., 2005;Shultz and Holbrook 2009).As stated in Baker and colleagues (2005, p. 134, italics in original): Consumer vulnerability is a state of powerlessness that arises from an imbalance in marketplace interactions or from the consumption of marketing messages and products.It occurs when control is not in an individual's hands, creating a dependence on external factors (e.g., marketers) to create fairness in the marketplace.The actual vulnerability arises from the interaction of individual states, individual characteristics, and external conditions with a context where consumption goals may be hindered and the experience affects personal and social perceptions of self.
This fluid state of powerlessness takes many forms in SST transactions, and consumers can be invulnerable in some settings as they are vulnerable in others (Shultz and Holbrook 2009).Marketing system thinkers have long understood the need to critically investigate how marketing innovations impact the distribution of costs and benefits for all market actors (Klein 2008;Laczniak and Murphy 2008).This system creates distributed injustices as some consumers can get better deals by performing service work, while others cannot (Klein 2008;Laczniak and Murphy 2008).Consider how SSTs are not universally accessible.Consumers are required to learn and operate commercial technologies, direct operations, and even recover from mistakes, not unlike employees.A consumer that feels greater levels of control, competence, and efficiency than they might when interacting with a human can benefit from the switch to SSTs (e.g., Collier and Barnes 2015).Yet for many others, including consumers who are technologically averse (Blut, Wang, and Schoefer 2016), illiterate (or low literate) (Viswanathan and Gau 2005), or who have physical or visual impartments (Jokisuu et al. 2016), using SSTs can cause negative effects.As SSTs change how services are produced and distributed, consumers that fail to properly operate within strict cybernetic rules of machines (Blalack 1976) become prone to increased service failures and get levied with various higher costs.
The more SSTs become part of the fabric of service delivery, the greater the degree of responsibility gets placed on the co-creating consumer to fulfill their service obligations (Laczniak and Murphy 2008).For marketers, SSTs offer cost savings, efficiency improvements, greater customization of service offerings, and an expansion of the range of services offered.Of course, many consumers benefit from these forms of value, but most SSTs in their current state of development remain inferior to human service providers on important factors such as anticipation, flexibility and adaptation to unforeseen circumstances, and emotional intelligence (Robertson et al. 2016).Consumers can lose out as they perceive the quality of service delivery to be less when it is co-created with machines (Lee, Fairhurst, and Cho 2013) and suffer other sources of dissatisfaction such as technological flaws, a lack of human interaction and support, slowness in use or delivery, and having to navigate hard to use interface designs (e.g., Lee, Fairhurst, and Cho 2013;Meuter et al. 2000).

Service Failure Responsibilization
Despite the many setbacks and disappointments encountered by consumers when using SSTs, marketers and researchers are constantly striving to learn how they can progressively encourage consumers to use more of these technologies (e.g., Cao et al. 2022;Zhu et al. 2013).As we see from market-shaping consulting groups like McKinsey, having more SSTs is considered a net positive for consumers and retailers alike.
Gone are the days when consumers were willing to wait in longer lines so that a cashier could weigh produce or bag groceries.Instead, customers increasingly value the safety, speed, and convenience offered by self-checkout, which can reduce friction for consumers and-crucially-free up employees for other operational tasks such as stocking and ad hoc customer assistance.When properly implemented, tech-enabled self-checkout can improve in-store productivity by 6 to 12 percent by reducing the labor hours required for operation (Harris, Kuzmanovic, and Pandrangi 2022, p. 34).
The more consumers are encouraged or compelled to use SSTs, the more opportunities there are for service failure, with consumers often suffering most.When setbacks and letdowns occur in self-service delivery, oftentimes consumers assume responsibility by attributing failures to themselves (Sugathan, Ranjan, and Mulky 2017;Zhu et al. 2013).As participation levels increase (as is the case in co-creation), consumers' propensity to blame themselves for service failures also increases (Harris, Mohr, and Bernhardt 2006), with those who consider themselves less able to successfully execute tasks often selfrecriminating more (Chen 2018).Failures can also encourage consumers to work harder on the marketer's behalf by becoming even more motivated to co-create in the future as selfattributed failures mount (Sugathan, Ranjan, and Mulky 2017;Zhu et al. 2013).Sugathan, Ranjan, and Mulky (2017) propose such findings as significant managerial wins because: [T]he increase in the degree of co-creation increases internal failure attribution and reduces firm failure attribution … [so] firms will avoid the need to be solely responsible for recovery efforts and be able to draw from customer resources as well as safeguard against external attribution, negative customer emotions, and retaliatory behavior (p.72).
In this light, SSTsand forms of service delivery that increase consumer participation and encourage consumers to assume greater personal levels of responsibility (including responsibility for failures)represent a form of government insomuch as marketers look to shape consumer actions in the design, format, and rollout of SSTs (Foucault 2008;Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008).This increased responsibilization is a form of self-government in which consumers regulate and control themselves (Yngfalk and Fyrberg Yngfalk 2015), in this case, increasing self-governance through self-service.Consumers have come to internalize the logic of co-creation and seek to leverage their resources, including technical, social, and cultural competences in the provision of services (Bonsu and Darmody 2008;Campbell, O'Driscoll, and Saren 2013).It is therefore unsurprising that SSTs remain popular with marketers.Through increasing the presence of SSTs, marketers can continue to shift the locus of responsibility onto consumers to self-discipline to be good and successful consumers.

