i dont even steal from these, i just prefer less interaction and faster checkout 🤷
If a cashier scans something incorrectly, its their mistake. If I scan something incorrectly, its theft. I’d rather not take on that liability.
Are you sure that it’s considered theft just for an incorrect scan?
They even call the security and police. Yes, they call it thief.
That’s a decision made about you by other people who don’t know you, and aren’t inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Are you sure it’s theft if you scan something incorrectly? Seems like a huge allegation.
i dont think ive ever scanned anything incorrectly. even if i did, it would have been a piece of fruit. in the case that anyone ever speaks to me about it in the future, i will just tell them “oh, oops” and then fix it. doesnt seem like much of a liability to me.
on the other hand, when i ring things through, you better believe i notice if a price is off, then i have them fix it if its higher than it should be and i say nothing if its lower. sounds like they are taking the liability as it were, which again i dont think is a serious factor.
Is it EVER lower? Every time in recent history that a price has been wrong for me, it’s been wrong because they “forgot” to put a sale into the system. But you better be sure the old sales are wiped immediately. I imagine this is because they expire automatically, but there’s a reason the system is made that way.
Hanlon’s razor is reversed when dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations.
Hanlon’s razor only applies if it CAN be attributed to incompetence.
When a pattern emerges of it only happening when it benefits the company, that stops being attributable to incompetence. It takes effort to make that happen.
often, yes
Depends on jurisdiction. In Germany, in order to qualify as theft, there needs to be intent. So just an error is not enough.
How to prove “intentional vs. not-intentional”? Easy: the whiter and richer you are, the more likely it is for you to convince everybody that it was a honest mistake ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so it. If I make a mistake, I’d be sorry, I’d pay for it and that’s it.
A friend of mine who works at the headquarters of a large local retailer keeps getting stopped by shop detectives of the same shop chain, even though he didn’t do anything suspicious. Well, anything apart from being the son of parents from Afghanistan.
I would pay for a mistake, but I wouldn’t feel sorry. They want me to be perfect, but I’m just a customer, so no reason to feel bad if I type it on wrong.
Well, the main point is that for some demographics a situation like this is a simple mistake with no consequences while for others it’s a direct way to talk to the police.
In the US almost all things that are tried in a criminal court require the concept of “mens rea” which means “guilty mind.” That requires the proof of intent. Not everything does and I’m not sure about retail theft.
I believe the distinction is usually criminal vs non criminal charges usually. Most criminal things require you to have intended to do the bad thing. That doesn’t mean that you intended the outcome, just the act that caused it.
If you intentionally kill someone: murder. If you intentionally attack someone and they die: a lesser type of murder. If you deliberately decide to not maintain some tall thing and it falls and kills someone: negligent manslaughter.
If you’re on a construction site using a nail gun and you follow your training and check what’s behind stuff and put up rope to keep people out of where you can’t see and a nail misses a stud and hits someone killing them: tragic accident. You didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.For civil things they can often just argue that you caused harm, so you’re responsible for some portion of it. That usually doesn’t apply to retail theft because “left with paper towel unpaid, we stopped them and took back the paper towel” doesn’t actually have any harm. There’s nothing to fix.
While there’s definitely dick baggery in retail theft prevention and store security, I have my doubts that the people complaining here about it at the self checkout are actually the victims of it.
I actually worked Asset Protection for Walmart many years ago. This was Illinois and every state can have their own laws. The majority of what we caught was just retail theft. However, sometimes people would run, fight, or steal a large amount, basically if they did something more than just trying to steal a DVD or something. In those cases occasionally the police would do more. I once stopped a group of teenagers that all fought and ran, the K9 unit came… They threw the book at them. But one of the things the police did is found that they had come to the store without money. Because of that the police suggested they had come to the store with the intent to steal so they actually increased the offense from retail theft to burglary. I’m sure all of that was plea bargained down, but it gave the DA more leverage at the plea bargain.
That’s why I hesitate to say retail theft requires that intentionality. Maybe it’s just a lesser form of intentionality? As in you didn’t come to the store with the sole intention to steal (burglary in the previous example) but it was a crime of opportunity. That said at least way back when I was doing it, we weren’t watching self checks for people making mistakes. We really didn’t watch self checks at all unless we were already watching you for some other reason (probably swapping a price tag, those stickers on the foam coolers come off real easy and suddenly that computer rings up as a cooler). I imagine with the tech out there now they could have AI watch self checks. My guess for that is that they would wait until you’ve done it several times and can demonstrate a pattern and charge with felony retail theft after a higher dollar amount.
