On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-costco-kroger-facing-self-checkout-reckoning-2023-10
Some are finding they still need employees to combat theft, assist with purchases, review IDs, and check receipts.
Praxis
This just them whining. One person watching the door (that they had anyway) and one person assisting at a self checkout corral is still less employees than all the cashier's I've seen them do away with.
yeah it's wild to think about, but i don't think i've been in a grocery store in years that had more checkout lanes open than closed. most of the time it's no more than 2. i'm assuming that if they were still building new stores they'd just get rid of them altogether.
It's weird, I felt this was a trend pre-pandemic (and at least it made sense in the off-hours) but after it really kicked into gear. I almost never see more than 2 checkout lanes staffed at any one time.
You still have to have them for the big holiday rushes, but that's pretty much the only time working at a grocery store that I've seen all of them used
I'm one of those weirdos who prefers the self-checkout but they're just not fucking practical when you got a cart full of stuff. These morons keep trying to implement a business plan that is one part having their cake and one part eating it to make the line go up for the quarter and it does not fucking work.
This is the biggest failure by far of self checkouts. PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN BAGGING AREA UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA PLEASE RING UP EVERYTHING THE BAGGING AREA PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN'T TRYING TO STEAL REPEAT FOREVER BECAUSE YOUR CART IS FULL OF 2 WEEKS OF GROCERIES FOR A FAMILY
It's extra funny in my location too because a tax on plastic bags means most people bring their own bags, but if you put your own bag in the bagging area it yells at you because it thinks you're trying to steal and won't let you do anything. So mostly people just pile everything unceremoniously in a giant grocery heap in the "bagging" area and then spend another 5 minutes reloading their cart and bagging everything.
Self checkouts are great when you have a couple of small things but they're absolutely the peak of inefficient bullshit for any regular sized grocery shop. They're one of the reasons why grocery shopping for me went from "a task I enjoy" to "a task I talk about in therapy". They have become anxiety zones.
PLEASE WAIT WHILE I LOCK THE SCREEN AND SCANNER WHILE SOMEONE COMES OVER AND MAKES SURE YOU AREN'T TRYING TO STEAL
Funny enough, this generates so many false positives that none of the workers I've seen even bother to check anymore. It's just "Oh, the screen locked up again, I'd better get that"
For minimum wage I'm barely being paid enough to unlock the robot. I'm definitely not being paid to care about theft, and if they wanted me to care about lost revenue they could give me shares in the company so I have an incentive to care.
One time I saw a customer stealing at the self checkout but I wasn’t in a mood to approach them, but I had to configure the machine next to them. Security guy came up to me a few hours later and congratulated me and said he saw me “combatting theft on the camera earlier.”
I never confronted the customer and they left with everything without paying, so I don’t even know what crack that security guy was smoking.
Based
And the thing is they're just fine if you're at one of the rare stores where it's not clearly geared to assume every customer is stealing every product, but then you go buying something in an area that's lower income and suddenly it takes 20 minutes to buy 3 things because the system is too busy screaming at you to drink the verification can to let you scan anything.
The only store I've been to without a fussy self-checkout is a pretty large euro-style grocery chain in North America. Their attendants are usually also attending to a standard check-out, so they don't even walk over. If you click the help button, they'll just void the last item you scanned lol.
Europeans are evil. But at the very least they demand some quality of life for themselves. Americans are made miserable and will threaten to kill your family if you suggest things don’t have to be this way for them.
my employer implemented self-checkout for an employee/open to the public cafeteria. the prices are extremely reasonable for good quality food, so i am not trying to be a dick about it... but if the barcode fails to read 3 times, that means it's free to me.
Reverse convenience surcharge
running an inside-out prison to keep people away from food and complaining that I have to pay for guards
Liked these things at my Safeway until they installed some machine learning computer vision software to prevent stealing
Not that I was stealing anything, of course, I would never do anything illegal. It's just the principle of it.
That shit fails all the time for false positives. Thankfully you can skip past it.
I frequently buy multiples of a single item so I do what a cashier does - I take a single version and just swipe it the number of times of things I'm buying, then swipe the whole lot in my bag. It always comes up with the video saying something like it appears there was some error in checkout (I'm assuming the video is to try to guilt shoplifters, saying hey look we have video). Anyways you can skip and ignore it. I've never had any repercussions to my account - granted if someone were to actually watch the video and cross it to receipt it would be obvious what I'm doing, but if they were to tie some sort of repercussion like banning my account I assume that would be automated (and fail just the same) too.
