I hate those machines. They've ruined the personality of so many stores I used to like.

Of course, none of the security fuckers stop me (a tall white blonde), but you'd better bet they stop the Black folx.

My girlfriend and I are looking for other options, because fuck that place now. Greed has made the quality of our experience so much worse, while they rake in record profits for shareholders.

@acb @webhat

Also, I'm not their damned employee.

There's an interesting deep dive into the real automatic food machines to be had—if you're interested—like in Japan, which are like glorified microwaves, where you can get food 24/7. The food is still made by humans, and it's packaged into individual servings that get reheated in the machine. One literally has all the packages kept warm and all the machine does is slice it open and dump it in a bowl of heated rice

I got a chance to look into a ramen machine, and there is some amazingly basic tech in there, which is little more than boil water and add it to the freezer dried ramen

cc: @kkarhan @alice

interestingly here in UK all the pharmacies just have normal human cashiers - but long queues, delays and shortages of meds and are frankly miserable places - and I'm already ill if I visit one (or else I wouldn't be there!)

In areas with lower socioeconomic status and more crime, shops selling general groceries (even from the same chain of stores) tend to keep humans behind the tills for security reasons (but they are often behind weapon proof shields)

Fair. But similar arguments can be applied to elevators and elevator operators. I am old enough to remember when every commercial building with elevators that was older than about (SWAG estimate) 15 years old had them.

@acb @webhat

I use it because I can eliminate one human interaction for health reasons, though avoiding small talk is a bonus.

- Obviously all for-profit businesses are incentivized to reduce costs and increase revenue and profit per employee.

And shifting personnel hours works, as it's just neither practical nor feasible to automate shelf-stocking with the chaotic and irrational nature of humans.

- Heck even in Warehouses full automation only works for pre-packaged goods and with custom-built systems which are very inflexible compared to forklifts, industrial high load capacity shelves and pallet (form factor containers and boxes)…

The reason pharmacies in Germany adopt robot shelves is because the pharmacist's time is too expensive to let themcwalk around and fumble in shelves instead of talking to customers.

- Plus the bot can effectively deny ejecting boxes of prescription drugs without a proper prescription and unlike a pharmacist won't budge when held at gunpoint! By the time anyone would've broken into the robot shelf and found the correct shelf with what they came.for, police would've already surrounded them.

- Similarly there are now cash handling machines at my local bakery cuz those reduce insurance premiums against theft and robbery (like CCTV cameras)…

Self-checkouts thus aim to reduce the cost of dealing with smaller purchases by incentivizing those with a few items to use them with dark patterns like less open cashiers and wait times…

They can be useful, for example in a very busy urban shop full of workers purchasing lunch, in other cases they seem not so much to be employed to decrease queueing times for those with small baskets, as to take cashiers off the tills and reduce headcount.

At least I can rest assured that both of the Supermarkten I use are part of the same coop, so hopefully headcount is less of an issue.

When I get off school and work and finally have time to go shopping, I'm dead-tired, don't want to be there, and I genuinely cannot stand the idea of actually checking out all my own crap. Isn't this the whole point of a grocery store is that somebody who knows better can help me out?

I always go in the cashier lane. Luckily, in my town, those lanes have actually been making a comeback over the past year or so.

@acb @webhat

I think NL also automated food sales since decades (with those machines still selling snack food from the wall, something which most other European nations tried and abandoned by the late 1960s), so the precedent of using them to reduce headcount may already have been set..

something else I've noticed (and confirmed by my friend who works in the supermarket) is a lot of staff who would previously have been on tills are now picking groceries for home deliveries, especially in evenings (for deliverynext day)

In Britain supermarkets themselves more often arrange this rather than having Doordash and similar - so some jobs removed from tills are replaced by driving delivery vans (which is better paid, although maybe more intense/stressful and you would need a driving licence and to be slightly older).

I do still see the smaller supermarkets hiring teens, seems no fewer than before and if I were young again I'd prefer this method of working rather than the constant interruptions of moving from shelves back to the till..

I always do shopping late in evening to avoid crowds of people (and busy car park with bad drivers), I've not noticed any major reduction in headcount in the supermarkets, I've got friends who work in them who have said the same and have worked in retail myself in 1980s.

What happens instead is staff are tasked with restocking and tidying up shelves (which in smaller shops they had to previously do *as well* as serve people on checkouts, which was always a pain when working in such places) and monitoring the village shop over 20 years (which recently got self checkouts) they have same number of staff as before.

But this is in a European country with some better employee protection legislation..

https://c.im/@kkarhan/116583530622643280