I’m no lawyer though, I haven’t worked that role in 26 years, these are just guesses. I don’t like using self checks because the shadow work, I’m not concerned about this legal issue.
Right but you’re also arguing the case for Criminal charges sticking. The Arrest itself Can have a huge impact on someone’s life, Even If charges are later dropped
I don’t think I’m making that argument at all. I’m just relaying what I witnessed when I worked first hand in that industry ~26 years ago.
No one is gonna report you to police for failing to scan a €0.50 piece of bread when doing €80 worth of grocery shopping
It very much depends on your skin colour. Me, as a white guy in Austria, no, they wouldn’t report me. I’d be very sorry about the mistake and I’d pay for it, and of course it would just be a mistake.
A friend of mine who’s parents are from Afghanistan, he gets stopped all the time by store detectives, even though he works as a software developer for the same company. He’s never made a scanning mistake, but if he would, there would be no doubt they’d report him. They stop him even though he did nothing suspicious apart from having slightly darker skin and a beard.
Hello from France. Our countries don’t admit to themselves how racist they still are and how much of a poison it is. I hope your friend is OK.
Yeah, he was born here, so it’s not something new to him.
A couple years ago, I accidentally walked out without paying. I did slide my credit card but didn’t pay attention to what happened. I thought I was done and left, but apparently it didn’t actually work. A minute later they chased me down, but they just let me come back and pay. No big deal.
I don’t know if it was because I was cooperative, or claimed innocence or was white
It’s also helpful that I have notification on for that card. I proved to myself immediately that the charge didn’t work
Lol, in Finland you definitely will get reported for forgetting to scan a 0,50€ yoghurt. And it will go to court.
That’s crazy, it’s the tills job to weigh the items and report error if it doesn’t add up, how would that be my fault? I’d hope to be innocent unless cameras prove I put the yoghurt in my pocket.
Not that I love cameras tracking my every move, but that’s another topic…
Yeah if I steal from them it’s only by mistake.
I’m the opposite though. I always go to the line with a person because I feel rushed in the self checkout if it’s busy.
I completely refuse to use the self-checkout lanes. every mistake we make there helps correct the process that will eventually ensure that the people who need jobs in a grocery store no longer have a job.
Fuck training their robots for them.
thats funny ive never felt rushed at a self checkout, but i can see what you mean.
I almost exclusively use self checkout because it is quicker, and I felt rushed exactly once because a line was forming. Funny thing is, because I felt rushed I literally forgot to pay and just walked out with a free load of groceries. I did come back the next day and told them, and asked to pay because I didn’t want to risk getting banned from that store, as it is the closest one to me. They said nobody ever comes back to do that lmao
I go to the cashier when I can. But when they only have one and that cashier’s line is 8 deep and they all have full carts and I have two items, both of which are frozen, I’m using self checkout. I can’t help it if the store cheaps out on cashiers.
That’s a staffing problem…if they paid another cashier they wouldn’t have as many thefts
You are not faster than a cashier.
What a strange thing to say.
Yes I am. Worked in retail for 8 years. They are slow because they are paid by the hour, not the transaction.
I use an app to scan items when I pick them up and immediately put them into my bag. The whole self-checkout process takes 10s to scan a QR code and pay. It is much more faster and pleasant.
Wait… I need time to know more about this magical process.
Here in Estonia, major stores (I think we have 5 chains) offer mobile apps that let you scan items. You pick something up, scan it, and put it in your bag. By the time you arrive at the self‑service checkout, everything is packed and you only have to pay, which takes mere seconds.
That’s amazing and I am so jealous of that!
I’m faster than queuing for a cashier.
And if it’s one where you take the scanner round the shop with you, it’s certainly faster than unpacking it all and repacking it.
No, it’s way more relaxed and honestly I don’t wanna speak to someone after a whole day of yapping at the office. I just wanna pack the groceries into my bag in peace
I’m faster than the line of people buying ice and lotto tickets and cigarettes and paying with a check.
obviously my self checkout experience is faster, or i would go to a cashier. we’ve been over this.
It’s faster as long as not everyone is doing self-chechout.
we’ve been over this.
Who?
Yes, but the cashier has a line of people waiting, and the self checkouts don’t.