Funniest shit is it doesn't even call an associate over. I need an associate to badge in for my 50% coupon you stuck on the milk, but you think you saw me swipe some shit? Nah, not gonna raise any flags.
The old implementation was fine. This machines are great for getting people with a small number of purchases out of line and out the door. But that wasn't enough, now they feel the need to have only the self-checkouts. Turns out? It stinks! They bottle-necked their own ability to take customer's money for no reason.
And making self-checkouts for less than 10 items and keeping actual cashiers for many items must’ve been too complex of an idea
One of the major chain grocery stores in my area introduced new self checkout stations that are just full on check lanes without a cashier. So you have to scan your item, place it on the conveyer belt, watch it travel down and just dumped in a little pile at the end, then walk down to the end of it and bag your own items. It's even more of a pain in the ass and I'm sure it's only because there's even more surveillance equipment to ensure items are what they're scanned as. Just fucking pay people. Death to America
when talking about workers: "Workers don't create value!!!! Bosses do through their unique labor of guidance and supervision without which the workers would be lost and confused!!!"
after "automating" the jobs of the workers (but not really): "WTF, machines don't create value???? They are merely the embodiment of past labor already done by humans???? Workers are needed to operate the machinery through the labor of guidance and supervision, without which the customer would be lost and confused???? WTF?!?!?!?! I thought I was good at economics and these machines would save me money!!! I thought technology was supposed to be magic and not simply constant capital that decays over time and requires maintenance!!!! WTF?!?!?!??!?!"
I would argue that self-checkout machines are less about automating labor away and more about transferring that labor to an unpaid workforce (customers).
you make a fine point. thinking about it now, doesn't this show that the bourgeoisie is even more clueless and less able to "innovate" than they suggest in their propaganda? Since they aren't even automating away the drudgery, or improving customer satisfaction, but simply transferring the labor from the worker to the customer? That seems like a desperate attempt to stop the declining rate of profit rather than a real "innovation"
I don't think the bourgeoisie really innovate at all anymore because there are now professional workers who have that job instead. Production engineers improve production methods and processes, for instance, and there's a whole genre of "supply chain management" jobs. This is of course ignoring the actual engineers and programmers who design the big new "innovative" products (see: Tesla, Spacex, Amazon).
But yeah I think self-checkouts and the like are a transparent attempt to cut costs, and this article is them being pissed that actually this is one corner that can't be cut as much as they'd like.
What if we just replaced all cashiers with cops?
this is my local target. no checkers, no employees on the floor, only self-check out, but there are 3 dudes in black/OD plate carriers standing by the door
Real life cyberpunk dystopia
There's at least a few bazingas that see the tacticools when they're shopping and get excited because it looks like the cyberpunkerinos, I bet.
It's not far off at all from the known and established fondness for Star Wars stormtroopers as an aesthetic.
If I would work at a self checkout (not denying nor conforming) I would let people steal. Just looking away when the do, making sure I have plausible deniability. I won't give a fuck, steal whatever you want.
If they won't train or keep employees, well I'm not trained either. If it doesn't scan the first try, it doesn't scan :if-he-dies-he-dies:
It seems many stores still need real people to help customers with their purchases
Don't worry, retailers don't view human cashiers as real people either 
When I worked at a grocery store about 40% of my time at self checkout was bypassing the security freeze because the camera thinks every customer is stealing if they scan products faster than 1 per 45 seconds and don’t put it on the bag scale within .44 seconds.
Oh boy I sure do love buying several pounds of bananas multiple times on the same shopping trip.
if you see someone stealing at a self checkout, you didn't see anything
Another capitalist contradiction, what fun! Will we ever run out of them?
Fuck them for trying to steal our labor, they deserve every theft loss and more
people don't like to talk to an automated phone bot, why is it different irl
I never use the self checkout. I am already paying more and you want me to do the work for you. Lol I would rather wait in line for hours than scanning the shit for you and then also pay for it.
Not using self checkout will actually help to economy as these major retailers will have to hire people. So stop using self checkout.
B-but... i don't like people. Self checkout helps me avoid them. Besides do you want to move items over the register for >8h a day? Me neither.
It also helps the economy to build houses and demolish immediately them afterwards (creates demand for building materials and jobs), that doesn't mean it makes sense. "The economy" is something the bourgeois made up to brainwash people to think exploitation is a good thing.
but i want to use the self-checkout lane to steal things. Fuck these companies.
A lot of these machines struggle to process food-stamps. Quite the oversight considering what these places tend to pay their workers.
Self checkout is for scabs. Support the grocers union.
