Comment by mhb

You're the one who started talking about specific examples and I agree that that's irrelevant since different companies decide how to allocate the money they save by reducing labor costs. Which is actually a refutation of your general assertion that labor cost savings don't constrain prices.

Your argument is based on the conspiratorial belief that "corporations" are a monolith conspiring to allocate the savings from self checkout. You have not explained why each of them is not incentivized to use that savings to reduce costs to take more business from their competitors. Is your answer that the businesses are all colluding? You have also not explained why they are constrained at all in the amount they can raise prices. The drip theory makes no sense. This is all basic economics.