What I’m hearing is NY Democrats are working to pass a bill that will increase prices at businesses using self-checkout by 10 percent. They aren’t going to cut into their own profits.
The fun part that I have heard from a few retail managers is that the software that the self checkout uses costs as much or more per month than the employee would have.
“democrats” “fighting for worker rights”, are we doing this in big 26? No wonder american left is dead.
Right, because if I self checkout my $200 grocery bill, that worker definitely would have made $20 in that few minute interaction.
I like the idea, but that’s a terrible implementation. The cost of the bill has no relation to the money saved by using the machine and firing a worker. A flat amount no more than a % of the bill is tiny would be better. Like $1-3 but no more than 5% of bill.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why big business gets away with everything.
Cause theres juuust enough idiots out there to cry and scream about how its big mean and supes unfair to hold them accountable for anything, and that any punishments should totally be insigifnicant that doesnt impact them at all.
200 grocery bill, that worker definitely would have made $20 in that few minute interaction.
So the fact that the store would lose more money to the 10% discount is what incentivizes them to use cashiers.
All y’all tripping over making these 2 numbers equivalent are missing the point entirely.
I’m not missing the point, funny enough it seems to be you that has.
Something should be done, but this is NOT the way to do it. I’m sorry you can’t understand that.
Of course not.
We shouldnt dare do it in a way that hurts the poor company.
Perhaps we should solve it by making customers pay a fee for using self checkout! You know, those poor, downtrodden businesses really do need all the help they can get.
They should have to pay a tax equal to that of employing someone. They will get efficiency and more days activity without leave and overtime costs.
It’s ultimately just a bill that would kill the self checkout which maybe that is their intention.
Self checkout isnt a bad thing in and of itself.
If you only get one or two items, or something that you find personally embarassing, self checkout is fine.
Thet problem is there are no more cashiers, and I’m expected to take my monthly groceries through self checkout, which is a fucking chore. and I totally deserve at least 10% for the chore of dealing with it, as well with the added stress that a harmless fuckup might result in me being fucking tackled to the asphalt in the parking lot by some overzealous loss prevention/cop, and see me arrested for theft.
so I dont want to see it go away, but there definitely needs to be regulation, like…1 self checkout for every 3 staffed cashier registers or something.
If it’s written as that image describes, I don’t even think they intend to pass it, they just wanted the headlines, but that would be the ultimate goal as written if so and it passed.
I didn’t have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I’m doing somebody else’s job as a customer, the company is saving money.
Agreed, some things are logical enough to see that; however, a study does help out in a way - reinforcing the common knowledge.
And quantifying it.
Won’t this just encourage people to use self-checkout as it will make using an employed checkout lane more expensive?
I don’t think many people know how harmful self-checkout is to their neighbors employed the store. I made a comment to a Costco employee about how I was glad they added the hand scanners to self-checkout, and their response was to educate me that self-checkout isn’t good for the employees because it means fewer jobs. I’m was so self-absorbed in my own day-to-day life that I did not even think about the impact it had on Costco employees. I didn’t even think about the fact that here I am talking about this pain point of self-checkout (having to use the stationary scanner) and relief about having a better option (the hand scanner) when the best option is already there (employees handling the checkout). The real solution is to just open up more jobs, hire more employees to do the scanning and bagging. I stopped using self-checkout after that.
I went to Aldi recently. You have to put a quarter in to get a shopping cart (I haven’t carried around quarters in ages). The shelves often get into a state of disarray. The line for the 1 employee doing checkout is massive, but self-checkout is also a huge pain in the ass. Continuously cutting jobs to increase profits is a race to the bottom, and yet people who can barely afford groceries think they couldn’t live without a discount chain like Aldi. We are saving pennies by giving up our time doing our own checkout, when we could be getting paid to check people out, providing them some convenience and doing so with greater efficiency instead. I’ll add that many items at Aldi’s are actually more expensive than at other grocery stores, if you’re not paying attention you could end up paying more than a place with more employed checkout lanes.
I’m sorry, but you must be a new Aldi shopper. The quarter thing has been their model for ages. Often you, or others will just leave a quarter in their cart when they put it back. The self check out is new, but Aldi is one of those stores that actually does pass the saving on to it’s customers. It’s always 20-30% cheaper at Aldi than other stores in my area. The exception being big name brand stuff but the store brand is def cheaper. $4 for a 12 pack of knock-off coke vs 13 for name brand at the other stores? it’s a no-brainer.
Edit: I’m not super current with it but as I recall Aldi does actually pay their workers. It’s one of the places that has a reputation as ‘the good one.’ I’m sure it’s not perfect, it still operates in the US ecconomy, but Aldi has been up there with costco for it’s operation practices.
