8 ms·

What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. It's the same thing with sending parcels, where I

by rwmj 4mo ago

What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. It's the same thing with sending parcels, where I must now sit on my computer at home filling in a complicated online form and printing out my own labels. This takes me like 30 minutes, but saves time and money for the Post Office (not for me!) There's no downside for the company here, especially when they are monopolies so we have no choice.

devindotcom 4mo ago
Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.
- ralferoo 4mo ago
  My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result. Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage. Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
  - ValentineC 4mo ago
    > Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - fmajid 4mo ago
    And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
      Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up. I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised. I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers. It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
      - Eisenstein 4mo ago
        > I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
- orangecat 4mo ago
  Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot. (I find ways to make it worth my while..) If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
  - saulpw 4mo ago
    Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
    - margalabargala 4mo ago
      The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
      - jordwest 4mo ago
        It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
    - senordevnyc 4mo ago
      The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
      - saulpw 4mo ago
        I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
        4mo ago
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- mhb 4mo ago
  > the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
  - milesvp 4mo ago
    You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
    - mhb 4mo ago
      So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?
- gib444 4mo ago
  > Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
  - fmajid 4mo ago
    Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
    - gib444 4mo ago
      It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower [0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/financial-performance/five-year-record https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
- _jackdk_ 4mo ago
  I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.
  - gblargg 4mo ago
    So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
    - _jackdk_ 4mo ago
      Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override. Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
      - gblargg 4mo ago
        Sorry, I was including time waiting in line at a cashier checkout. If there's no line, then it's faster if you've got a lot of items.
- rmunn 4mo ago
  Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
- gblargg 4mo ago
  I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me. Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
  - carlosjobim 4mo ago
    Or you can go to a good supermarket with plenty of cashiers and no lines instead.
    - Telaneo 4mo ago
      I'm yet to see one. There have always been lines at supermarkets, even when I was a kid. It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
      - carlosjobim 4mo ago
        If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
        Telaneo 4mo ago
        > If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts. Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human. It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
- mrweasel 4mo ago
  I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
  - Telaneo 4mo ago
    > A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
    - mrweasel 4mo ago
      Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes. It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
      - Telaneo 4mo ago
        Understandable in your situation. > It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
- EliRivers 4mo ago
  (I find ways to make it worth my while..) I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.
jen20 4mo ago
I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago
  Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.
  - mhb 4mo ago
    Uh, the queues at the post office have never exactly been fast.
  - jen20 4mo ago
    Unless they're rebuilt the post office (they haven't, unless they went with "70s retro" as the design aesthetic!), every counter is normally manned.
- rwmj 4mo ago
  You still have to wait in line even with the shipping label because they have to scan it into the system.
darth_avocado 4mo ago
> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.
- mhb 4mo ago
  > It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with. It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?
  - darth_avocado 4mo ago
    When your grocery store gets a self checkout, do you see your grocery bills go down? What ends up happening is that the grocery store makes more profit, the other stores notice and they too get rid of self checkouts. Your grocery bill remains the same, you are more inconvenienced but all of their profits go up.
    - mhb 4mo ago
      Yeah sure. That's the logic that elects Mamdani. Maybe you're confused because instead of going down, prices increased less than they otherwise would have. Economics happens on the margins where the reality is that store A reduces its costs and lowers its prices to compete with Store B. Or are you paying $100 for a jar of peanut butter?
      - darth_avocado 4mo ago
        Ehh. Corporate profits are at all time highs. The idea that somehow if corporations replace workers or pay them less, will somehow ensure we see smaller price increases as consumers is the fallacy that’s brought us here in the first place. Trying to make this a political discussion is pointless. In-n-out hires a large staff and pays people well, and somehow their hamburger is still $3 and top quality. The same time when every other fast food chain is charging restaurant prices. Costco hires plenty of staff and pays them well, their prices are some of the lowest in the country. Meanwhile Walmart, target etc. are always understaffed and somehow still more expensive. We were told that $20 minimum wage would make our McDonalds burgers to be $100 (like your hyperbole about peanut butter). Our burgers are just marginally more expensive than the rest of the country. I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together even when they didn’t need to post pandemic. Makes me really skeptical of the claim about companies lowering prices to compete with each other.
epolanski 4mo ago
I never make the mistake to go to places with qr codes twice in my life. I can live with giant tablets in fast foods, but there's no chance I go to qr code restaurants ever. As the article points out, it's super inconvenient and absolutely breaks the mood for the night and cheapens and ruins the experience. Even worse one of my favourite steak houses has removed phone booking and implemented a super slow and inconvenient form. Another place that will never get my money again.
- fmajid 4mo ago
  No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century. I had a Korean colleague who remarked how backward the US is, you have to do everything over the phone, and you lose signal in elevators.
  - gwern 4mo ago
    > No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century. Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.
godelski 4mo ago
> that money is saved for the company Sure, but you're not taking into account how much it costs the company. This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free" Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer) There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people
- Joker_vD 4mo ago
  > Nothing is really "free". There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.
  - godelski 4mo ago
    > There are economies of scale though Which is explicitly what my comment is about
- greengreengrass 4mo ago
  Or the supermarkets who replaced checkouts with customer self-service under the guise of convenience, and now subject us to more surveillance capitalism to try to protect their losses given people don’t feel so bad about stealing from a machine than a human.
DanHulton 4mo ago
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly. The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves. Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue. Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.
- senordevnyc 4mo ago
  Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain. Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.
  - venzaspa 4mo ago
    Isn't it named after the hypothetical scenario about a doorman? The doorman fallacy isn't even specifically aimed at what is more profitable, its just saying that there are softer roles that aren't well defined that aren't replicated when the role is automated away.
    - senordevnyc 4mo ago
      That fact doesn’t make it a fallacy. The fallacy part is the idea that the people choosing to automate that job are just stupid and ignorant, and don’t understand what the job really is. Which I’m sure is true for some automation, but doormen are a terrible example.
      - DanHulton 4mo ago
cyclotron3k 4mo ago
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.

