General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: No cashiers, please: Futuristic supermarket opens in Mideast [View all]bigtree
(85,996 posts)...remember, my perspective comes from more than a few broken eggs. I worked grocery retail for 36 years.
Nice to know some customers couldn't care less that I was working there. Raised my family on union wages, but i get it. Screw me, as long as the customer gets what they want. Nostalgia, I know, expecting a community to care about the jobs that support it.
Shoppers complain self-checkouts are inconvenient, confusing, and pose accessibility issues for the elderly and disabled, and they dont like to see people being replaced by machines.
Beyond the fact that self-checkouts can be cumbersome and annoying, many people prefer the social aspect of being able to interact with a cashier. A cashier can help answer any questions you might have about a product and can direct you towards the item that youre looking for.
Cashiers provide a valuable service in retail stores, which is why consumers like them. And in unionized stores, a cashier position is often a family-sustaining job that provides benefits, a pension, and income that is then reinvested in the local economy. This means that cashiers not only help retailers meet consumer needs they also drive our economy.
By automating labor, self-checkouts may allow businesses to replace cashiers with machines, and thus shed significant labor costs... Most of the self-checkout manufacturers websites readily acknowledge their savings in labor-related costs; a report on NCRs website states that self-checkout allows stores to cut labor costs, which account for more than ninety percent of the costs associated with running the front end of a retail store. Likewise, Optimal Robotics notes that a four-station, one-attendant configuration would require approximately one hundred and fifty fewer labor hours a week compared to the regular checkouts
Just to reemphasize, the pitch from the automated checkout makers was and is all about labor savings and much less about any perceptible improvements for customers. The automated checkout companies do try to nod to some consumer benefits, but its a distant and deeply secondary tier of the sell. While the manufacturers also promote consumer advantages that may indirectly affect businesses most commonly shorter lines and faster checkoutsthe main selling point is lower labor costs,
https://gizmodo.com/why-self-checkout-is-and-has-always-been-the-worst-1833106695