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I think these exist entirely to squeeze labor costs, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. First, allowing grocery stores to operate with smaller staffs means w

by vec 9y ago

I think these exist entirely to squeeze labor costs, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. First, allowing grocery stores to operate with smaller staffs means we get more grocery stores. The small, cramped grocery store that recently opened within walking distance of my apartment probably wouldn't be able to operate if it had to provide not just pay, but parking and work space for another dozen full-time employees. That's a food desert in a dense urban core that doesn't exist anymore and a smaller, but still substantial, group of available jobs that otherwise wouldn't be there. Second, if I were to approach you and tell you I had two plans for a machine. Both are about evenly efficient, but one requires two people to stand at the machine doing boring, repetitive, mindless drudge work for hours on end. I, for one, definitely prefer the one that doesn't require human suffering to operate. Automated checkouts eliminate jobs, but specifically they eliminate shitty jobs that we should probably feel bad about asking anyone to do in the first place.

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
I agree with you in that I would hate a job as a supermarket cashier. However, I know people who really like it. What you and I think of as boring drudge work, they see as an opportunity to be social and chat with people all day long. People vary.
jccc 9y ago
How much of that cost reduction goes into building new stores? How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer? I would guess nowhere near enough to support the notion that this cost reduction leads to new stores, or that new stores would appear in food deserts. I don't want self-checkouts to disappear. I just don't want to be lied to about their purpose, and in particular they ought to make it worth my while to use them by offering at least some tiny discount. The fact that they don't tells us all we need to know.
- vec 9y ago
  > How much of that cost reduction goes into building new stores? Probably almost none of it, at least not directly. > How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer? Probably a lot of them. Places where it's profitable to run a grocery store already have grocery stores. Food deserts exist in the first place because they're not profitable places to put grocery services for one reason or another. Lowering the fixed cost of running a grocery store means that some places that previously could only support N grocers can now support N+1, so that's where the opportunity is. This is no less true when N=0.
  - jccc 9y ago
    Oh good, so poor people in the ghetto would have to slog their way through checkout themselves more than we privileged people would, shopping as we do in more profitable stores. Otherwise if you mean that all of a retailer's stores should have self-checkout in equal measure, then we're back to square one: The same places are as less profitable as the more profitable ones. Why impose this deeply unwanted downgrade on your already profitable stores? I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. I'm just saying that it's dishonest for a retailer to claim self-checkout is about anything other than the obvious. If providing groceries to food deserts were really a motive for these cost savings, there is one thing they could do to promote self-checkout that would absolutely work where all of those other efforts in the article don't: Offer the tiniest token discount for doing it yourself. But they don't, and there's the answer.
    - vec 9y ago
      > I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. No, but I am :-D. Pretty obviously the motive for these cost savings is _cost savings_. But that extra profit has to go somewhere. Sometimes it'll go into lining the pockets of whoever owns the store, which kinda sucks. Go advocate for higher capital gains taxes. I'll be happy to help. Past a certain point, though, stores that just pocket the extra profit won't be around for long. Someone who's willing to make less money as a grocer will come along and start a cheaper store across the street. Most of that savings has to go to somewhere. Either there's more checkout lines or a better selection or cheaper goods across the board or whatever. Sometimes a store will be profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. At this point, the savings are mostly priced in. We are already benefiting massively from this automation. Everyone hates these automated checkout terminals, but I doubt many people really want to have their neighborhood grocery store close and all the rest in their town get more expensive.
      - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
        How much money do they really save when you include initial capital costs - six figures for four to six lanes - and maintenance/updates? What's the projected lifetime? I'm also sure we're going to have even faster RFID readers within a decade at the outside, so I'm wondering what the savings will be over that period. I suspect speed and throughput is at least as much of a motivation as expense.
smacktoward 9y ago
> I, for one, definitely prefer the one that doesn't require human suffering to operate In the US, grocery worker jobs are some of the only blue-collar jobs left that still provide a middle-class income with benefits. There are lots of people for whom getting one of these jobs is something to aspire towards, not some terrible fate to dread. This has a lot to do with the fact that grocery workers are better unionized that most -- 19% of workers in the retail grocery industry are union members, compared to less than 7% in the private sector overall (source: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Communications/1509_Union_Density2015_RGB.pdf https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/P...). Which is one of the reasons for the push towards self-checkout; it pushes those numbers down, which reduces the bargaining power the union can wield on behalf of those workers who the machines don't replace.
- vec 9y ago
  If some mad gazillionaire decided to start paying people to hit their own thumbs with hammers, I'm sure she could find a price point where a lot of people decided they wanted to do that. If she kept doing it for long enough, self-hammer-mangler might even become an honorable profession to which a lot of people aspired. That doesn't imply that we, as a society, want people to be spending their time and energy hitting themselves with hammers. As a society, we spent the last few centuries having the problem of providing a comfortable standard of living to ourselves and our peers and the problem of getting shitty drudgework done be two problems that largely solved each other. We are well on our way to actually solving the shitty drudgework problem. That means we badly need to find a new solution to the comfortable standard of living problem, but deciding not to fix the other, fixable problem doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy.

