I've wondered about this myself. It's not just grocery scanning-- my parents used to get a bunch of bills in the mail every month, and send out a bunch of check

I've wondered about this myself. It's not just grocery scanning-- my parents used to get a bunch of bills in the mail every month, and send out a bunch of checks to pay them. It's stunning to think about how many people were needed at every step of that pipeline to make the whole thing work. All of that's automated now, and you can find similar things in many industries. That should have freed up lots of people to handle the special cases that fall through the cracks of the automation, but they're nowhere to be found.