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 ...
The phone trees are such boogersnot. Just answer “operator.”
With all that you’re not using a shopping service like Instacart or Amazon Pantry or similar that eliminates all those problems... why?
In my opinion, and as respectfully as possible, even though I’m a ‘city kid’, I think that’s pretty much like deciding which circle of Hell is more favorable to inhabit. I think NYC is even worse than NJ.
Sorta. I actually like chatting with the cashiers and having my groceries bagged. Maybe have a couple of self-checkouts for a few items.
Same here. We get it.
The Shop Rite in my town still offers to load your car, probably because you can’t take the carts out into the lot (they’d end up in scrap yards in neighboring Newark NJ). They also have a sign very specifically saying “no tipping” for the service.
The problem here in NJ is that we’re not ALLOWED to pump our gas even if we wanted to (so can’t learn young); when traveling in other states, I figured it out pretty quickly.
Heh!
I like making people think.
I dislike having to Taser you, as Taser cartridges aren’t cheap and you keep not taking hints to go away and leave me alone. I especially am not at all interested in your ramblings about gladiators.
That was you? Sorry...
“..You are a jerk....”
LOL...yeah, my wife tells me that all time. I tell her that I worked hard all my life to get this way...LOL
FWIW, It’s in the context that it’s said that counts. I only tease with those questions in jest when the machine, or me. screws up and they have to come over to straighten me, or it, out. Most of em know I’m only teasing and laugh with me as we figure it out what went wrong.
Actually, if I only have a few items, I like and use self-checkouts as it’s usually much quicker. Like others have stated, we avoid em if we can if we have a large basket load of groceries, especially if it contains items that need to be looked up. I’ll help bag the stuff while my wife checks out just to speed things up for us and those behind us.
The real jerk is the person that deliberately jumps in line or some old fart that continuously bumps you with their cart while waiting in line to check out....now, that’s a real jerk.
Sadly, many of your fellow New Jerseyans don’t seem to be able to figure that out, per my own personal observations. :)
I hate self checkout but I can use it if the human lines are too long. At Ralph’s, the human checkers and baggers really try to provide service with a smile. They have to stay competitive with other retailers and with Nonhuman checkout. Some I have known for 15-20 years. I feel this is part of living in a community, not just a zip code.
I lived in NYC for 3 years, before I married. It was a fun place for singles.
But let me ask you-— did someone show you how to pump gas your first time?
Those receipt checks are necessary because at the Wal-Mart in my town the gibsmedats were playing all kinds of games - like just loading carts and trying to walk out (sometimes with flat-screen TVs). As a poster commented on a local news site: “They’re not even hiding it anymore, are they?”
I remember
Hershey Bars
For a
Nickle,
that’s right
A Nickle!
I guess I’m just old fashioned. Until I pay for it and they hand me my bag of groceries, THEY own the groceries and I don’t appreciate them trying to get me the customer to assume the cost (in the form of labor) of doing the work the company should be doing in order to get the goods into my hands. Next thing you know, they’ll get the bright idea to require their customers to stock the shelves and sweep the floors for the privilege of shopping there.
I believe you, and I suspect the younger they are, the worse it is. They may know a lot about electronics, but far fewer young people own cars here than when I was young years ago. Ride-sharing is very popular here, as buying a car (even a used one) is hard for young people working McJobs - the insurance is notoriously high until they reach 25 years old.
Speaking of ATMs any idea why the machines are notoriously slow with the advent of mega GHZ cpus in computers, the average ATM at a large chain like Bank of America, Chase or Wells Fargo, feels like they are using 1990 tech in the year 2020. You’d expect a simple deposit should be under a minute, but I’m always waiting on the ATM to process what i press. Takes 10-15 seconds to print receipt after you tell it what kind of receipt you want. Gas station pumps print out faster receipts at the pump than ATMs.
My father, RIP 25 years ago, used to say that the politicians in Oregon and New Jersey evidently assumed their constituents were dumber than those in the other 48 states. Since they were evidently unable to figure out how to pump gasoline.
But then when you look at who those constituents have elected... maybe he had a point.
(not to be taken as a personal insult. Just a funny way of looking at it.)
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