So I get a massive head start, and I still finish first.
There would not be a line at the cashier if there were more of them. There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out. The self checkout created the problem.
There are fewer checkouts available because the space is wasted on the self-check out.
Let’s not pretend they open all the checkouts and it’s space keeping them limited.
No, this is wrong in my experience. The store would only staff as many lanes as needed to keep the lines short enough that people wouldn’t complain. So, there was ALWAYS a line of at least three people. That was policy, not a limitation of the number of lanes.
The self-checkout machines are always open, so if you go during any time except the busiest, there is no wait. Self-checkout, in my experience, has been faster, and it’s not an illusion. I shop in the early morning, and there is never a wait for a machine, I just walk right up and start scanning. Before self-checkout, even in the early morning, when they’d only have two lanes open, there was still a wait.
Self-checkout did NOT create the problem of waiting, store policy did.
Not true, there are less because it costs money to pay for more cashiers
The problem is the opposite. There are too many regular checkout lines and not enough self checkouts. Almost every grocery store I shop at has like 12 self checkouts (taking the place of 4 previously regular checkouts) and then like 10-15 regular checkouts, of which never more than 4 or 5 (sometimes less) have cashiers in them. How about turning 5 or more of those regular checkout lanes you never use into 20 more self checkouts?
How about hiring 5 or more additional cashiers to relieve congestion?
Why have jobs for jobs sake?
It’s not “for jobs sake.” It is to reduce congestion and wait times for people trying to check out. It’s got the added benefit of reducing shrink by having a trained and practiced professional doing the labor quicker and with greater ease and accuracy than the customers would do themselves.
Sure, but I feel like only a smaller mom and pop type of establishment is going to forgo extra profits and provide more jobs for the people in their community in this way. There is no way a Kroger or Walmart is going to do that.
Idk how it works in Burgerland, but where i come from most checkouts aren’t occupied. They’re usually on demand, and even then they rarely use all of them.
This might perhaps be true in the land of XXL everything, but in the space it takes to have 3 cashiers you can easily install 2 rows of 4 self checkout machines, and in Europe space tends to be more scarce.
They are a massive space saver, and when that’s the space you have, 8 self-checkouts and a cashier have more throughput than 4 cashiers (which don’t even tend to be staffed all at once).
If you want to use the space argument 6 self checkouts take the space of 2 cashiers
This is bananas, and this is also bananas… It’s odd that all this produce is bananas. Oh well, I’m not trained to tell the difference.
This is indeed 4011
4011
I have no idea why I remember that one but not other ones.
It’s bananas you can only remember that one produce code. I wonder what it’s for
Whoops! It seems that my finger has slipped and picked the cheapest variety of banana, out of the 11 varieties of bananas.
I did accidentally steal something the other day when one item stuck to the back of an identical one so I thought I was getting 6 but accidentally got 8 instead.
Just laid them flat on the counter then scan scan scan scan scan. Didn’t even notice until I got home.
“Hi sir, would you like to step over here and use the self-checkout?”
“No thanks - I don’t work here.”
The complaining is an important part of the theatrics.
I used to work with a very wealthy man. He owned a very successful side business and had some very good customers. He would tell me about how he would exaggerate all of his complaints about how much money he’s going to lose when something or other happens. And I saw him do it to people at work. One of his major skills was playing the victim. I lost all hope of feeling bad for business owners once I realized that was a thing. Meanwhile, he has a huge house on the palisades outside of New York City and all his kids went to private schools from preschool to college.
When he left, he tried to give me his bill oRiley CD collection.
I know some people think that self-checkout is making the customer do the cashier work for free, but honestly, having experienced it both ways, I’d much rather do it myself. It’s not like I am doing anything else at the time, and shopping already involves something very similar, regardless.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves and pushed the cart around, then if some stores started making people push their carts around themselves, you’d hear the same complaints.
But I am already picking up each item, one by one, when I put them into the cart. To me, it’s really not that different to pick up the items one by one, scan them, and put them into the bag.
My local grocer did a scan as you go before COVID and it was so fantastic. Everything just got bagged as we went and all you had to do was scan the self checkout till and weigh your produce at the end. So nice.
No idea. This just feels like an old person thing. Never met someone young who complains about self checkout as long as it’s working.