by rwmj 4mo ago

devindotcom 4mo ago

Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.

ralferoo 4mo ago
My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result. Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage. Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
- ValentineC 4mo ago
  > Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done. Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- fmajid 4mo ago
  And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up. I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised. I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers. It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
    - Eisenstein 4mo ago
      > I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
orangecat 4mo ago
Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot. (I find ways to make it worth my while..) If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
- saulpw 4mo ago
  Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
  - margalabargala 4mo ago
    The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
    - jordwest 4mo ago
      It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
    - saulpw 4mo ago
      I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
      - 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
mhb 4mo ago
> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
- milesvp 4mo ago
  You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
  - mhb 4mo ago
    So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?
gib444 4mo ago
> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
- fmajid 4mo ago
  Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
  - gib444 4mo ago
    It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower [0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/financial-performance/five-year-record https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
satvikpendem 4mo ago
I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
_jackdk_ 4mo ago
I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.
- gblargg 4mo ago
  So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
  - _jackdk_ 4mo ago
    Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override. Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
    - gblargg 4mo ago
      Sorry, I was including time waiting in line at a cashier checkout. If there's no line, then it's faster if you've got a lot of items.
rmunn 4mo ago
Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
gblargg 4mo ago
I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
Telaneo 4mo ago
I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me. Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
- carlosjobim 4mo ago
  Or you can go to a good supermarket with plenty of cashiers and no lines instead.
  - Telaneo 4mo ago
    I'm yet to see one. There have always been lines at supermarkets, even when I was a kid. It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
    - carlosjobim 4mo ago
      If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
      - Telaneo 4mo ago
        > If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas. There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts. Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human. It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
mrweasel 4mo ago
I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  > A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting". This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
  - mrweasel 4mo ago
    Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes. It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
    - Telaneo 4mo ago
      Understandable in your situation. > It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
EliRivers 4mo ago
(I find ways to make it worth my while..) I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.

