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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
> 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.
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.
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).
It's actually not possible to close the transaction before finalizing the items to be added to it. Generally as far as tap is concerned the pinpad won't go into the mode where it can collect money until the cashier totals it. It is actually possible depending on the software to go back to a prior screen after the pinpad has registered a tap and make a change and depending on timing have the original tap still go through but this is a weird edge case not the expected flow.
Drives me crazy watching people ahead of me try to do this. If the transaction hasn't been completed what precisely do they or indeed you think you are paying for again like handing the store an electronic blank check? I agree to pay...whatever the total ends up being!
No, it's often quite possible to scan the watch while the transaction is still open (depends on the store; not all of them support that). The payment method is still open, and is closed by the cashier.
Yeah, it's "trusting" the store, but it has never resulted in unwanted charges. I do it for the person in line behind me. I can afford it, if there was to be an issue, and the service desk is about ten feet away.
In Japan, they make a ceremony of giving you your goods before accepting payment.
It's an edge case most hardware doesn't expose the ability to start charging you until the cashier totals it.
The only exception is that with some hardware/software is that within a narrow window it may be possible to go back and make a change after putting the pinpad in payment mode.
Remember the pinpad is a second computer not a peripheral.
I have never in decades of paying for things ever seen a checkout where you can tap right away.
No I have only ever lived in the US and I have used such systems on the employee end and recently which I suspect you have not. The pinpad universally doesn't go into payment mode until the transaction is set to complete. Depending on timing it is possible on some systems to go back to the prior screen and make changes and have the first tap still count e.g. cashier totals and selects card and the pinpad goes into payment mode, the goes back and adds an item then returns to payment mode and the transaction clears but it never not ever goes into payment mode initially. Think about why.
If you have no transaction what are you paying for
If the payment screen is up as soon as the first item is added how would you show any other screens e.g. loyalty number, donation prompts, ads and other BS.
If the customer taps then verbally says they would like to use a different card or pay cash how would that be implemented? The exact total will be oft unknown until the transaction is fully rung up and people make late transaction changes literally all the time.
People insert cards early all the time which is fine because it sits there doing nothing until the end they also tap early which does nothing but because they are extra stupid this doesn't hurt much
They don't tap long enough close enough or in the right place on their card or on the machine so to them thry are already just molesting the machine repeatedly with the card until it beeps anyway.
I just did it fifteen minutes ago, at the S&S, across the street. It's gonna be hard to gaslight me, on this one.
I can scan the phone (or a card), while the transaction is still in progress. It doesn't get charged, until the end, but it's entirely possible to scan it early.
> 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.
Yeah, I wouldn't do that. The self-checkout actually works fairly well.
The reason that I insist on using the manned lanes, has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the automated process (I know that it may seem that way, with my gray pompadour, but I'm actually fairly comfortable with tech). It's just because I know that the reason the store uses them, is to fire cashiers, and it's sort of a "stay with them until the end" kind of thing, in my mind.
Like I said, not really the way people think, these days. We tend to be extremely selfish. I participate in an organization that encourages us to adopt a mindset that takes other peoples' existence into account. It's really just symbolic, I know, but I do it for myself; not for others. I feel that symbols are important.
Home Depot self checkouts are large touch screens with a nice wireless gun. It doesn't even check weight. It is one of the least shitty SCO experiences unless you have a bunch of bolts and shit in which case why are you even in self checkout when they always have at least one physical register open?
Agree. Home Depot ones are quite effective. The only sand in the gears, is that, if I use my business card, it always asks me for a job number. It's possible that this is something that contractors appreciate, but they have separate, manned, lanes for them.
The ones that truly suck (in my area) are the CVS ones. They have a glass jaw, and it's quite easy to make a mistake that requires the exasperated attendant to come over, and get it unstuck.
That has nothing at all to do with the person using the machine, and everything to do with the geeks that wrote the software. Whenever I see someone (regardless of their age or "digital native" status) struggling with tech, I blame the designers; not the user.
