By the time you make it to check-out, you’ve already given the grocery store management “free labor” by walking through the store and pulling your own items. Piggly-Wiggly was the first grocery store to push that task off onto their customers, in the 1930’s. Before that, you’d go to the counter and present the clerk with a list of what you wanted, like Sam Drucker’s store in the old show Petticoat Junction. :)
Self-service grocery stores like Piggly-Wiggly could trim costs over the old model, and by passing those savings on to their customers, became the new standard business model.
Interesting - I'm 81 and neither my wife or I have ever seen that, so one wonders if was only in the South, at first.
passing those savings on to their customers
A foreign concept to those pushing the self-checkouts. Everything is bottom-line oriented these days and anything saved goes into the corporate pocket. Sometimes they use the lame excuse, "It will keep prices from rising." but since you don't have access to the internals, you have to take their word for it. Yeah, right.
Funny that, Amazon is rolling out a grocery delivery service.
Stores know that the purchaser will make decisions to buy based on instant decisions.
I refuse to use Amazon Fresh whee I just give them my list and they deliver what I want.
I want to go to the store and BROWSE. The browsing part is fun and I can decide to buy cookies or a pie depending on which looks better. I want to buy fresh cherries if they look incredible. No lists for me!