by vec 9y ago

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago

I agree with you in that I would hate a job as a supermarket cashier. However, I know people who really like it. What you and I think of as boring drudge work, they see as an opportunity to be social and chat with people all day long. People vary.

jccc 9y ago

How much of that cost reduction goes into building new stores? How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer? I would guess nowhere near enough to support the notion that this cost reduction leads to new stores, or that new stores would appear in food deserts. I don't want self-checkouts to disappear. I just don't want to be lied to about their purpose, and in particular they ought to make it worth my while to use them by offering at least some tiny discount. The fact that they don't tells us all we need to know.

vec 9y ago
> How much of that cost reduction goes into building new stores? Probably almost none of it, at least not directly. > How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer? Probably a lot of them. Places where it's profitable to run a grocery store already have grocery stores. Food deserts exist in the first place because they're not profitable places to put grocery services for one reason or another. Lowering the fixed cost of running a grocery store means that some places that previously could only support N grocers can now support N+1, so that's where the opportunity is. This is no less true when N=0.
- jccc 9y ago
  Oh good, so poor people in the ghetto would have to slog their way through checkout themselves more than we privileged people would, shopping as we do in more profitable stores. Otherwise if you mean that all of a retailer's stores should have self-checkout in equal measure, then we're back to square one: The same places are as less profitable as the more profitable ones. Why impose this deeply unwanted downgrade on your already profitable stores? I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. I'm just saying that it's dishonest for a retailer to claim self-checkout is about anything other than the obvious. If providing groceries to food deserts were really a motive for these cost savings, there is one thing they could do to promote self-checkout that would absolutely work where all of those other efforts in the article don't: Offer the tiniest token discount for doing it yourself. But they don't, and there's the answer.
  - vec 9y ago
    > I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. No, but I am :-D. Pretty obviously the motive for these cost savings is _cost savings_. But that extra profit has to go somewhere. Sometimes it'll go into lining the pockets of whoever owns the store, which kinda sucks. Go advocate for higher capital gains taxes. I'll be happy to help. Past a certain point, though, stores that just pocket the extra profit won't be around for long. Someone who's willing to make less money as a grocer will come along and start a cheaper store across the street. Most of that savings has to go to somewhere. Either there's more checkout lines or a better selection or cheaper goods across the board or whatever. Sometimes a store will be profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. At this point, the savings are mostly priced in. We are already benefiting massively from this automation. Everyone hates these automated checkout terminals, but I doubt many people really want to have their neighborhood grocery store close and all the rest in their town get more expensive.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      How much money do they really save when you include initial capital costs - six figures for four to six lanes - and maintenance/updates? What's the projected lifetime? I'm also sure we're going to have even faster RFID readers within a decade at the outside, so I'm wondering what the savings will be over that period. I suspect speed and throughput is at least as much of a motivation as expense.

smacktoward 9y ago

> I, for one, definitely prefer the one that doesn't require human suffering to operate In the US, grocery worker jobs are some of the only blue-collar jobs left that still provide a middle-class income with benefits. There are lots of people for whom getting one of these jobs is something to aspire towards, not some terrible fate to dread. This has a lot to do with the fact that grocery workers are better unionized that most -- 19% of workers in the retail grocery industry are union members, compared to less than 7% in the private sector overall (source: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Communications/1509_Union_Density2015_RGB.pdf https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/P...). Which is one of the reasons for the push towards self-checkout; it pushes those numbers down, which reduces the bargaining power the union can wield on behalf of those workers who the machines don't replace.

vec 9y ago
If some mad gazillionaire decided to start paying people to hit their own thumbs with hammers, I'm sure she could find a price point where a lot of people decided they wanted to do that. If she kept doing it for long enough, self-hammer-mangler might even become an honorable profession to which a lot of people aspired. That doesn't imply that we, as a society, want people to be spending their time and energy hitting themselves with hammers. As a society, we spent the last few centuries having the problem of providing a comfortable standard of living to ourselves and our peers and the problem of getting shitty drudgework done be two problems that largely solved each other. We are well on our way to actually solving the shitty drudgework problem. That means we badly need to find a new solution to the comfortable standard of living problem, but deciding not to fix the other, fixable problem doesn't sound like a viable long-term strategy.