I’m sorry, but you must be a new Aldi shopper
It was the first time I had shopped at an Aldi in like a decade. A friend buys my kid these snacks she loves, that are only at Aldi, so I went to check it out. The quarter thing was one of several PITAs I experienced.
It’s always 20–30% cheaper at Aldi than other stores in my area
That wasn’t my experience. There’s a Smart & Final nearby that has most of the basics at similar or lower cost, especially if you go with store brand. While I was at Aldi I was doing price comparisons against the other stores I go to (using their apps, knowing the price in app is usually higher) and found many items were more expensive at Aldi. Frozen fish was one thing I remember being higher at Aldi. It seems like they drop prices on some items but get you on other items, which is what a lot of grocery stores do.
I recall, Aldi does actually pay its workers well
I’d believe that but that’s because there are maybe 3 employees in the entire store. One at checkout, and two running around handling everything else. I figured that’s why the shelves were not arranged well, there’s no one with the time to clean things up after shoppers make a mess. This was a fairly large Aldi too, almost as big as the S&F in my neighborhood. The difference is at the S&F they open up more checkouts when things get busy.
An employee check out lane is not always the best option. I like self check out lanes because it is more efficient for me and the lines will move faster because there can be more machines open.
An employee lane is great when you need assistance, like for elderly or less technically adept people and they should maintain a balance of both. Also agree that they should not charge 10% more to people who use this lane.
A blanket 10% discount should apply to everyone in a store that has self checkout lanes.
As to employees losing jobs because of self checkout, cashier is not a super fulfilling job that needs to exist in abundance. Preferably new jobs open up that offer better opportunities to people than just scanning and bagging things and collecting cash.
Now watch as Hochul kills it because “it’s bad for the economy”.
I mean overall it would be terrible for the economy, grocery stores would just raise prices another 10%.
At first they promised us it would keep the prices down, I already knew that’s not how businesses operate but hey…I got no influence over this so let’s see how it works out.
A few years after grocery prices triple with all kinds of excuses, yes excuses…claims about how what when where and why it happened which all turned out to in reality be nothing more then a temporary nuisance, but prices never went down because duhh it’s a business.
So here we are, paying the wages for jobs we do ourselves and a 200% tip to boot.
I really think we should keep track of the amount of time spent at the self checkout and make a bill for the store manager under the title: “freelance register operator” at a polite $40 bucks an hour.
I think many people already get a 10% discount on all items at self-checkout.
Ok, but since they’re too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.
I mean kinda? There’s a natural price cap in place for basic needs like this because of their relationship to labor. People need to eat to live and work, and if they can’t afford to, must riot or die. This places a limit on the allowable range of grocery praces in relation to wages. If there was 10% slack to raise prices, they would’ve done it already. 'course, that doesn’t account for the effects of benefits like SNAP, if those rise to match.
(Not that can’t do it, if they’ve morons. it would just turn out to be an enormous mistake. 💀)
I guess they could still do it “safely” if everyone switches to using the self-checkout? Then the rise would only hit people on normal checkout. I guess what this does is unevenly distribute the cost of groceries between people that can use the self-checkout and those that can’t. So it like, harms old and disabled people mostly? And people that shop during peak hours when there’s a self-checkout queue.
And also it incentives supermarkets to fire cashiers, like a Pigouvian tax on hiring them. Fuck.
Exactly.
Another increase in the cost of living because of self serve checkouts. Can we just nationalize all corporation right now and divvy them up later?
Can we just nationalize all corporation right now and divvy them up later?
Depends, are you a member of a militant communist group that’s training and drilling for street to street fighting? Do you have a few hundred thousand members?
If yes to both, then yes. If no to either, then we have to do a lot of building class consciousness and organizing first.
What does it feel like answering rhetorical questions?
training and drilling for street to street fighting? Do you have a few hundred thousand members?
JFC you might be the ONLY person on .ML that gets it.
Like I am SOOOOOO SICK of internet edgelords with zero combat skills demanding we burn down society and roll the dice that whoever survives will do a better job.
On the flip side, if you aren’t raising class consciousness at every opportunity and training and drilling for street to street fighting in an attempt to build that movement of a few hundred thousand armed commies, then you don’t get to criticize how anyone else is choosing to go about it, either.
Lenin was still right, and a revolution is still absolutely beyond necessary.
So are we the only 2 people allowed to criticize others? Or only me? lmao
If you’re as serious about raising hundreds of thousands of armed commies(lmfao) as I am than perhaps you’ll accept my criticism and go easier on that no true scottsman fallacy.
