Comment on Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout, some stores removing them
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months agoI fundamentally hate self-checkouts because they were an attempt to eliminate an essential job in the company. I refuse to use them. Frustrares my wife and stepdaughter, but it is my little way to give the corporations the middle finger and force them to have to employ people.
Fair! My mom always refused to use them.
I didnt for the longest time, until the day my friend went through self c/o and took about two minutes, while I took 15 min in the slow lane. Which honestly was less about the employees and more about shoppers who cant figure out how to pay for the two carts worth groceries they got…
Jako301@feddit.de 6 months ago
I don’t get what the issue is with eliminating unnecessary jobs. It doesn’t create any extra work for the customer (you have to place all items on the conveyer and put them back into the cart either way), it isn’t offloading any extra work to the other employees and it saves anyone involved a fuckton of time.
mao@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
Technological advancements have the unfortunately intended side effect of corporations having less people they gotta pay to, because machines are quite the competitor sometimes. While I think OP is being a bit pedantic here, efficiency in and of itself is not inherently good – the question should be who’s extracting the profit. If the increased efficiency translates into less working hours… hell yeah. If it translates into record megacorp profits, then… I see no need in eliminating these unnecessary jobs for now
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This. They may be unnecessary for the company, but they are necessary for society to maintain function and for the economy as a whole to continue smoothly function. Consider an analogy for the economy to a food chain, you have to have the bottom rungs of the food chain that are plentiful and prosperous to continue to maintain the larger predators. If you start taking out the bottom rungs, it may take a while, but the apex eventually starves. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The more money the poor make, the better the economy will function.