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So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning and bag

So called “shadow work” is becoming more prevalent. When you choose to self checkout at a grocery store you’re essentially doing work for free (scanning and bagging your own groceries) in place of a paid cashier and bagger.

peteretep 8y ago
One would assume that in a sufficiently competitive market (for examples, certainly in the UK, supermarkets), this then gets passed on in terms of price cuts.
- phillipcarter 8y ago
  > One would assume I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US markets, at least.
  - ddxxdd 8y ago
    Businesses are generally more competitive than people realize. The average person believes that corporate profits are typically in the 36% range, which is 5X higher than what reality shows: http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high-part-ii/ http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average...
    - xyzzy123 8y ago
      Partly this is because profits are taxed, so it makes sense to shift profit into some other accounting bucket like capital expenditure / growth, offshore ip etc.
  - mruts 8y ago
    There is a much much stronger historical precedent of businesses competing rather than colluding. Price fixing isn’t a Nash Equilibrium, and therefore, isn’t a stable state. The market will ruthlessly push prices on goods to their lowest profitable price by means of the marginal consumer. While price fixing obviously happens, it usually only happens in markets with a small number of producers. And even then, it will inevitably collapse. Look around, goods are very competitive nowadays. Computers are competitively priced, all goods on Amazon, nyc $1 pizza, food, gasoline, cars, clothes, etc. Very few businesses have the fat margins you claim are the norm. And the businesses that do are usually not producing goods, but renting services: telecoms, advertising, etc.
  - bookofjoe 8y ago
    Concur. I've always been puzzled why self-checkout isn't, say 1% cheaper, considering how much labor costs in supermarkets and razor-thin profit margins.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      This seems clear to me: customers aren't remotely rational, and will generally complain about economically fair systems[1] that they feel are "taking away" things they're entitled to. I can't count how many times I heard people complain about baggage fees when they were introduced, and no one ever had a response to "I never fly with baggage, why should I subsidize your propensity to overpack?". Even people who knew way better and would default to an efficient market assumption in every other possible scenario would assume that it was a naked cash grab, the benefits of which accrued entirely to the airlines. The same is true of complaints about Spirit Airlines: how DARE they give me the voluntary option of a low-priced flight without a bunch of (useless, costly) amenities that I feel entitled to? I can go on and on: credit card fees at liquor stores, etc etc. [1] In particular, rewarding consumers who reduce costs by passing on the cost savings.
- driverdan 8y ago
  It gets passed on in the form of faster checkouts and shorter lines, resulting in less wasted time.
  - owenmarshall 8y ago
    “Please place the item in the bag.” “Please remove the last scanned item from the bag and scan it before placing it in the bag.” “Please wait, help is on the way.”
    - dceddia 8y ago
      Every damn time. I really wonder whether that system actually helps prevent theft, or if it was originally put in place because stores suspected that theft would be a problem, and we're just stuck with it now. Plus, in the couple stores I frequent, there's always an employee standing at the ready to clear out the errors. Which, I imagine, would go a long way toward reducing theft on its own. Either way, they seem to be universally bad. I can only hope a store tries to buck the trend by turning off the weight check and finds that it causes no problems. Maybe if that happens, the other would follow suit.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
        I know over the years at least some of the systems have either gotten better or more lenient. With Walmart specifically I haven't gotten "Unexpected item in bagging area" in a couple of years at least. It's probably a combination of an improved system on Walmart's part and learning how to place items in the bagging area appropriately on my part. There's obviously a long way to go to make these kind of systems ideal (the UX of entering in produce items is probably the most common frustration for me nowadays) but the all-too-common refrain that I hear that these systems are basically unusable without some employee to constantly babysit them is false, at least at the stores I frequent that have them.
    - driverdan 8y ago
      When was the last time you used self checkout? I haven't seen this problem in years. Older systems had this problem but it has been fixed for a while.
kukx 8y ago
Upside is that the queues are usually much shorter and you do not waste as much time waiting in line. Also, as noted in another comment, it may lead to lower prices.
- bencoveney 8y ago
  Additionally - You can keep headphones on and keep listening to a podcast without being rude to the cashier - You can scan and bag stuff in an order that makes sense (e.g. so you don't get eggs at the bottom) at your own pace
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  As much as I like self-checkout, I find the opposite is true, and it gets worse as the number of items increases. Most people are generally pretty slow scanning items as they struggle an extra second or two to find the barcode. It's great for express checkouts, but not for people that have a cart full of items.
wingerlang 8y ago
In some countries these jobs (baggers) does not even exist.
esoterica 8y ago
When you choose to drive your own car you’re doing work for free in place of a paid driver. When you choose to do your own dishes you’re doing work for free in place of a paid housekeeper. Etc.
- randomacct3847 8y ago
  Not a good take. In the supermarket example you do free work to save a company money on labor. You don’t save a corporate entity anything when you drive instead of take an Uber or wash dishes instead of hiring a cleaner.
  - esoterica 8y ago
    When you drive to work you’re saving your company money by providing free labor since they don’t have to hire someone to drive you to work.
    - randomacct3847 8y ago
      Bad take. If youre an average worker and don’t drive yourself to work and have no alternative form of transportation a company is not going to pony up and pay for a private driver for you. How is that remotely analagous to the buzzfeed situation or self checkout
      - esoterica 8y ago
        If you’re a cheap shopper and you want to go to the grocery store with the cheapest prices, the store is not going to pony up and pay for a bagger for you because that would drive their costs up. See the analogy now?
        randomacct3847 8y ago
        No, you can choose to not do work and not shop at a grocery store that doesn’t have a cashier (but then you’re taking about the Amazon Go stores where its a true win win because you just walk out) If you choose to not drive to a job that you signed up for knowing that your only option to get to work was driving, then you’ll just not earn income. The company won’t otherwise pay to transport you there.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
I think that's true, but, in some ways "work" is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, long ago, before the invention of the department store or grocery store, the customer wasn't allowed to just roam around in the aisles grabbing products. A clerk had to go and fetch the inventory from the shelves for the customer. Shoppers today do a tremendous amount of shadow work for the grocery store but think little of it. We actually like it.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  One big "mind blown" moment to me was reading about Piggly Wiggly launching the "self-service supermarket" concept. As someone living firmly in the modern world, it was hard to imagine it working any other way than it does now (outside of a detatched-from-reality western movie "General Store") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History > At the time of its founding, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them. This created a greater cost, and therefore higher prices. Piggly Wiggly introduced the innovation of allowing customers to go through the store, gathering their own goods, thus cutting costs and lowering prices. > Customers at Piggly Wiggly entered the store through a turnstile and walked through four aisles to view the store’s 605 items sold in packages and organized into departments. The customers selected merchandise as they continued through the maze to the cashier. Instantly, packaging and brand recognition became important to companies and consumers.[5]
tigershark 8y ago
If it gets me out of the shop more quickly it’s a no brainer! But I’m probably an outsider given than north of 95% of my grocery shopping is happily done online.
wutbrodo 8y ago
This is only "shadow work" relative to the status quo, and there's no principled reason to privilege the status quo over the alternative. You could just as easily say that tying your shoes is "shadow work" because you at one point could have paid a butler to do it for you (and still can, I suppose). This is true of any of a million things that you do for yourself that you could pay a taskrabbit to do instead. So the claim that "shadow work" is becoming more prevalent doesn't make a ton of sense, especially when you net it out with the types of labor that are becoming newly salable (through taskrabbit and all the other forms of the gig economy).

