For those of you who have never been here, the Mast Store is the NC mountains version of a Vermont general store. It sells a wide range of goods in an atmosphere reminiscent of the 1940s or 1950s. It is intended to appeal to customers who long for what they view as simpler and better times. It is a wild success, and therefore, a tourist attraction.
The latest ads for the Mast Store boast that it has no self-checkout lines. That is the perfect advertising slogan for our times. Why? Because, in the age of AI, service from an actual human being will become the ultimate luxury good. The rest of us will have to settle for a world populated by unfeeling and inflexible machines and bots.
You don’t have to be a reactionary to recoil from that sort of consumer experience.