The trend away from personal salespeople to self-service in many retail outlets has caused firms to:

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ARCO customers are an independent bunch these days. First, they pump their own gas, at pumps that have been designed to make the process as fast as possible. Then, if they are hungry, they walk over to the adjacent AM/PM convenience store and serve themselves a hamburger kept fresh on a special warmer since it was made several hours before. Maybe they pick up a quart of milk to take home. Only then do they deal with another human being - and only to pay for whatever it is they bought. Gas pumped, dinner eaten, shopping done - all in minutes.

Shoe customers at Mervyn's, a chain of 219 moderately priced department stores owned by the Dayton Hudson Corporation, are getting in and out pretty fast, too. Mervyn's recently converted its women's shoe department to all self-service. It keeps boxes of shoes in all sizes right out on the floor, with a sample shoe displayed on top. If a customer likes the shoe, she can look for her own size, try it on and pay for it without ever dealing with a salesperson. Waiting time: Next to nil.

What makes these examples so interesting is that in neither case is money the primary reason that consumers are willing to serve themselves.

The prices the ARCO customers pay for the hamburgers and milk are comparable to what most fast-food outlets or convenience stores charge, and the gasoline is no more than a few cents lower - if that - than what full-service stations command. And at Mervyn's, the move to self-service coincided with a storewide push to stock better merchandise, so not only weren't prices discounted, they actually went up. Still, sales in the shoe department rose by a double-digit percentage last year. One reason, suggested William P. Condaxis, divisional merchandise manager, is that ''customers no longer get frustrated standing on the floor waiting for a salesclerk.''

Indeed, in survey after survey, consumers have indicated that speed and convenience top price on any list of the pluses of self-service. Many consumers are so convinced that self-service is the height of good service that they are willing to pay extra for the privilege - witness the people who pay fees for using teller machines in New York, or who pay extra to tap into data systems through their own computers.

Clearly, such consumers believe that the only way to get things done quickly, pleasantly - and right - is to do it themselves.

''People want the personal element removed from transactions, the same way they want cancer removed from cigarettes,'' said John O'Shaughnessy, a professor at the Columbia Business School.

The result, said John Deighton, an assistant marketing professor at the University of Chicago, is that ''there is a lot of unbundling of service and product going on, as consumers become willing conspirators in the assumption of more responsibilities.''

Plenty of forces are driving the trend. Consumers have grown far more comfortable with the technology of self-service as they have grown impatient with what is increasingly perceived as shoddy or rude service. For industry, this is a godsend, in that labor shortages are making service-oriented people harder to find, and more expensive to hire.

Moreover, industry has gotten far more sophisticated in promoting its wares. Today's corporations have learned to present self-service as an added fillip to a product, not a way of cutting corners.

''Business people learned long ago that it is cheaper, and may be more effective for the consumer, to substitute capital for labor,'' said Noel Capon, another business professor at Columbia. ''What they are learning now is their marketing. They've learned to say they are giving extra value.''

Whatever its roots, the do-it-yourself movement has meant replacing highly trained salespeople with lower-paid clerks and order-takers at shoe stores and a host of other sellers of low-tech consumer goods. For electronic information companies and others that offer services or products conducive to a high degree of computerization, it may soon mean cutting the overall number of employees. New Vistas

But the ramifications of self-service go well beyond personnel costs. The trend has opened whole new vistas for American industry. For ARCO, it has meant entering an industry - food - that it would not have touched in a full-service environment. (Today there are AM/PM minimarkets, as ARCO calls them, at 770 of ARCO's 1,700 branded stations, and the company says it will franchise many more in the future.) Self-service has also enabled gas stations, retail stores, even electronic information companies, to handle a much higher volume of customers, thus increasing revenue per location. It has opened new markets for once-site-bound companies - florists, for example, who could not afford retail space at airports are placing expensive floral arrangements in vending machines at arrivals terminals.

And it has helped businesses differentiate themselves. Salad bars and dessert bars, for example, are viewed by restaurants more as a way to draw diners than as a labor-saving measure. ''A good salad bar, properly maintained, is very labor intensive, but restaurants are putting them in because customers view choosing what they want as something valuable,'' said Malcolm Knapp, head of a New York restaurant consulting firm that bears his name.