In my experience, if we want to design stuff to be used by humans, then it starts with getting comfortable with our own humanity. Empathy is useful, when designing stuff.
If we don't like people, then we're unlikely to design stuff that people like to use.
For those who might be curious, The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, is an excellent book for getting in touch with empathetic design.
I am absolutely sure. If you are a good cook you can apply your skills to feed those who you esteem as easily as those who you hate. Imaging the target audience makes a difference requires magical thinking. In fact understanding people is liable to be negativity correlated with liking them.
Software that is "correct," but not something that people "like" using. A "necessary evil."
Heck, I've written it myself. I have two shipping apps that basically do the same type of thing; but one is an app that I use, regularly, and the other, is to server those that want a different approach. That one is actually a lot more "powerful" than the one I use.
It's also a lot less popular. It's 100% "correct," and dead as a doornail.
Don Norman wrote a sequel to DOET, called Emotional Design, where he talks about this kind of thing.
Human emotions can't really be measured, and HN is full of "Inspector 34" types. They just can't grok emotions.
We don't have home depot, but most self-checkout tills in the UK have scales and a separate bag weighing area. You can usually do everything at the till, but they also have scales and barcode printers around the loose fruit and veg areas too (and you have to print a barcode to scan if you're using the portable scan gun thing I mentioned earlier).
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence whatsoever for that, and I refuse to adopt that kind of loser mindset, where the agency of 99.999999% of people don’t matter at all to how our culture and civilization develops.
so, essentially, you and the other commenter are arguing whether it is everyone that has a little fault for being naughty, or is it just a couple of psychos who are fucking everyone else over.
but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.
and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.
Those grocery store employees [at a national chain supermarket] were not going to get a nice raise regardless, and petty theft is either already accounted for or covered by insurance.
One outcome I can see though, is that if enough is skimmed off the top through self-checkout, then maybe the beancounters will realize that self-checkout isn't as 'efficient' as they thought, and will reinstitute human checkers.
Just like how we hope that the hotel that laid off the doorman eventually realizes their mistake and hires him back.
Using this alleged “pattern recognition” as an excuse for learned helplessness, and justifying theft from other victims of these top 0.000001% (if you believe that) is absolutely a loser mindset, yes.
You're confused. Either the world is one way or it isn't. Simply deciding it isn't might make you feel like a Chad but it doesn't make you any less of a fucking idiot. I know you think you can will meritocracy and the glorious principles of Democracy into existence and that's really cute, I'm sure it helps you get through each day, but recognizing that it's cope doesn't make you a loser.
It seems like you're saying that it's fine to steal and otherwise victimize people because "meritocracy and the glorious principles of democracy" are, in your view, dead. What a sad worldview. I hope you find some peace.
It's people being dishonest that makes self checkout slower, with it having to verify the weight of everything. Some stores are higher trust and lack this, which makes it so much faster and smoother.
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.
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.
> 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).
> Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep. In the meanwhile, life is to be enjoyed.
Regarding supermarkets I guess I'm lucky then, because I have supermarkets nearby focusing on customer service with many cashiers. And they are absolutely ten times faster at scanning my groceries than I would be, since it's their job and they do it all day. Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
So to me as a customer it's quicker, more pleasant, and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers. That's something I'm very glad to support with my grocery buying buck. Instead of having that money go to pay for the groceries that other people steal in the self checkout.
> This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep.
I already look forward to that a lot more than most people think I should.
> life is to be enjoyed.
I never really figured out how to do that reliably.
> Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
If they have baggers, that would be a genuine advantage. I've literally only seen them in films though (unless you want to count really tiny stores where the cashier will also bag for you).
As things are though, I have to bag myself, and that's the main bottleneck, so even if the cashier can scan more quickly than me, that doesn't actually make the whole process go any faster. Scanning at the self-checkout is marginally slower than just bagging, but in my case at least, it's usually just a case of swiping an item past the scanner, hearing the beep, and putting it a bag. Some items have barcodes in weird places, but if they're items you frequently buy, you quickly figure that out.
