Ah, probably is there already?
Gonna be MORE anyways coming…..
They can be faster to get thru….
They of course mean the store you are in will have less cashiers on the payroll…
The store is actually making YOU do the cashier’s job, eh?
And of course….. They can be annoying…
….As of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 3.5 million Americans were employed as cashiers. The bureau’s 10-year forecast shows only a 1 percent reduction of these positions (just under 31,000 jobs), but this decrease has to be understood in the context of another trend: the rise of retail. The National Retail Federation says the sector grew nearly 4 percent last year and predicts it will do so again this year.
Beck tells Vox, “There are a number of reasons why retailers have invested in self-scan technologies. The first and most important is that it enables them to reduce their costs considerably. The largest proportion of a retailer’s cost is their wage bill.”
In one store, he added, he saw one supervisor tasked with overseeing 23 self-checkouts at once.
Walmart is the largest employer in the United States, and therefore defines what it means to be an American service worker. The company has a storied tradition of labor law violations, and a list of settlements longer than even a world-champion shoplifter’s haul diary, stemming from massive groups of workers alleging that they’ve been denied lunch breaks and overtime pay, illegally fired for participating in union activities, punished for taking medical leave, and held below the poverty line by an hourly wage rate that has barely budged since the 1980s. Now, Walmart will define what it means to be an American self-checkout supervisor.
“We look at what options can we provide for the customer,” Walmart director of corporate communications Ragan Dickens tells Vox. “What do they like? What are they responsive to? That’s where we begin the journey. We tested self-checkout in the early 2000s. They responded greatly, we piloted it in the early part of the decade, and now it’s in all of our stores.”
Dickens says that Walmart is piloting “large basket” self-checkout at one store somewhere on the East Coast, which will make it easier for customers to ring themselves up even when they’re buying a lot of items — even a cartful. It’s structured in a semicircle leading around the register, letting customers bag up their own purchases and load them back into their cart on the other side….
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Why contort to shuck jobs and replace them with technology (which currently costs $30,000 to $60,000 per station to install) if nobody likes them, the security measures are another source of confusion and expense, and they’re eroding the relationship between retailer and consumer to the point where people feel they are morally obligated to steal?
Andrew Murphy, a managing partner at the venture capital firm Loup Ventures, thinks he has the answer for me.
“My quick take to answer your question directly is that self-checkout is a stepping-stone technology to true automated retail that will quickly get passed by.” He pauses. “Quickly may be the wrong word.”
Customers don’t want to do retailers’ jobs, he agrees. They’re smart enough to know that retailers are simply replacing cashiers with the customers themselves, training them to use simplified cash registers and eliminating cashier positions. He’s not saying this in any kind of moral outrage; he’s just stating the facts as someone who sometimes considers investing in new retail technology….
Note…..
This linked piece is pretty long….
It also describes how people can and use the machines to cheat the stores out of money….
image…chris jones .net