'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology
'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology
Unstaffed tills were supposed to revolutionise shopping. Now, both retailers and customers are bagging many self-checkout kiosks.
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Their intent was to cut jobs/costs. They worked as designed. The user experience being improved was never the real goal of these, both on the employee and customer side. I'm fine using them for a small number of items/one item, but if I'm going to buy a bunch of things or anything that requires special handling (alcohol), I just skip them. I also skip them if there's no line at a human checkout because I don't want to drive those folks out of jobs either.
The article says the expected cost savings haven't been realized because people steal stuff and generally suck at scanning & bagging their own groceries.
Ah, the retail theft claim...
Hahaha, that's awesome. I don't believe it, but it is humorous.
Shoplifting was already an issue. Self checkout has scales to check what you're bagging, and cameras. I simply don't believe it's caused a significant increase in theft, no matter how hard they try to claim it.
Further, any issues that stores have with theft/shoplifting is because they refuse to do anything about it. Thirty years ago we stopped shoplifters and took them to security where cameras recorded everything, and called the police to come pick em up. Hell, we usually had a cop on hand for this stuff, and much of security was staffed by cops/retired cops.
Fine, you'd rather let this be an insurance claim, then any issues you have with theft is no longer a concern to anyone, because clearly it's not a concern to you (that is, the company).
People know they won't be stopped/arrested. So there's almost no risk to just walking out.
Why would grocery stores lie that shoplifting happens more at self-checkout?
Why do you think the stores refuse to do anything about it?
Maybe because it isn’t worth the effort and they know that when they look at the spreadsheets even if they can’t admit it because it goes against some of the core ideologies of capitalism (people are exceptionally selfish and greedy and will steal as much as you can until you force them to pay).
Treating this like it is a problem of needing more authoritarianism and surveillance in 2023 is kind of an absurd take in my opinion.
The whole “but those cashiers can get better jobs” line is such BS in a society like the US. It is just as likely that the cashier’s life might be seriously negatively impacted by losing a job and they might not be able to find another that works for them. I don’t know what will happen to that cashier when they lose their job, I am not in their shoes and I am tired of people being so callous towards destroying jobs like this. We don’t need to get rid of every cashier job to make society more efficient, it’s just what antisocial people want and what greedy business execs want.
There are so many other places we can increase the efficiency of society (primarily by taxing the rich!) that firing cashiers down to the minimal number that can functionally manage a market front is absurd. It is like train freight companies “needing” to cut costs and have only one conductor on the train by themselves instead of two because the modern economy demands it… and it just doesn’t pass the smell test. A half mile long freight train isn’t an efficient enough movement of massive amounts of material to just say to hell with it, let’s pay two people to drive the train just in case one becomes incapacitated in an emergency?
I think the real question is why is the job of someone who oversees the process of members of a community collecting their food and paying for it so fucking miserable in the first place that people wouldn’t want to work that job for a fair wage? It shouldn’t on the face of it be a miserable job, though for sure a physical one. Why is the work environment so miserable that most people derisively assume nobody should be happy working this job for the rest of their lives?