> and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers.
I'm not sure this really should be as much of an advantage as it might be. Sure, them bagging groceries is better than nothing, but the fact that the alternative is nothing is what should be fixed in that case, rather than having them do jobs that are mindless busywork, or just barely above that (not that I have anything against them. If you want to be a bagger, go for it, good for you, but I'd quickly become even more suicidal than I already am). Sadly, we're apparently not quite ready to have that conversation yet.
A job is not a persons identity or destiny. The world has long ago moved on from the paradigm that the first job you do is where you stay for the rest of your life.
The baggers in my local supermarket are high schoolers getting some extra money, while probably studying. It's good for them to learn the basics of what it means to do a job, and be exposed to other people in the community except for psychotic screeching teachers or TikTok brain rot. It's still good that these jobs exist, even if grown ups are doing them. It might be somebody who is between other stuff, or needs some extra cash because of changes in life situation, or for some reason isn't at the moment capable to do another job.
More jobs are always more better, no matter what the jobs are, because it puts firm upwards pressure on other salaries. Bagging groceries is an easy job, so it pressures every other job which is worse to pay better. Otherwise your potential employee will say "I'll just bag groceries instead, if you don't pay me better".
Yeah. It's just the place you spend 8 hours every day.
Imagine the job instead was digging holes (not for any actual purpose. Just digging and filling in holes so that people could 'have a job'). Would you be saying the same things?
Bagging is at least an actual service, but it's not far away in my mind.
I've had worse jobs which were 16 hour days. But then the pay was better. Anyway, these are high school kids, so I don't think they're working full days, with school and everything.
By the way: If you'd like some cheering up, shoot me an e-mail (from my profile). Things don't have to be hard, and most of the times solutions to our problems is much easier than they seem, but gets ignored because we think it has to be hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I wouldn't go to a restaurant that used QR codes twice. But I can't go to a different supermarket as there's only one in a reasonable distance away, or use another train line, or avoid a government form.
Yes. If you create a straw man, you're very convincing. The real world isn't a static snapshot though. If people are unhappy enough with existing businesses, they will find alternatives or new businesses will see opportunities. Or you can move to a place with the type of businesses you prefer.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not an absolute. The fallacy doesn’t imply that every building would be better with a doorman. But it does suggest that buildings that DO have them aren’t necessarily making a wise choice by getting rid of them.
At this point, though, I mean if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
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.
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.
> 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.
When I hear arguments like this I feel compelled to point out that the people running these businesses live in the same world as you.
I don't know how old you are or if you remember, but the examples you gave used to be the most common sources of complaints, delays, refunds, etc. when the employee would do a shitty job (fairly often). The world of the past really was objectively worse.
Ahh yes, having someone to wait tables at a restaurant, someone to scan and bag groceries, someone to take your medical history, having furniture already assembled etc. was really objectively worse.
Also known as the person who mistook your order, put the eggs in the same bag as something heavy, or messed up your chart. Flat-pack furniture is a different topic since that's always been a budget product.
Unless you think sitcom writers of the past were part of a conspiracy, people clearly argued about this then just as we do now.
I think the only difference is that we have managed to weasel in politics somehow. It's worth questioning where you get these ideas about "free labor". Obsoleting a job is not necessarily nefarious nor did it even mean anyone got laid off. It's ultimately a tradeoff that has to be more than mere cost cutting for it to succeed.
You’re equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was. I could also point to the current setup and say the same.
The times I scan in self checkout and the machine malfunctions, needing a manager. The times I added the medical history myself but the nurse/doctor missed it because they themselves weren’t taking it. Every single time I have to walk back and forth during a meal because I now serve my own table.
I’ve had to wait for help at a self checkout more times than I’ve had my eggs broken. It’s worth questioning why you’re so eager to defend corporations making you work for free.
