This is an old entry that I hadn't yet completed, but I remembered it after finishing Lynn Truss's book Talk to the Hand.
Before I came to school I'm not sure that I had ever seen a self-checkout lane in a grocery store, and I know I'd never used one. Over the last three years, I've gradually overcome my disdain/technophobia and occasionally use it. When the technology decides to cooperate it can be a lot faster than waiting for service in the other lanes. What an advantage for the antisocial! I fumble with an impersonal machine, and after a couple of minutes, pick up my groceries at the other end of the conveyor belt--often they're already bagged as if by magic. All this and no requirement to be polite or to tolerate the small talk of the nosy woman or the glares of the grubby teenager. Ah, the efficiency and isolation of the modern world, but I think I may have reached my limit when I walked into the library (P-ville), made a few selections, and took them to the circulation desk. One of four librarians behind the desk informed me that my ILL requests had arrived, pointed to a shelf several feet away, and "suggested" that I use the self-checkout machine. Maybe it's just because as a child I spent most of my free time at the library and my hometown librarians would never dream of importing a technology that would deprive them of the opportunity to scrutinize everyone's choice of reading material  or to share recommendations of their own, but something very important has been lost here, sacrificed to modern "convenience."
Truss complains that the advent of technology reduces the consumer. Rather than being served by those we pay, we essentially are co-opted into being employees. For those few minutes in the self-checkout lane, I become an employee of Grocery Store, Inc., untrained though I am. I scan the groceries, man the register, and sometimes bag my own purchases. Am I helping myself or working for them?
And what about those hassles with the phony friendliness of automated phone systems: "In order that we may more effectively process our calls, please have the following information ready. . . ." - as if you exist to make their lives easier while they keep you on hold for an hour. Or, when in order to reach the person you need, you are forced to navigate a dozen different menus, and somehow you end up exactly where you started without the information for which you called. In the past, much of the run-around might have been avoided by the presence of an actual person answering the phones, or at least you'd have someone to whom to complain. . . .
An interesting argument. Granted, this situation was somewhat different. I did not directly pay the library for its services, and, not being a resident, was not indirectly supporting them by my taxes. So perhaps I have little right to complain about my stint as unpaid employee. But we're also losing the idea that we're part of a community of people - that we have to interact with one another and work together and see one another face-to-face--that we get to learn from one another and share and grow together. All the things for which good manners are so crucial. Politeness is rarely convenient, but it is right.
So don't expect to see me in the self-checkout lane, expressing gratitude and wishing a good day to the machine for whom I work Maybe it's time at last to put my anti-social ways behind me. 
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