Sounds like a tax on those who need a catcher or can’t use the self checkout for various reasons. I could see stores just removing all the staff on the tills and switch to a self checkout only.
yet they are doing the exact opposite and removing self check out. all because they claim there is more theft from self check out
That’s one way to get a discount.
That “$300 billion” number is just completely made up. The math doesn’t even remotely work.
The entire US grocery industry does somewhere around $1 trillion in revenue per year. For self-checkout to save $300 billion, that would mean roughly a third of every dollar spent on groceries was going directly to cashier wages. That is obviously not how grocery stores operate. Total labor costs for a store are only a fraction of their expenses.
And the idea that self-checkout was some massive money-saving miracle ignores the other side of the equation. Those systems cost a lot upfront, require maintenance, and they increase losses from theft, missed scans, and mistakes. A machine replacing a cashier doesn’t magically eliminate costs; it just moves them somewhere else.
There is a reason companies like Walmart, Target, and Dollar General have started putting limits on self-checkout or bringing back more staffed lanes. If self-checkout was saving them hundreds of billions, they wouldn’t be walking it back. They would be installing them everywhere they could.
This is the kind of post that hurts any community built around open discussion and critical thinking. A sensational claim gets repeated because it supports a certain viewpoint, while nobody stops to ask if it is actually true. The truth should matter regardless of whether it supports corporations, consumers, or anyone else. Being intellectually honest means checking the facts first, not just accepting information because it confirms what we already believe.
On a side note, totally support the bill in every way.
I frequent a DG Market in a rural area. They shut the self checkouts down pretty quick due to theft.
I love how you call out their statistics as being bullshit without backing up anything that you say with even the slightest source of your own.
The United States GDP is $30 trillion (this is a 2 second Google search BTW). And I can easily imagine at least a third of that is grocery sales making at least 10 trillion? And New York is one of the largest states by population in the country. So either back up your bullshit with some kind of linked fact or shut the fuck up.
Not OP, but a 2 second Google search turns up that it is in fact about 1 trillion. https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts
I didn’t see your comment until after I deleted mine. But yeah I saw a comment below that actually had statistics from datausa.io.
I still say that they should back up their rebuttal with their own sources instead of just spitting out a number.
To further add some numbers (and their source) to this, the average grocery cashier makes $15-16 an hour, or liberally $35k a year. Note that this isn’t the entire cost of a cashier, the checkout equipment and POS systems cost money too - let’s assume that and the automatic checkout system are in the same order of magnitude. There were about 800k grocery store cashiers in the US in 2017 (source) so that’s about $28 billion, or ~3% of that proposed $1T revenue.
Many factors not included in this calc, more importantly regional variations in costs. Food prices and wages are higher than average in NY, 10% might not be pretty well calculated for that state. Also, human employees must be insured/have benefits, and machines do not require this. That cost savings on stores isn’t in the calculus here.
Also a huge fan of holding food chains accountable for fair pricing. Hope this becomes effective!
I really thought leaving Reddit would reduce the occurrence of this but honestly it was naive of me. This sort of clickbait crap is everywhere including Lemmy. Its unfortunate
Reddit is a cesspool but unfortunately so is the wider media ecosystem for the most part.
Highly upvoted too. Yes it is exactly the same here, just a little different biases.
It’s a shame because I can’t find a platform to get away from this type of nonsense. It’s all the same, false claim is made and nobody even asks if claim is true they just assume it is and start arguing about it in the comments.
Like, what’s the point? Wish there was a platform similar to this that actually permanently banned people sharing blatantly false or misleading content.
It’s how media works, rage get’s click and the lack of critical thinking skills is incredible prevalent everywhere.
This is why I always skip a few items at self checkout, if you don’t want to pay the cashier, then you’ll pay me instead
Is there no scale? Do you pocket the item? How does this work?
If you scan one item and put two on the scale, it will usually just accept it.
The scales and the items aren’t all that accurately documented, so it doesn’t always know the difference.
They will increase prices by 10% to offset this.
Grocery prices have gone up 25% to 30% since 2020. It has been at least three full years since the pandemic was declared over. And food prices have gone up at around 10% since then.
They don’t need an excuse to add 10%, they’re doing it anyway.
Sources:
https://americandefault.org/statistics/grocery-price-increase-since-2020/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2025/june/food-price-inflation-slowed-in-2023-and-2024
General inflation has went up 30% since 2020. So it matches food increases perfectly.
They saw how popular Mamdami is and saw the writing on the wall.
We don’t need to replace every single one of them, just enough to scare the rest.