peteretep 8y ago

One would assume that in a sufficiently competitive market (for examples, certainly in the UK, supermarkets), this then gets passed on in terms of price cuts.

phillipcarter 8y ago
> One would assume I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US markets, at least.
- ddxxdd 8y ago
  Businesses are generally more competitive than people realize. The average person believes that corporate profits are typically in the 36% range, which is 5X higher than what reality shows: http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high-part-ii/ http://www.aei.org/publication/the-public-thinks-the-average...
  - xyzzy123 8y ago
    Partly this is because profits are taxed, so it makes sense to shift profit into some other accounting bucket like capital expenditure / growth, offshore ip etc.
- mruts 8y ago
  There is a much much stronger historical precedent of businesses competing rather than colluding. Price fixing isn’t a Nash Equilibrium, and therefore, isn’t a stable state. The market will ruthlessly push prices on goods to their lowest profitable price by means of the marginal consumer. While price fixing obviously happens, it usually only happens in markets with a small number of producers. And even then, it will inevitably collapse. Look around, goods are very competitive nowadays. Computers are competitively priced, all goods on Amazon, nyc $1 pizza, food, gasoline, cars, clothes, etc. Very few businesses have the fat margins you claim are the norm. And the businesses that do are usually not producing goods, but renting services: telecoms, advertising, etc.
- bookofjoe 8y ago
  Concur. I've always been puzzled why self-checkout isn't, say 1% cheaper, considering how much labor costs in supermarkets and razor-thin profit margins.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    This seems clear to me: customers aren't remotely rational, and will generally complain about economically fair systems[1] that they feel are "taking away" things they're entitled to. I can't count how many times I heard people complain about baggage fees when they were introduced, and no one ever had a response to "I never fly with baggage, why should I subsidize your propensity to overpack?". Even people who knew way better and would default to an efficient market assumption in every other possible scenario would assume that it was a naked cash grab, the benefits of which accrued entirely to the airlines. The same is true of complaints about Spirit Airlines: how DARE they give me the voluntary option of a low-priced flight without a bunch of (useless, costly) amenities that I feel entitled to? I can go on and on: credit card fees at liquor stores, etc etc. [1] In particular, rewarding consumers who reduce costs by passing on the cost savings.
driverdan 8y ago
It gets passed on in the form of faster checkouts and shorter lines, resulting in less wasted time.
- owenmarshall 8y ago
  “Please place the item in the bag.” “Please remove the last scanned item from the bag and scan it before placing it in the bag.” “Please wait, help is on the way.”
  - dceddia 8y ago
    Every damn time. I really wonder whether that system actually helps prevent theft, or if it was originally put in place because stores suspected that theft would be a problem, and we're just stuck with it now. Plus, in the couple stores I frequent, there's always an employee standing at the ready to clear out the errors. Which, I imagine, would go a long way toward reducing theft on its own. Either way, they seem to be universally bad. I can only hope a store tries to buck the trend by turning off the weight check and finds that it causes no problems. Maybe if that happens, the other would follow suit.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
      I know over the years at least some of the systems have either gotten better or more lenient. With Walmart specifically I haven't gotten "Unexpected item in bagging area" in a couple of years at least. It's probably a combination of an improved system on Walmart's part and learning how to place items in the bagging area appropriately on my part. There's obviously a long way to go to make these kind of systems ideal (the UX of entering in produce items is probably the most common frustration for me nowadays) but the all-too-common refrain that I hear that these systems are basically unusable without some employee to constantly babysit them is false, at least at the stores I frequent that have them.
  - driverdan 8y ago
    When was the last time you used self checkout? I haven't seen this problem in years. Older systems had this problem but it has been fixed for a while.

