Posted on 03/01/2020 12:16:21 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd choice and the bureaucrat responded that it was a jobs program. “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal,” Friedman said. “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
Friedman’s absurd proposal illustrates the absurdity of make-work bias—the belief that conserving labor makes us poorer. Make-work bias was particularly popular during the Industrial Revolution, when legions of new machines upended the old way of doing things. No one was more famously upset than the textile workers of the early 19th century—Luddites—who railed against the automatic loom, the “job-killing” machines of their day.
Modern Day Luddites
We in the Information Age have our own Luddites. Among their ranks are Las Vegas culinary workers trying to hold back AI servers and bartenders and teamsters opposing self-driving vehicles and delivery robots. Luddites and their sympathizers heap a particularly large amount of criticism on self-checkouts, probably because their ubiquity makes them an obvious target.
Their apprehension is understandable. The proliferation of self-checkouts touches our daily lives so completely that it’s hard to imagine cashiers not losing their jobs or suffering smaller paychecks. Self-checkouts threaten cashiers as surely as excavators threatened shovel manufacturers. It is no surprise that protests erupted after a French supermarket used self-checkouts to get around labor laws or that the Oregon AFL-CIO backed a petition which limits the number of self-checkouts to two per store. Every supplier hates competition.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
I’ll take the self check lane anytime (unless a cashier is cute - increasingly rare).
“Waiting in line is its own form of labor.”
I’ve performed this sort of “labor” on numerous occasions. For instance, being stuck in the express checkout with a six-pack of beer (CA does not allow alcohol purchases in self-checkout) behind someone who didn’t read the “15 items or fewer” sign.
He has a point, but when I have a bunch of groceries, I wanna just unload them on the conveyor and pay. If I wanted to do all the work and scan and bag them, I woulda applied for a job.
About 60% of my curses are in Italian and forty are in English when I use a self-checkout at the CVS. They have two people over there just to fix everything that goes wrong.
They usually have one person at these self-checkout lanes in case of problems. I always ask em which one of these fine, upstanding “employees” won the “Employee of the Month” award last month?
Or, “do I get a discount for checking myself out?”
Staffed checkout is more absurd than digging a canal with spoons. Staffed checkout is akin to digging a canal by covering it with dirt.
There will always be people in our society who can’t do much more than checkout-style labor. I mean no insult by that! They could just be victims of circumstances. And checkout-style labor is honorable labor. It’s just that not everyone has the opportunity - or the ability - to become a doctor or a skilled craftsman.
So here’s where I have a problem with the author. Where do those people go when checkouts and such are fully automated?
If I have a choice, I choose self checkout. I can get done much quicker than a cashier and its not even my job to do so.
[I think self-checkout-only stores can go screw themselves]
Business is all about making profit. Labor is an expense to business. Yet without labor, there are no consumers. Not for nothing is economics called”the dismal science.”
My husband always uses the self check out claiming it is faster but he always leaves fuming because the stupid thing did not work right and you have to wait for the poor clerk to come and fix it.
I always use the cashier and by pass the whole thing.
The exception is if I have just a couple of items, then I might risk the self checkout.
I’ll start using self checkout when the cost of my groceries goes down due to the elimination of labor costs.
Fact is, we are paying MORE now than ever, even with the self checkout registers.
“surely as excavators threatened shovel manufacturers”
While that may be true, the building contractor didn’t make the building owner come out and run the excavator. The excavating contractor still delivered a finished product, a hole in the ground, to the building contract. The building owner never had to dirty his hands doing somebody else’s work to make that somebody else more profitable.
I HATE self-checkout. I prefer to pay the store to do the checkout.
It’s ridiculous enough to have to empty your own basket. I’m old enough to remember when the grocery store checkout clerk emptied your basket, did the checkout work, counted out your change, and the bagboy actually brought your grocery cart to your car and put the grocery bags into your car for you. You gave him a tip and he was happy. All I had to do was take the products off the shelves and put them into the cart.
Our service economy was so much better in those days. People were happy to do those small tasks for you and a human being always answered your phone calls.
Don’t get me started on the crappy and totally worthless AVR systems that take your calls nowadays and do everything they can to prevent you from talking to a human being.
I love it when the self checkout does not short change me like the human checkout, so I only use self checkout in walmart.
When self checkouts were new I swore I would never use them unless it saved me money. I wasn’t going to volunteer my labor to improve their profits.
I now use them often. Back then my kids were little and I did a major grocery trip twice a month with them in tow. It was quite an ordeal and I never envisioned the day that I would run to town by myself for a few essential items. I still prefer not scanning and bagging my own items, but it saves time at Walmart or Cashwise. All other stores I frequent have shorter lines so I don’t use their self checkouts.
I saw this issue at a few places recently. This grocery store I went to last week had a problem with one of the registers. I got to where i swiped my credit card after scanning all items, and then the machine locked up. I had to wait for a person who then took me to a different register to re scan all my items. A normally 1 minute or less transaction ended up taking over 10 minutes.
The cashiers at our Wal-mart have been otherwise occupied by doing the shopping for online orders.
I notice that it’s mostly older people that seem to hate self-checkouts.
On the other hand, there are far more problems with old human style checkouts.
1. Getting stuck in line behind some oldster who insists on slooooooooowly and laboriously taking ten minutes writing out a check that in the era of Check 21 is going to get processed as a debit transaction and handed back to them when they could have just swiped a debit card and noted the transaction in the register instead in a tenth of the time.
2. Getting stuck behind someone who has fifty items in the ten items or less lane.
3. Getting stuck behind someone who insists on paying in pennies.
4. Having inattentive or stupid staff work very, very slowly - spending three minutes to scan a bar code when it didn’t work the first 200 times, that sort of thing.
5. Having staff poorly bag your groceries - say, sticking gallons of milk on top of your carton of eggs, always a favorite.
With self checkout, you’re never stuck behind snails, if the service is slow you only have yourself to blame and the items are bagged to your satisfaction.
Yes that’s huge these days. When the store is already crowded, the peeps pushing those large racks of blue totes really jam things up.
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