I was checking out some groceries today, and the person next to me was clearly doing something the machine didn't like.
"Please scan the item before putting it in the bagging area".
Over and over again. I started thinking about what an entirely bogus thing "self-checkout" is. It seems to have exactly zero benefits to the consumer. No bagger, no help if you're missing a price sticker, not even ample room to put your groceries while you scan. You're left with exactly one square foot of space to do this job.
Is it making groceries cheaper? After all now they don't have to staff as many cashiers now. Nope! Groceries are higher than they've ever been! All that delicious margin gets sent straight to our benefactors at the Kroger corporation. Where would we be without them!
Not to mention the thing is calling you a thief every five seconds. The ones by me even film you and if they feel you're swiping something, it will show a slow motion video of you in the act and it tells you to correct your mistake.
So it's work that I have to do. That nobody is getting paid for. And that is taking videos of your face and your behaviors. And it's constantly announcing that you're a bread thief to everyone in the store.
And for what? To increase unemployment of course! It's one of those things I can't believe collective society has taken sitting down. It's one of the most egregious examples of pure corporate greed at the expense of the consumer experience, all the while cutting swaths of entry level jobs.
Nah, fam. I'm getting that 10% veteran's discount.
All stores have at least some cashiers. At least, all the ones I ever go to.
And I'm going to need a source about those self-checkout stores being cheaper, because I sure haven't seen that.
We haven’t seen a drop in prices, as inflation is way up, thanks to the Orange Chimpanzee. Yet, a store with 100% employees and 0% automation will always be more expensive than a store with 30% employees and 70% automation- that’s the reason humans invent machines…in the end machines and robots are always cheaper than humans. Those profits will not be passed on 100% to consumers, but parts will be, to draw more people into the store.
That is completely false. Safeway is 25-40% more expensive for basic items like limes, onions and tomatoes compared to the Mexican market right across the street.
The Mexican market always has 2 butchers, 1-2 cashiers and 1-2 people stocking items. Safeway maybe has 50% more staff for a store that takes up like 10x the amount of space once you add in the parking lot.
Economies of scale would say Safeway should be able to obliterate the smaller store in price but that has never been the case in the 6 years I've lived here. They do have more items and longer hours (3 extra hours in the evening with a skeleton crew), but at the prices they demand, you are better off going to the Mexican, Asian and Indian markets while accounting for gas and wear and tear on a car and still have a better experience and overall cost.
Large corporations are just syphons of local money into offshore accounts at this point.
What has that to do with automated cash tellers?
Really, though, got any data on that? Because what's to stop a store from passing 0% of that onto consumers and thus increasing their profits?
It’s from my close business interactions directly with the managers of these stores. I did business with them, areas of brand and category management, POS, etc.