Cybernetic Administration of Consumer Life
If pushed to extreme limits, the combination of the widespread proliferation of SSTs and progressive elimination of human service provision has the potential to erect what Blalack (1976), in his classic essay on automation and dehumanization, refers to as cybernetic bureaucracy.Living in a cybernetic bureaucracy means that commercial interactions have all been converted into fully automated mechanisms and systems that are inflexible, impersonal, and impervious if not hostile to elements not accommodated by pre-set rules (Blalack 1976).Rather than act as an autonomous agent, the consumer is corralled into technological engagements on others' terms (Bilic 2018;Dholakia et al. 2021).This is akin to MacKenzie's (2005) notion of performativit[ies] of circulation, where consumers are emplaced in cybernetic loops that blur boundaries between the ability to make autonomous decisions and 'conduct of conduct' (Foucault 2008).To thrive in this cybernetic bureaucratic environment requires that the consumer subject anticipates and internalizes the rules (or more appropriately for the digital age, the code) of the machine and system and acts accordingly (Deleuze 1992).Consumers unable to configure interactions to the logic of the machine face many marketplace failures and added costs, financial and otherwise.
If we consider SSTs based on dividing consumers into those who can and those who cannot deliver their own servicesmore quickly, cheaply, efficiently, etc.we overlook the larger-scale impact of all consumers being compelled to co-create with technologies.Blalack's (1976) conclusion of his analysis of automation and technological rationalization posits that cybernetic bureaucracy must entail dehumanization on the one hand and the creation of a cyborg on the other.In other words, in a world where humans are consistently confronted with the structured rigidity of machine logic (Bassett 2007), cognitive processes become assimilated to this logic and humans become like machines to marketers (e.g., Lazzarato 2014).
In his integrative review of dehumanization, Haslam (2006) theorizes that a widespread anxiety toward computers comes from a general sense that human contact has been lost and that social relations, from personal dealings to commercial transactions, have become increasingly formatted by technology.Haslam also suggests that as computers come to increasingly mediate every aspect of our lives, computers' lack of flexibility, emotion and personal faults ends up dehumanizing human relationships (Floridi 2014).Taking this viewpoint to the extreme, if unchecked, technological progress ultimately leads to social anesthesia (McSwain, White, and Bruce 1989).In terms of the ultimate cost for consumers, the current proliferation of SSTs is perceived by many as an encroaching form of cybernetic bureaucracy.Rather than feeling rewarded by the promised or suggested potential efficiencies and process innovations that SSTs offer, many consumers perceive the growing absence of oftentimes mundane interpersonal service interactions with service providers as isolating, discouraging, and ultimately dehumanizing (Meuter et al. 2000).Some miss what once was, yet for a growing number of others, they may never experience the regular human contact and complex interactions that services once provided.

Concluding Thoughts
In this commentary we argue that in the age of self-service by compulsion, there comes a universalized injunction to co-produce.All consumers are increasingly expected to understand and maximize the value of their own accumulated human capital, which marketers ceaselessly try to have them put to use (e.g., Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008).This injunction represents a form of consumer government, in Foucault's sense of the word, that "responsibilizes" all consumers, regardless of their ability or inclination to co-create.Not everyone wants, or has the capacity, to be a constantly producing consumer.We hope to encourage empirical studies related to consumer equity and SSTs.We must better understand how marginalized or vulnerable consumers fare in situations where co-creation is compelled, as well as the effects of SSTs, and co-creation more generally, on consumer quality of life and well-being (Sirgy 2021).In studies on co-creating consumers, as well as investigating outcomes like satisfaction, speed, success, or consumers' willingness to rectify failed encounters, other factors should be considered.These include one's willingness to co-create and contextual factors, consumers' technological anxiety and its effects, and multi-dimensional examinations of the skillsets and abilities that consumers are (or are not) able to draw on in their interactions with SSTs.
Marketing practitioners are encouraged to critically interrogate the effects of co-creation technologies on various consumer groups.The trend for companies to use information technology to depopulate the customer interface and reduce the costs of managing customer relations may benefit some, but it hurts many others in ways that marketers seem unequipped or unwilling to grasp.We echo calls for more critical consideration of the social impact of new technologies (e.g., Laczniak and Murphy 2008).The transition toward an increasingly cybernetic marketplace that universalizes co-creation is well under way.It behooves us as marketing theorists to understand and investigate the implications of this transition on all market actors, not just its supposed winners.

I
hate these new blasted self-checkouts, because they talk to you and I can't figure out what they're saying [hard of hearing customer].