Man, I opened up a can of worms on my FB page this morning simply by opining that there’s nothing grievous or detrimental about self checkout lines in supermarkets.
My exact FB post is as follows:
“I’ll never understand why some people equate self checkout bagging at grocery stores with performing manual labor. Like, they think it’s the equivalent to balancing on a plank over a pit of boiling oil while performing particle astrophysics.
It’s not.
Go to the grocery store, pick out your sundries, place in cart, push cart to checkout, scan barcodes, bag, wheel cart to car, load car, return cart to stall, and go home.
This is not a Herculean task.
“But it’s taking away jobs! People need jobs!”
Okay, fine. Walmart, for example, employs millions of people who all have assigned duties. Having X amount of self checkout registers isn’t going to cripple the economy. Having customers scan and bag their own items will, in fact, create more openings for employees and will allow them to concentrate on other aspects of the store as opposed to scanning milk, eggs, and Vagi-Clean for the general public. And if there is, say, a malfunction or a query at the self checkout area, there will always be (surprise, surprise) an employee to assist said customers who may need an item unlocked, opened, or helped with.
Also, if you’re too lazy to scan & bag your own shit or if you think that shopping is laborious, then be glad you live in the age of online ordering where employees will pick and bag your items and will bring them outside to you at the curb. That’s called the creation of a job. A job they’re hired to do to make your life that much easier, since so many people are harping about how self checkout takes away a job. Hell, if not Walmart curbside then one can use Instacart or any other smartphone app to hire someone else to shop for them. You’ll pay extra for the convenience, but at least you won’t have to break your back scanning a barcode.
That’s why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest humans on the planet; because he capitalized of the laziness of people who use the Internet to shop for, literally, everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, in my earnest opinion. That’s one of the perks of living in the 21st Century. One has every right to opine about the different aspects of marketing, but I still see no major transgression happening with bagging your own groceries.”
So, who agrees or disagrees? Is this killing jobs? Does this make me a communist? Is this an unforgivable offense?
Self checkouts suck when there aren't enough open and u have either a bunch of slow old people trying to figure out the scanner and moving like molasses while they're scanning and bagging their stuff or people that are by themselves with carts piling over that spend 15 min going back and forth between scanning and bagging.
Yeah I'm with Raptor. I've no issue with them. Do they really take away a good amount of jobs? I've never seen a grocery store that didn't offer cashiers and baggers in addition to self checkout.
Hmm, it's a drag if it does affect jobs in such a profound way though. Still, it's a matter of convenience for people. I don't think jobs should exist just so people have jobs. Jobs suck.
Self checkout stations are basically replacing the "8 items or less" checkout line.
Which is great because it's always faster.
But...…for larger grocery amounts (typical family grocery orders)...its never quick to use the self checkout aisle. It's always quicker to use the typical cashier/scanner aisles. It's much efficient.
I use them when available and they're usually limited to a certain amount of items (eg 15 or less). So a person doing a full shopping cart is going to have to use the standard checkout.
Checkers and baggers are going away like the dodo and tollbooth operators though. I forget which store, but they're testing "smart carts", which track what you put inside and then you pay via credit card or smartphone app at the cart before exiting the store. No contact with a store employee at all.
Give it 5-10 years and these smart carts will be ubiquitous.
Seriously though I find it weird that people complain about the self-service lanes costing jobs when most of the same people didn't care that those jobs only provided substandard living wages and told people in them to get better ones anyways.
I also think we'll have to move unto a Universal wage system at some point anyways when there are more people then sustainable jobs to be worked.
People who say "it allows supermarkets to move the staff to other areas of the store" are idiots. They don't do that. They cut the hours available to the department. They don't necessarily make anyone redundant. They just don't employ the same number of hours back in after someone leaves so a 39 hour job may be cut to a 25 hour one. It's called natural wastage.
__________________ Sweating on the streets of Woking
Powerful forces are investing billions of dollars into killing the cashier. That said I don't know why people would be giving Matt shit for it.
1. The phasing out of cashiers may be inevitable but it's going to take literally decades to sweep across the entire country.
2. It's not like cashiers are the only people under the gun. The same tech companies gunning for them are also doing everything they can to **** over commercial drivers, pilots, mechanics, receptionists/secretaries, warehouse workers etc.
__________________
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
I don't see anything wrong with self check outs per se. I think if you think that places like Walmart will invest the savings into having their employees do other jobs, rather than just cutting jobs and pocketing more profits that's pretty unrealistic. And I don't see why your stance would be considered the communist stance, it just sounds like you are accepting the logic of capitalism.
I don't think self-checkout kiosks are going to remove cashiers ever. They are too inefficient. It's always faster to go through a cashier kiosk when you have a ton of groceries. Too many variables can cause slowdowns within a self-checkout.
As Tzeentch points out, it would be the Amazon pick up and walkout checkout system that will kill self-checkout kiosks.
But I wouldn't be amiss to say that I sometimes prefer an actual human to sell me something rather than a LCD screen...though I do enjoy those menu kiosks at McDonalds.
If all jobs are to be taken over by automation, then what exactly are these robots going to be making? If no-one has a job then no-one can afford to buy these goods and services. At least that's my train of thought.
__________________ Then lets head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch
The economy is a made up thing. A lot of jobs exist simply because people need jobs or they starve. It would be so nice to evaluate which jobs actually need to exist, and use the rest of humanity for something else. Culture or earth preservation or space exploration or something. Some noble goal. It's all a made up cycle right now.
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Jan 27th, 2021 05:08 PM