I imagine that if grocery stores had started with each person having a personal shopper who picked things off the shelves
They basically did. They had a counter and you asked the shopkeeper at the counter to get stuff for you. So there were no trolleys being pushed around, but someone was still getting stuff for you. And you had to wait while they did it.
Nowadays I order my groceries online and go pick them up. There are two parts that take time: waiting for the guy to come out with everything after parking, and taking everything out of the crates they come in and putting them in the reusable bags in my car. Back when I cycled to the supermarket, I’d pause on the way and announce I was already there when I was 2 minutes away to cut down on the first time, too…
DIY makes sure nobody puts the cans on top of the bread or bags raw meat in with the lettuce, too.
Back in the olden days baggers were properly trained, too. They had competitions and everything.
A bunch of smaller places around me just totally shut down the self checkout. It’s actually incredibly frustrating because there will be a line and I could just do it myself and be done. But no, everyone has to wait for a single cashier now because people were stealing. Just make up your mind. Get rid of it entirely or use it.
Why would they pay more cashiers if you shop there anyway?
Probably because the nearest similar store is far enough away to make it unreasonable to go anywhere else.
I don’t particularly like shopping at Target, but it’s sometimes the best option for me. Except my local Target’s management refuses to hire enough employees to properly staff the store. Unpacked boxes of products crowd the unorganized and uncleaned aisles. Employees look stressed and generally unhappy. Half the time there’s a single cashier or no cashiers, and the self checkout is limited to 10 items (and is often closed, presumably because no loss prevention staff is on duty to monitor it). One time I had ~20 items and there was no cashier. I was about to rage quit (seriously considered just rolling my cart out the doors) when an employee saw me and opened a register just for me. (She clearly was stressed and overworked but took pity on me. I made sure to rate her highly on the survey thing printed on the receipt.)
The Target two towns over is the opposite: well staffed, clean, plenty of cashiers on duty. Staff there seem happier too, presumably because they aren’t overworked and/or are paid better. But the local one is 5 minutes away and the farther one is 30 minutes on the highway. I’ll still go to the farther one if it makes sense and fits in my schedule, but it rarely does.
It’s more shocking to me that a target could be a best option for anything. The one by me has nothing in it that you can expect to buy. Food? Lol… maybe some prepackaged brownies. If you’re lucky. Toaster broke? Lol, they don’t sell that at Target. Need a hammer? Lol…
It’s almost the fabled concept of “free market” where people are “voting with their dollar” is mainly a fiction.
It’s not shoplifting, its an employee discount.
It’s my compensation for doing their work for them.
The industry term for that is “shrinkage”.
I was shopping in the pool!
I thought that was used in the porn industry.
That’s “fluffing”.
I thought that was when you stuffed your mouth full of marshmallows and then give head
That’s a fluffernutter.
That sounds dangerous.
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I love self-checkout. The line moves much faster. But it is important to learn which machines work well and which ones are most glitchy. Kind of like learning which lane has The World’s Slowest Checkout Clerk.
Then you choose that one.
No, when I see she’s working I definitely go to self-check.
If I only have a few things, its great, usually shorter line and scanning my own stuff isn’t a big deal.
When I have a cart full of stuff, I’d rather have the expert just churn through scanning all of that stuff. Especially if there’s someone packing it into a bag at the same time.
I hate the ones at Kroger. If you scan stuff too fast, it freaks out and calls the employee over.
Like, I’m talking about going slower than an actual cashier.
I tried scanning one of those digital coupon things they print on paper and the employee was called over three times in that one transaction.
And if you ring up alcohol you can’t ring up anything else until you get cleared. Other chains I’ve been to let you keep scanning and you get cleared when they have time.
I don’t get why anybody complains about self checkout. I think we’ve had them for a decade in Poland. Everything works and is much faster than a normal checkout. At this point I’m actually avoiding the few stores that don’t have them yet.
Where I live there is always a line for the self checkout. The self checkout machines are slower than the manned checkout machines, you can only pick up one item at a time, scan it, place it in the bagging area and pause for a second before touching anything else or else the whole system has a meltdown and then you need a person to come fix it. A checker at a normal scanner is at least 5x faster than even the best person at the self checkout. And as an added bonus, you also get a camera in your face and monitor showing the recording so you can see unflattering videos of yourself while working to appease the fussy machine. Also, the ergonomics are shit if you have more than a small basket of stuff.
