With these sorts of things, I think people often lose sight of how cheap human workers can be. Automating a unionized factory, where the workers get a good sala

With these sorts of things, I think people often lose sight of how cheap human workers can be. Automating a unionized factory, where the workers get a good salary and benefits, saves a lot of money. Automating away a $8/hr job by a system whose savings is lost as soon as someone takes advantage of it and steals a toothbrush, I'm not as sure. Some fancy cart that has a built in scale and scanning mechanism to work as the self-checkout lanes do would help somewhat with theft issues, but would also be expensive, prone to breakage, etc. Why not just get a teenager or other low wage worker. Sadly, we have plenty of the latter.