Posted on 09/06/2021 8:42:45 AM PDT by RandFan
Amazon is opening one of their hyper-automated food stores just a couple blocks from me.
I think you have to have one of their paid membership cards to swipe into the entrance door.
We have two regular chain grocery stores within walking distance, so, hopefully, the added competition will create some downward food price pressure in my little neighborhood.
Isn’t curious how certain Islamic countries (like Dubai and the other emirates) can be at the cutting edge of modernity while others are still in the 7th century?
That's why Dubai can have nice things and we can't. They don't tolerate misbehavior from their underclass.
This is what happens when you make labor expensive through regulations, taxes and of course the minimum wage.
The incentive is for tech/automation to eliminate jobs especially unskilled work...
**************************************************
Thus the phrase.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Have you see a reduction in prices when you do it yourself?
No, I haven’t either.
We didn’t have the technology yet. No way to get the scanners small enough and useful enough. But it’s getting there, thus this store.
This isn’t self checkout. This is automatic. You grab it from the shelf, put it in your bag and it lands on your tab. You walk out the store and your tab is charged to the account. Boom.
“Now in many stores we have to scan our own merchandise in a laborious process eliminating the jobs of the cashiers who could do it faster.”
They didn’t eliminate the jobs of the cashiers - you are now the (unpaid) cashier.
Actually, maybe you get paid after all through lower prices, since competition is still fierce at the retail level.
BTW, that’s what’s going to happen to most minimum wage jobs. Robots can do the work for less than $15/hr and the company doesn’t have to pay payroll taxes and give lunch and bathroom breaks.
Another wonderful consequence of leftist policies.
Prediction: soon they will impose a tax on each machine.
Some scanners asked me to choose my language. I would say “foul” when dealing with certain types of scanners. On some temperamental ones I would end up quoting “Marvin the Paranoid Android” declaring loudly “What a depressingly stupid machine.”
I have been at an unnamed supermarket where they had 2 (out of 20+) cashiers and 8 self checkout lanes. When I got to the lines they were sooooo darnnnnned lonnnnng so I abandoned my full cart and walked out.
Amusingly, people are still lined up three or four deep at the traditional registers. I'm one of the only shoppers that actually use this app.
I suppose it's possible to not scan some items and get them for free but most people would never do that. Besides, I'm sure the supermarket's P&L has a line for "losses" like this and found that it more than balances the cost of hiring additional cashiers and baggers.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing it.
Our Walmart had some self scan registers for regular orders before the crud hit. My wife got very good at scanning and I sacked what she scanned. Everything was credit card at those lines then.
Apparently, their quick checkout lines with a limit on items has gone to credit card only. We haven’t been in the store since the crud hit.
We have about a dozen items, we buy about once a month at and receive at Walmart’s pickup stations. The ordering is done via my chromebook computer from our family room, and we pick what credit card to use.
I'm okay with that. Beats waiting 5-10 minutes (or more) at the check-out line with the harried housewives and bratty kids trying to snag a candy bar.
I remember when gas stations went to the business model of the consumer pumping their own gas. I liked that as well. Would much rather pump my own gas instead of waiting for some 17-year-old kid to amble over to me so I can hand my credit card over. But that's me.
Heh heh, or like Carl's Jr, in "Idiocracy".....
This should help you calm down. Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase. Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr. Carl's Jr... "____ You, I'm Eating."
beat me to it...back to the future...
They should make human labor more affordable by having them live in cubicles above the store like china does with it’s factory workers.
Those “unskilled workers” are barely human anyway.
This is only possible in a country with laws against shoplifting.
I know like most FReeprs I didn’t read the article till after i posted :-)
OTOH, every restaurant is required to serve you as much bread as you can eat regardless of what else you order.
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