No one is sounding a death knell for service people yet, of course. Stores that carry high-ticket items are likely to keep stressing customer service. And stores selling complex products - computer stores, for example - are likely to keep specialists on hand to help customers who might be confused by technology.

But look at a few statistics on some of the older self-service products and there is little question which direction the trend is moving. In 1974, only 9 percent of gasoline sold in this country came from self-service pumps; today, nearly 80 percent is pumped by the customers. Ten years ago there were 9,275 automated teller machines; last year, 67,000. And a growing number of banking customers are finding even a trip to the teller machine too tedious - unless they need cash, many are transferring funds between accounts and checking their balances by Touch-Tone telephone.

The list of successful self-service options is growing longer each day. Eastern, Continental and a few other airlines have supplemented ticketing agents with ticketing machines on some routes. Hotel guests increasingly are reviewing their bills on closed-circuit television and then paying them with an automatic charge to their credit cards. Rental car customers, armed with computer-generated rental agreements, are going straight from airport terminals to their waiting cars, without saying so much as hello to counter personnel.

On the corporate side, Dun & Bradstreet, TRW, Knight-Ridder and several other information companies are successfully offering new services that let customers with personal computers hook into the information company's data base and extract the information they want. The services save the companies the time and expense of packaging the data, yet the full savings are rarely, if ever, passed along to the customers.

''When you go to an electronic teller machine you are effectively working for your bank, and you are working for us when you retrieve your own data,'' said George J. Feeney, senior vice president for advanced technology at the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, which sells financial and marketing information. ''That means the cost of delivering products is going down. But the customer gets the product quicker and more efficiently, so prices are not necessarily dropping.''

In fact, for most products and services - restaurant salad bars may be a rare exception - the economics of self-serve sit squarely in the seller's court. Although some self-service products are sold at a lower price than their full-service equivalents, rarely does the price discount reflect a company's full savings.

A good example is mail-order services. New England Business Services Inc., for one, sells business forms by catalogue. It competes directly with local print shops for customers. New England's forms are generally a bit cheaper than the ones sold at the shops, but Richard H. Rhoads, the company's president, readily admits that the lower prices do not fully represent his lower costs. Thus, his profit margins regularly top 10 percent, in an industry where margins are generally at least two or three points lower. ''Our profit margins are high because we don't have to have salesmen,'' he said.

Even for businesses like gasoline retailing, where labor is primarily unskilled and thus less costly than a trained salesperson, a move to self-service can mean considerable savings. Even at the minimum wage, an employee's salary is $26.80 for an eight-hour day; when benefits are added in, the cost is generally double that. And in a decade of increasing worker scarcity, few companies get away with minimum wages.

Customers, thus, represent the latest source of cheap labor. They work hard and they are fast. And since they are happy to help themselves, companies feel less and less pressure to reward them with lower prices.

The gap between full-service and self-service prices on gasoline, for example, keeps narrowing, a fact that ARCO, which switched entirely to self-service in the early 1980's, concedes. ''Our original intention was to lower prices, but we discovered that a significant percentage of our customers were pumping their own gas because they liked the speed,'' said Edward G. Reilly, ARCO's senior vice president for marketing.

The whole gasoline industry has caught on to that, notes Marc C. Particelli, a consumer products specialist at Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc., the consulting firm. ''The gasoline retailers for years believed that self-service was price based, and they really took the margins down,'' he said. ''But then they discovered that consumers really liked self-service, thought it was faster and cleaner. So they've all brought the prices back up, and lo and behold, there's been no shift back to full service.''

The lesson for industry, according to Mr. Particelli: ''Prices are based on willingness to pay, so if the consumer doesn't value the difference between full-service and self-service, there is no need to drop prices.'' A Shortage of Workers

Even if a self-service environment inevitably meant lower prices, industry would probably be going this route now anyway. For one thing, the labor shortage has grown critical in many areas. The civilian unemployment rate was 5 percent in March, the lowest since December 1973. Most companies cannot be as choosy as they might like about the type of help they hire - which means that customers increasingly must deal with surly or ill-trained workers. Thus, companies and customers alike readily embrace selling and service methods that bypass human interaction.

