megopie

In a lot of cases they’re not actually saving much money on these systems. They’re not cheap machines, require expensive outside contractors to be repaired, and also still require an employee overseeing them.

It might seem cheaper in the sense that one cashier can oversee 6 customers using the machines instead of serving one customer at a time, but most of the time, there’s only going to be one person checking out. The only time that 1:6 ratio comes in to play is during narrow periods in the day when the store is very busy, like around 5~7 when a bunch of people are finished with work and on their way home.

Perhaps it would save money if they were keeping every check out lane open all shift long without these machines, thus requiring 6 people who’s sole job is to stand there idly most of a shift, but that’s not what they did. There is a lot of other work that needs to be done in the store, straightening shelves, refilling empty slots from overhead, helping customers find stuff. So most of the time 5 of those “cashiers” would be going around the store doing that when things weren’t busy, and then just staff the registers during those rushes. Those staff are still there, doing other things.

The machines are actually more expensive but the margins are the same since they just raise prices to compensate. The real point of the machines is that they give management more direct control over the employees, since they can task them strictly to certain things and not have to worry about them getting pulled off ad hoc to staff registers. The additional cost is passed on to consumers, in a functioning market customers would avoid stores that raised prices to pay for the added cost of the machines, but since most stores do this, customers don’t have much of a choice.

But gas is also more profitable than ever for those involved. Any increase in price gets passed along to down stream consumers, but the margins have increased.

And since the people deciding what electrical generation are getting put in are not the ones paying the final bill, they have no reason to pursue solar at scale.

Some places are installing it at scale, but it’s almost always due to some public mandate, or because the people putting it in are the ones paying for the final power.

I don’t think it was even a matter of research, or it least it hasn’t been for a while, more it’s a matter of scaling production and competitive supply chains.

If there are 15 steps to produce a panel and you need to make 20% profit to pay off the capital expense and cover fixed costs, then the final product is going to be expensive, if the scale is large enough to afford to only make 1% profit at every step things get cheap.

It was, in many ways, all the worst parts of their previous games compiled in to one, with none of the redeeming elements. Like, it seems the internal decision makers have an extremely distorted view of why they have been successful in the past, and the actual production line seemed completely disorganized and dysfunctional. The design and goals were bad, and the execution was bad.

They should have learned from the criticism of oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4 and 76, but it seems like they discarded all criticism(genuine or otherwise) on the grounds that the games were successful. And only listened to praise (whether it was wide spread, or from a narrow audience).

Maybe because it wasn’t a success they’ll actually listen to criticism and take the time to sort through it, or maybe they’ll just assume the issue was the space theme and will continue down the procedural shooter looter slop path.