Recently Tokyo railway station installed electronic scanning equipment on customer facing work stations - check out BBC. These gadgets catch the smiles of workers as they are communicating with customers buying tickets or asking for directions. If the worker is not smiling adequately - ie if the smile is not wide enough or teeth do not show up to a desired degree, she or he gets reported. Throughout the day the scan keeps reporting the smile score - I think the desired level is between 75% and 90% full smile as defined by preset parameters.
My first reaction is that I want to buy the shares of the company manufacturing the smile scan devices, as I can see the universality of this application. In whatever country you are, there would be dozens of institutions where thousands of workers need to be monitored for their smile quotient. It's a multi-billion dollar business in the making. On second thought, I am already dumping the shares. Probably workers will find several innovative ways of cursing the customers with a 90% smile. In that case smile scans will be useless. So the business plan flattens out.
Honestly, I find the stressed out air hostesses and cashiers more homely and predictable - smiling ones will leave me confused and unstable for a few moments!
For some reason the image of the Joker from Batman: The Dark Knight, loomed once I read this piece, like there would be permanent cut out smile, how eerie!
ReplyDelete