Growing public comfort with technology has pushed self-service along, too. Home banking, for example, seemed a great idea in 1983, when a group of banks formed Video Financial Service to offer banking via home computer. But it never caught on.

''The technology back then was tedious, expensive and generally difficult to use,'' recalled John F. Fisher, senior vice president for marketing at the Banc One Corporation, the Columbus, Ohio, bank holding company that led the consortium. ''The concept was just ahead of the technology.''

Now, home banking is failing for the opposite reason. Touch-Tone telephones and personal computers are ubiquitous these days, and technophobes are fewer and farther between. But in this environment, the banks that push home banking are not offering enough, according to Mr. Fisher and other banking experts. Because customers must still go to the bank or the teller machine to get cash and to make deposits, home banking - which allows customers to view their canceled checks as well as transfer funds around - is not enough of a time saver to warrant the expense of installing a system.

For business people, the desire for customized products delivered with lightning speed is often greater than it is for consumers. That is why TRW Inc.'s Target Marketing Services, which sells mailing lists for direct marketing, is trying out a service in which business customers can test their own criteria.

Working through a personal computer and a modem, the customer could ask TRW's computer how many names it would come up with if it was restricted, say, to people who own two credit cards and have never been more than 90 days delinquent on bills. Customers could test numerous combinations of criteria before ordering an actual mailing list.

If the self-service approach catches on, TRW will probably be able to eliminate at least 30 jobs, or 10 percent of the department's work force. Yet TRW has no intention of reducing prices for customers who do it themselves; in fact, the company is considering charging extra. 'Quick Turnaround'

''Customers will buy it on the basis of the quick turnaround,'' said Dennis W. Benner, Target Marketing's vice president. ''If they submit it to us, they might have to wait days to get an analysis of each set of criteria. When they do it themselves, they can sit down at the computer and not get up until the problem is solved.''

Needless to say, in plugging the new system to customers, TRW makes no mention of its plans to save on labor costs. That type of new marketing savvy seems to be sweeping industry. Today's corporations recognize that a self-service product presented as a convenience often will fly, even at a high price, while the same product, if presented as a cost-cutting measure, may be dead in the water.

Citibank, for one, learned that the hard way. In the early 1980's, Citibank concluded that automatic teller machines would be an economical alternative to tellers in the long run. But Citibank executives did not imagine that customers might actually prefer the machines to tellers. So they reserved teller services for people with more than $5,000 in their accounts, and relegated modest depositors to the machines.

Because Citibank positioned users of the machines as second-class customers, the small depositors balked. Amid a flood of bad publicity and charges of class discrimination, the bank cancelled the policy in 1983.

But look at teller machines today. With much fanfare, Citibank and its banking colleagues have persuaded well-heeled and modest savers alike that the devices represent freedom from banker's hours and from long lines at the teller's window. Many banks have banded together in such interstate networks as NYCE to make it even easier for their clients to tap into their cash reserves without coming anywhere near their primary bank. And, most banks say, use of the machines is increasing. Today, 70 percent of Citibank's retail transactions are handled electronically. Nothing Saved?

Citibank and other bankers insist that electronic teller machines are expensive to install and maintain that they really are not money-savers. However, most business experts say that, had electronic teller technology not caught on, banks would have had to extend their normal working hours to service customers who simply cannot get to the bank between 9 and 3. And that would mean an untold number of added tellers and other costs.

''Banks have huge administrative costs, and without mechanical devices those costs would be going through the roof,'' said Dick R. Wittink, professor of marketing and quantitative methods at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management. Even a spokesman for Citibank conceded: ''We couldn't have the number of locations and serve the same number of people if we didn't have the machines.''

With so many benefits, and so few drawbacks, self-service clearly is here to stay. But chances are it will always coexist with services that cater to customers in a personal way.

''New industries and technologies will stick with full-service, but any industry that becomes mature will unbundle,'' said Professor Deighton of the University of Chicago. ''It will try to segment consumers into those who want barebones product, and those willing to pay premium prices for service.'' In other words, the fate of self-service rests squarely in the customers' hands.