A lot of this reads like you don’t like to deal with people because you think people, especially in the service industry are incompetent and are wrong majority of the time.
> equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was
This was highly dependent on the neighborhood you lived in. It still is to some extent. Full service is still around, but I wouldn't expect that in "the bad parts of town". You do not want those people doing those jobs, but now we're really heading somewhere politically incorrect and touching on systemic inequality.
What's the point of discussing this if you're going to insist on reading everything in bad faith? You know very well I'm speaking from experience. Go ask anyone else who lived in that kind of place at that time. It's where the run down Walmart and McDonald's still are. That's where self-checkout was born.
You are trying to advocate for the disadvantaged who might work those kinds of jobs longer term, yet you don't understand those people. You do not understand the valid concerns of the shoppers at those stores either who had little alternative. You're complaining about self-checkout, but it's the same machines they worked with for at or near minimum wage. The way you get angry is the way they'd get angry too after a full day of that every day. As I said, you do not want those people doing that job.
I don't regret any of what I said, but I regret adding to yet more of this noise on HN. I tried to have productive conflict by sharing my perspective, but there's no substance left here.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
> I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together
If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices? Adjust n to whatever value is lower than your hyperbole trigger.
> Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
> If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices
You’re also responding to a partial statement of a sentence and not a complete argument. The argument being companies don’t necessarily lower prices to compete with one another even if they can.
And finally, why do companies don’t raise their prices infinitely? (A complete tangent to the discussion) Because well, business 101. Prices increases are a slow drip. And there is a limit after which price increases hurt the sales. And you always want an external excuse to point a finger at to make the prices palatable. Some companies can increase prices faster than the others. Apple made hundreds of billions in profits last year and they just increased the prices of MacBooks by hundreds of dollars. They could’ve easily not raised prices but why would you not when you have a loyal customer base that won’t mind paying a few hundred dollars extra?
> So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
It's a problem because the business models are providing alternatives of what their customers value. You're arguing that because Costco, one of, if not the most successful retailers in the world, can do it why can't all stores? I can assure you every business wants to be Costco.
But also, I've been to Costco. And they offer what they want in quantities that they want. And it's often not what I want no matter how well they treat their employees. Also the checkout lines were very long.
Business 101? Take a step back. What you're describing is the feedback mechanism of the competition that drives prices down. Supply, demand, price. Econ 101. The reason prices aren't infinite is not because the evil corporations are conspiring to increase them slowly enough that customers barely notice. It's because, if they increase them too much, they will lose business to their competitors.
Apple has the ability to raise prices because customers value its ecosystem. But, OK. Why didn't they raise the price by thousands? Do you think people didn't notice the few hundred dollar price increase drip? It looks to me like people did notice. It's because at a certain price, it's worthwhile to hold your nose and use a different operating system.
At some point you’re just picking items and responding to them. This is taking the discussion away from your core argument. You talk about Costco but conveniently leave out in-n-out because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
My core argument has been that corporations offload tasks onto customers and then use the money saved to boost their own profits.
Your argument is that the cost saved is passed on to the customers.
I’ve provided examples of why that doesn’t happen, and provided examples of companies that don’t sacrifice customer experience while maintaining lower prices to show that the rest of them are not doing the same.
I am yet to see any substantial evidence from your end to prove that savings are indeed getting passed on to customers. And unless that’s something you want to discuss, we should end it here.
You're the one who started talking about specific examples and I agree that that's irrelevant since different companies decide how to allocate the money they save by reducing labor costs. Which is actually a refutation of your general assertion that labor cost savings don't constrain prices.
Your argument is based on the conspiratorial belief that "corporations" are a monolith conspiring to allocate the savings from self checkout. You have not explained why each of them is not incentivized to use that savings to reduce costs to take more business from their competitors. Is your answer that the businesses are all colluding? You have also not explained why they are constrained at all in the amount they can raise prices. The drip theory makes no sense. This is all basic economics.
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.