I think they all deliberately manufactured consent for this bullshit by dramatically understaffing the regular checkouts for at least a year before installing the self checkouts. But that part may be a bit conspiratorial given the ultra slim margins on groceries.
You must not remember the time when enough cashiers actually were on hand. Used to be just as fast when all lanes had a cashier at them.
I know this is a radical idea but I believe that if we can, via technological and logistical improvements, eliminate the need for people to sit (or dog forbid stand, like in the US) at a till for 8 hours per day doing the menial task of ringing up items, then we should do that. Even if it comes at the cost of people sometimes having to wait a couple of minutes in line.
BOOO!
Your idea is basically “make customers wait, not employees”
It’s not an actual improvement until they can eliminate human labor. Until then it’s just pushing work unto customers.
For a given number of cashiers on staff, having at least some self-checkouts makes everything move faster. If a self checkout takes twice as long while you’re actually at it but a single cashier can run six of them, that’s still three times as many customers handled by that cashier. Those numbers are made up, of course, but the point is that unless you’re hiring so many cashiers that there are never any queues, it’s not necessarily slower to have self-checkouts, it just shifts time from waiting in the queue to scanning items
In practice, stores just use it as an excuse to understaff.
That leads to some fraction of customers defending the corner cutting because it’s faster than the understaffing it caused.
Having worked as a supermarket cashier prior to self checkouts becoming a thing and in the early days of them getting established - early enough that some people genuinely demanded to see my manager because they wanted to be paid the 20 pence that they would have earned working as a cashier for the duration that it took them to scan their things - my experience is that they were staffing that low anyway. There were just longer queues.
Agreed about the standing for a while shift, that was likely one of the most grueling jobs, but making me do the job with zero benefits was not the correct solution. I do like the idea of grocery pickup, (delivery for those that can’t get to the store) that was a good improvement. My only gripe there is getting the worst produce available everytime. Making pickup viable only to prepackaged goods. I’m also a social individual and have grown many friendships with cashiers through the years. Some greeting me by name as i enter a shop. Thats a level of welcoming that no technology will ever achieve. If a robot greeted me by name as i walked in a store it would be extremely creepy and off-putting. I’d likely avoid that place at all cost.
The benefit is that you are no longer paying for someone else to do something you can do yourself without costing any time (because you’d just have to wait for them to do it). Would you like to go back to having everything behind the counter so that the shopkeeper would relieve you of the task of getting things off the shelves?
Yes. Yes i would. Thats my preferred shopping experience. Personal and social.
🤢
Better go to a fancy boutique then
The benefit is that you are no longer paying for someone else to do something you can do yourself
Oh, I’m still paying for it. Paying much more than I used to, actually.
Just now I have to pay for it and do it myself.
I would not because I like to be able to browse all the available options and read the labels. I’m also fussy about my produce selection. I’ll only use grocery delivery for produce as a last resort , like if I’m stuck at home sick.
Self checkout doesn’t eliminate that need though. It just pushes the labor onto the consumer. The job still needs doing. Now you are just the one doing it, for free.
People still need to earn money, though. You advocate for all cashiers to lose their job.
(I have been a cashier in an electronics store and loved the task, minus the customer relations.)
No, what I advocate for is a society where no one has to do labour. Very different.
How am I supposed to survive until we get there?
Not where I live.
There are generally twice as many self checkouts as there were lines before, and they still have a few regular lanes in place with one or two available for those that want assistance.
Self checkout where I live is far faster than the old way.
Having to scan them at the station, yeah cashiers would probably be faster, but where I live you get the scanning tool as you shop so I just scan and bag it as soon as I’ve taken something off the shelf. All I do at self-checkout is pay what I scanned, grab my already prepared bag and leave. Unless those cashiers are walking with me around the store there’s no chance they’ll be faster than how I go shopping.
Thats something i could get behind. The only place around me that i know of that does anything similar is Sams club and you have to use your own phone to do that.
Unless its Walmart, it will have 10 lanes and 3 of them are open. Same with the self checkout.
There was a time they all had cashiers. Not just during busy seasonal rushes either. Sometime in the late nineties this became no longer true.
I remember when you stood in front of the counter and told the cashier what you needed and they had to bring You everything from the shelves one by one. Nothing ever was faster than self checkouts.
I’m pretty damn old but I don’t remember that personally. Just in movies. I do remember the glory days when every single register had a cashier, and a bagger, and that was much faster than self checkout. Especially as it is now, with a bunch of unstaffed registers and a line waiting for the self-service machines.
