How to Move Your Company’s Work Onto Your Customers (A Satirical Playbook)

Eran Goldman-Malka · September 17, 2026

Strategy Boards Leadership

SATIRE. NOT CAREER ADVICE. NOT A HOW-TO. NOT AN INVITATION.

Think of the following as a satirical guide on how to slowly ruin a business. If an executive actually implements this, they aren’t ‘efficient’ - they are the reason your Net Promoter Score (that critical measure of customer loyalty)is a disaster. This is corporate comedy, but the real joke is how uncomfortably familiar it might sound to your own operations.

Congratulations. You have discovered the highest art in modern management: do not eliminate the work. Change the owner.

The customer will do it. For free. And if you time it right, you will be in the next job before anyone finishes counting the avocados.

The Case Study You Already Lived

You are at the self-checkout, avocado in one hand, dignity in the other, searching for the SKU of the fruit. Sometimes you find “avocado.” Sometimes you summon the attendant, who is currently performing exorcisms on five other machines. And some citizens (never you) experience a sudden botanical confusion and select onion.

A coincidence, surely. Rather like those banking “errors” that somehow never run in the customer’s favour.

Payroll still goes out at month-end. You, the unpaid cashier, are not on it. The supermarket did not automate the scan. It outsourced the scan to the shopper. The work is identical. The P&L is prettier. A new internal job appears for the person who must reconcile how the company sold a mountain of onions, almost no avocados, and a quantity of inventory that appears to have achieved sentience.

Management hears one sentence: we took cost out of labour.

One owner. One hero. One bonus.

The rest - theft, rage, abandoned trolleys, staff who would rather drive a bus - belongs to “the market.”

Now the playbook.

The Action List (Do Not Do This)

1. Redefine the job until only the basic part is visible

“Cashier” becomes “person who types a barcode.” Once that is the job, of course the customer can do it. Do not mention judgment, speed with a full trolley, theft deterrence, or the human who notices that the elderly customer is about to pay twice. Those are not in the process map. Therefore they are not real.

2. Launch it as a convenience, then quietly make it the only door

Self-checkout as an option is civilisation. Self-checkout as a moral duty, with three open staffed lanes and a priest’s lighting on the machines, is a transfer of labour. Celebrate “choice.” Staff the choice like a trap.

3. Move the work, keep the praise

Your scorecard should contain payroll hours and transactions per labour hour. It should not contain shrinkage, time-to-rage, or “customers who now shop at the place that still has humans.” If a metric cannot make you look like a genius this quarter, it is a ‘lagging indicator’ and can live in someone else’s appendix.

4. Invent a new internal team for the mess you created

Loss prevention. “Guest experience hosts.” A taskforce on onion/avocado variance. This is not a cost. This is investment in controls. Put it in a different budget so your saving remains visible.

5. When customers steal, moralise

Do not say “we built a system that pays people to mis-scan.” Say “society has a theft problem.” Then hire a consultant. Then print a poster. The poster is cheaper than a cashier and photographs better for LinkedIn.

6. Time the career

This is the professional flourish.

Pick a role where:

the saving prints now
the damage sprays across three departments
the invoice arrives after you have left

Build a reputation as an operator. Collect the bonus. Collect the promotion. When someone in finance finally models the shrinkage against the payroll “win,” call your favourite headhunter and explain that you are experiencing a sense of completion and are ready for a new challenge.

Preferably at a competitor, where you can run the same trick and call it a “fail proof playbook.”

7. If challenged, request a business case for courtesy

“Show me the ROI of not humiliating the customer.” Watch them fail to produce a cell. You have won. You always win this round. That is the problem.

8. Never be the owner of the fog

Credit is a person. Harm is a climate. Be the person.

This Joke Is Not Funny in a Boardroom

If you felt a slight thrill of recognition, that is not because you are a monster. It is because the organisation already pays for this behaviour and calls it discipline.

Concentrated benefit. Dispersed harm. Immediate applause. Delayed evidence. A single hero. A committee for the wreckage.

The serious version of this argument is simple, and it does not require avocados. Before you approve an efficiency programme, ask whether the work disappeared or merely changed address (to the customer, to another function, or to next year). If the address changed, you did not save. You invoiced someone who does not sit on the committee.

And if your culture would treat the list above as a slightly aggressive career plan rather than a satire, you do not have a culture problem. You have a measurement problem.

Still satire. Still not advice. If you need that in writing for your lawyer, here it is again: do not do this.

Want the non-satirical version: a board conversation about savings that are actually transfers of pain? That is my actual work. Contact me.