Comment by devindotcom
1 day ago
Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.
My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result.
Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage.
Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
> you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
> Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up.
I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised.
I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers.
It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
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I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me.
Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot.
(I find ways to make it worth my while..)
If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
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The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
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It's people being dishonest that makes self checkout slower, with it having to verify the weight of everything. Some stores are higher trust and lack this, which makes it so much faster and smoother.
> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer
How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?
(I find ways to make it worth my while..)
I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.
I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
> A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes.
It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
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I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.
So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer.
Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower
[0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...