Most of the stores in my area pulled all but two lanes out to put more self checkout only to also close all but the boxed in sections on either end that were supposed to be 15 or less areas. At this point why don’t they just commit and have a single miserable worker at a single checkout right at the door? At least then they’d be honest about it.
Faster, because real cashiers have strategies like item x 6, and the authority/passcode to use them. And because they do it all day they have muscle memory working for them. We look at a head of lettuce and my brain says “romaine” or “frisee” but their brain says"5046" or whatever the right code is. Or rather it tells their fingers to type the code without interrupting the more important things they’re actually thinking.
That’s one way of looking at it, and I respect it, BUT also think that self-checkouts are a way of eliminating jobs: stores just want to have fewer employees and more benefit. I avoid self-checkout not for convenience, but because I don’t want to contribute to the destruction of jobs.
You’re absolutely right about that point.
I believe the goal should be to improve these worker’s conditions. Make checkout work as comfortable as possible, promote them taking turns and switching tasks so they don’t have to be doing just checkout for 8 hours.
Instead of removing the job, make it less annoying.
You can only complain about being stolen from if you didn’t make record profits.
Have you never met a MAGAt? They can (and WILL) complain about anything and everything, and completely shout down any evidence of their deceptiveness.
Not sure what that has to do with my comment though
Im pretty sure you were talking about them not having a legitimate cause for complaint, since they made record profits.
And then WhoIzDiz is saying they complain without a legitimate reason about lots of things.
Not really disagreeing with your point.
Unless you mean you disagree that most of the corporate grocery chins are run by Republicans.
I was sarcastically pointing out that having records profits doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to complain about theft.
Oh! I took it as a serious remark about whining about hungry people pilfering while engaging in wage theft, price gouging, and exploitation of food producers.
Making record profits doesn’t magically make it okay to steal from you. It’s perfectly valid to complain if someone does. This is pretty obvious stuff.
Apparently all that subtext isn’t obvious to everyone…
Who’s running these companies? Who are those companies’ major shareholders?
Again, not really responsive to my comment.
In my country, supermarkets typically make about 2-4% profit, and were marking 4-6% 10 years ago. So I guess they can complain…
Yup, those are the rules.
How often does Winnie the Pooh stop by your place? Cuz it sounds to me like you live in Fantasyland.
See page 5. Tesco is generally the most profitable supermarket in my country.
So those are the facts here in Fantasyland, what have you got?
Read this document by tesco to know the absolute truth about tesco. As if all the creative accounting didn’t happen prior to that disclosure.
Do you know what an audit is?
Can you describe a plausible scenario in which Tesco lies about its profit margin to make it look smaller than it is, bearing in mind the people who matter to Tesco (its shareholders) want its profit margin to be as high as possible?
If you want to pretend that capitalism is all on the up and up and that the systems we used to keep it in check are not all rotting away at their cores while MBAs figure out new and creative ways to hide money in comp packages, stock buybacks, and other bullshit accounting tactics, that is your right. But I’m not hopping on board with you.
I still don’t get why you wouldn’t get a discount for checking yourself out. No wonder all those high-falutin’ CEO’s think consumers are a bunch of dumb schmucks. The real heroes are the clerks who “miss” scanning something from time to time.
I get a five finger discount now and then. Small things usually. I will NOT pay the bag fee if I self checkout, you took away a job for a computer, you can absolutely eat the 25-50 cents worth of bags.
Same reason they don’t pay you for using an atm instead of an expensive teller at an expensive branch
It’s easier To add a fee To a new service even if it’s to save them money, Than it is to start charging for an existing service that used to be central to their business
As an introverted person, I use self-checkout wherever I can. The less I have to talk to random people, the happier I am :)
I’m also strongly for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines, like it happened with washing machines. Let them do that work, and let people enjoy the creative ones.
Is this a metaphor for “AI”.
It is, in the way that it takes away jobs from people, but Lemmy seems to not realise the parallel.
Except being an artist is enjoyable, while being a cashier is very monotonous in a noisy environment. I’m strongly anti-genAI, but I’m all for outsourcing shitty jobs to machines.
And what am I supposed to do when the machine takes my cashier job?
I love self check out, it’s great when you’re only getting a few items. When I shop for more than that there’s the handheld scanners, which are also great