jen20 4mo ago

I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.

xboxnolifes 4mo ago
Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.
- mhb 4mo ago
  Uh, the queues at the post office have never exactly been fast.
- jen20 4mo ago
  Unless they're rebuilt the post office (they haven't, unless they went with "70s retro" as the design aesthetic!), every counter is normally manned.
rwmj 4mo ago
You still have to wait in line even with the shipping label because they have to scan it into the system.

darth_avocado 4mo ago

> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.

mhb 4mo ago
> It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with. It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?
- darth_avocado 4mo ago
  When your grocery store gets a self checkout, do you see your grocery bills go down? What ends up happening is that the grocery store makes more profit, the other stores notice and they too get rid of self checkouts. Your grocery bill remains the same, you are more inconvenienced but all of their profits go up.
  - mhb 4mo ago
    Yeah sure. That's the logic that elects Mamdani. Maybe you're confused because instead of going down, prices increased less than they otherwise would have. Economics happens on the margins where the reality is that store A reduces its costs and lowers its prices to compete with Store B. Or are you paying $100 for a jar of peanut butter?
    - darth_avocado 4mo ago
      Ehh. Corporate profits are at all time highs. The idea that somehow if corporations replace workers or pay them less, will somehow ensure we see smaller price increases as consumers is the fallacy that’s brought us here in the first place. Trying to make this a political discussion is pointless. In-n-out hires a large staff and pays people well, and somehow their hamburger is still $3 and top quality. The same time when every other fast food chain is charging restaurant prices. Costco hires plenty of staff and pays them well, their prices are some of the lowest in the country. Meanwhile Walmart, target etc. are always understaffed and somehow still more expensive. We were told that $20 minimum wage would make our McDonalds burgers to be $100 (like your hyperbole about peanut butter). Our burgers are just marginally more expensive than the rest of the country. I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together even when they didn’t need to post pandemic. Makes me really skeptical of the claim about companies lowering prices to compete with each other.

epolanski 4mo ago

I never make the mistake to go to places with qr codes twice in my life. I can live with giant tablets in fast foods, but there's no chance I go to qr code restaurants ever. As the article points out, it's super inconvenient and absolutely breaks the mood for the night and cheapens and ruins the experience. Even worse one of my favourite steak houses has removed phone booking and implemented a super slow and inconvenient form. Another place that will never get my money again.

fmajid 4mo ago
No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century. I had a Korean colleague who remarked how backward the US is, you have to do everything over the phone, and you lose signal in elevators.
- gwern 4mo ago
  > No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century. Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.

godelski 4mo ago

> that money is saved for the company Sure, but you're not taking into account how much it costs the company. This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free" Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer) There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people

Joker_vD 4mo ago
> Nothing is really "free". There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.
- godelski 4mo ago
  > There are economies of scale though Which is explicitly what my comment is about
greengreengrass 4mo ago
Or the supermarkets who replaced checkouts with customer self-service under the guise of convenience, and now subject us to more surveillance capitalism to try to protect their losses given people don’t feel so bad about stealing from a machine than a human.

DanHulton 4mo ago

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly. The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves. Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue. Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.

senordevnyc 4mo ago
Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain. Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.
- venzaspa 4mo ago
  Isn't it named after the hypothetical scenario about a doorman? The doorman fallacy isn't even specifically aimed at what is more profitable, its just saying that there are softer roles that aren't well defined that aren't replicated when the role is automated away.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    That fact doesn’t make it a fallacy. The fallacy part is the idea that the people choosing to automate that job are just stupid and ignorant, and don’t understand what the job really is. Which I’m sure is true for some automation, but doormen are a terrible example.
    - DanHulton 4mo ago

cyclotron3k 4mo ago

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.