These aren't really much of an improvement in efficiency though - self-checkout kiosks for stores have been around since at least the early 2000s, and they're s

These aren't really much of an improvement in efficiency though - self-checkout kiosks for stores have been around since at least the early 2000s, and they're still much slower than minimum-wage cashiers with a little experience (maybe Amazon will finally change this, but the tech my local grocery has is definitely as bad as the kiosk I worked alongside in 2003). It takes me much longer to order using a kiosk at a McDonald's than it takes me to tell a cashier what I want. I remember using a touch-screen kiosk at a Subway back in 2005, and my local subway 15 years later still doesn't have them. This ultra rise in productivity just isn't actually happening despite what conversations on hacker news (and before that, digg, and before that, slashdot) keep insisting on.