ANDY KESSLER: The You-Do Economy: Self-service may seem inconvenient, but it’s a new frontier of individualism.

Inside View: Columnist Andy Kessler speculates on issues including earnings at Apple, AI at Google, weight loss drugs including Ozempic, the rise of the humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus, and arguably the biggest question of all: Is Snoop Dogg overexposed? Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press/Chris Pizzello/AP

It started slowly. We dial our own phone numbers instead of an operator. We pump our own gasoline (except in New Jersey). With pensions phasing out, most of us plan for our own retirement and trade our own stocks. I call it the You Do Economy.

Technology, which eats people, replacing low-end jobs, has turned this trend into a runaway train. We use self-checkout lines at grocery stores. Airlines prefer if we check in ourselves and either show or print our own boarding passes. Airline kiosks spit out baggage tags that often take a doctorate to figure out how to attach. Hotels want us to check in and out ourselves (though I always forget to print out the bill so I can expense it). Need customer service? Forget it. Read the FAQ. Or go watch a video on YouTube. Else we’re on hold for 45 minutes, minimum.

We are almost forced to buy clothes and shoes online. Physical stores don’t stock the quantity or variety of Amazon and other sellers. Then, of course, we have to haul ourselves to Whole Foods, Staples or UPS with our returns—lugging with us five boxes of uncomfortable sneakers.

We swipe our own credit card to pay—cash is almost dead. Even worse, restaurants don’t bother with menus (remember when Covid spread via paper?). Instead, we scan QR codes and squint at menus on our phones. We’re asked to tip at counter-service restaurants.

Is that it? Heck no. People used to rely on editors to fact-check or amend the record. Now on X and most recently Facebook, we get “community notes,” which are corrections done by, you guessed it, you and me! Artificial intelligence could do the fact checking, but, no, it hallucinates so bad we’re forced to question everything it comes up with.

We have to install our own updates, and we’re even subject to buggy beta software, so we have to find all the problems instead of quality-assurance teams doing the job. We install a dozen streaming services instead of the old cable feed. Changing shows means almost acrobatic precision presses on our remote.

We do our own taxes, even though the Internal Revenue Service has virtually all our financial information already. We need to be our own health advocates. All this takes more time, and time is money. It’s unpaid work for all of us.

If we abolished the Income Tax, or replaced it with a flat tax or the Fair Tax, that would help with the tax issue. As for the other stuff, some of it brings more choice, but some of it is just a way of exporting costs to customers.