kukx 8y ago

Upside is that the queues are usually much shorter and you do not waste as much time waiting in line. Also, as noted in another comment, it may lead to lower prices.

bencoveney 8y ago
Additionally - You can keep headphones on and keep listening to a podcast without being rude to the cashier - You can scan and bag stuff in an order that makes sense (e.g. so you don't get eggs at the bottom) at your own pace
Dirlewanger 8y ago
As much as I like self-checkout, I find the opposite is true, and it gets worse as the number of items increases. Most people are generally pretty slow scanning items as they struggle an extra second or two to find the barcode. It's great for express checkouts, but not for people that have a cart full of items.

wingerlang 8y ago

In some countries these jobs (baggers) does not even exist.

esoterica 8y ago

When you choose to drive your own car you’re doing work for free in place of a paid driver. When you choose to do your own dishes you’re doing work for free in place of a paid housekeeper. Etc.

randomacct3847 8y ago
Not a good take. In the supermarket example you do free work to save a company money on labor. You don’t save a corporate entity anything when you drive instead of take an Uber or wash dishes instead of hiring a cleaner.
- esoterica 8y ago
  When you drive to work you’re saving your company money by providing free labor since they don’t have to hire someone to drive you to work.
  - randomacct3847 8y ago
    Bad take. If youre an average worker and don’t drive yourself to work and have no alternative form of transportation a company is not going to pony up and pay for a private driver for you. How is that remotely analagous to the buzzfeed situation or self checkout
    - esoterica 8y ago
      If you’re a cheap shopper and you want to go to the grocery store with the cheapest prices, the store is not going to pony up and pay for a bagger for you because that would drive their costs up. See the analogy now?
      - randomacct3847 8y ago
        No, you can choose to not do work and not shop at a grocery store that doesn’t have a cashier (but then you’re taking about the Amazon Go stores where its a true win win because you just walk out) If you choose to not drive to a job that you signed up for knowing that your only option to get to work was driving, then you’ll just not earn income. The company won’t otherwise pay to transport you there.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

I think that's true, but, in some ways "work" is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, long ago, before the invention of the department store or grocery store, the customer wasn't allowed to just roam around in the aisles grabbing products. A clerk had to go and fetch the inventory from the shelves for the customer. Shoppers today do a tremendous amount of shadow work for the grocery store but think little of it. We actually like it.

kalleboo 8y ago
One big "mind blown" moment to me was reading about Piggly Wiggly launching the "self-service supermarket" concept. As someone living firmly in the modern world, it was hard to imagine it working any other way than it does now (outside of a detatched-from-reality western movie "General Store") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History > At the time of its founding, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them. This created a greater cost, and therefore higher prices. Piggly Wiggly introduced the innovation of allowing customers to go through the store, gathering their own goods, thus cutting costs and lowering prices. > Customers at Piggly Wiggly entered the store through a turnstile and walked through four aisles to view the store’s 605 items sold in packages and organized into departments. The customers selected merchandise as they continued through the maze to the cashier. Instantly, packaging and brand recognition became important to companies and consumers.[5]

tigershark 8y ago

If it gets me out of the shop more quickly it’s a no brainer! But I’m probably an outsider given than north of 95% of my grocery shopping is happily done online.

wutbrodo 8y ago

This is only "shadow work" relative to the status quo, and there's no principled reason to privilege the status quo over the alternative. You could just as easily say that tying your shoes is "shadow work" because you at one point could have paid a butler to do it for you (and still can, I suppose). This is true of any of a million things that you do for yourself that you could pay a taskrabbit to do instead. So the claim that "shadow work" is becoming more prevalent doesn't make a ton of sense, especially when you net it out with the types of labor that are becoming newly salable (through taskrabbit and all the other forms of the gig economy).