# The Self-Service Kiosk: A Case Study in Corporate Speedrunning Customer Service Into a Wall

Here’s the thing about “self-service” initiatives: they’re always sold as liberation but deployed as subtraction. A big-box store manager, operating under what I can only assume was a corporate memo titled “Friction Is Revenue,” decided that when customers ask where something is, the correct response is to gesture vaguely at a kiosk and vanish. This is not customer service optimization. This is outsourcing your job to a machine and hoping nobody notices the difference. Spoiler: they notice immediately.

The malicious compliance is so clean it almost hurts. Employees, freed from the burden of actually knowing where anything is, simply point. One commenter nailed it: “Sir, rather than posting on reddit, may I show you to the AI kiosk?” This is the sound of someone who has watched their role get deleted in real time and decided to be very, very literal about it. The kiosk is the answer now. The kiosk is always the answer. The kiosk knows no mercy.

But here’s where it gets interesting: the customers just… left. Multiple commenters reported the same thing—if you get pointed at a screen instead of a human, you go to another store. The root cause analysis writes itself. Corporate wanted to reduce labor costs by steering people toward self-checkout experiences (which, let’s be clear, are just theft-enablement booths with a motivational speaker). What they got instead was the retail equivalent of a speedrun strat gone wrong: optimized so hard for one metric that the whole system collapsed. The store manager rolled back the policy the next day. I assume the kiosk is still there, blinking quietly in the break room, having learned nothing.

The funniest part? Nobody’s ever actually seen one of these kiosks work. One commenter pointed out they’ve “never known a store to have a map, let alone a kiosk.” Which means corporate deployed a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, using technology that doesn’t exist, to fix a customer experience that was already fine. It’s like watching someone install a mod that breaks the game while claiming it’s a patch.

The real lesson buried in here isn’t about kiosks or compliance or even the slow liquefaction of retail. It’s that when you try to optimize away the human part of “customer service,” you don’t get efficiency—you get the customer walking out the door. The kiosk was supposed to free up staff. Instead it freed up customers. Corporate won the battle and speedran straight through a loss condition. GG, no re.