I love self-checkout.

In college I worked at a big department store in the front-end, and eventually became a manager. I trained people on how to use the cash register, and it was the one thing that pretty much everyone with a pulse was expected to do. And it was the easiest thing to train. Why is this?

There have been decades upon decades of software design involved. I have a ton of criticisms of capitalism for how it often over-optimizes things or optimizes for the wrong things, but POS software is something that (at least in my time there) was mostly free of the bloat and nonsense that management usually tries to cram everywhere. In every programming course I have ever taken, one of the first examples taught is sone sort of basic POS interface for something (usually a pizza shop). It's universal and one of the most translatable skills- the POS system I used at my uncle's pizza shop was very similar to the one I used working at a bowling alley, and also similar to the one I used at the department store. Which is also similar to the software used at every store with self-checkout I've ever been to.

The worst parts of cashiering for me was the human interaction. Touching the toy that someone's snotty child has had in their mouth throughout the whole shopping trip. Getting hit on by people I wasn't interested in. People in a bad mood looking for someone to take it out on. As a customer, I always hated dealing with slow cashiers, or the rare cashier who didn't know what they were doing, or the cashier that was super chatty and bubbly. My goal, on both sides, was always to minimize the time spent facilitating the transaction so we could all get on with our lives.

From a management perspective, we had 14 lanes but usually only 2 or 3 open at once on a weekday. If there was a sudden rush we would call up more employees from elsewhere. Weekends we would have more staff, maybe 6-8 cashiers for most weekends. On Thanksgiving weekend we would usually have to have about 16-18 people on the schedule- enough to cover breaks, help to restock receipt paper, coverage for people calling off, etc.

All of these problems are solved by self-checkout. I do see the problem where this is costing jobs. It's often helpful to have humans around who can answer questions or deal with problems. Most stores I've been to lately have a combination- a section of self-checkout lanes with somewhere around 4-12 lanes overseen by 1 employee, plus some number of lanes with cashiers.

In theory this should lead to cost savings which should be passed on to the consumer. More efficiency means increased productivity, so we all need to be working less, right? The problem is capitalism- the people with power take these efficiency gains as profits for themselves instead of sharing them with society. There have been plenty of studies showing things like how we work more hours on average than a medieval peasant, or showing that if labor hours went down from productivity gains we would be working ~11 hours per week.

Receipt checking is a separate thing. Costco has 2 employees check me out: one to unload and re-lpad the cart, one scanning things go the register. And a 3rd person at the door checks my receipt, even though I didn't do any self-checkout at all.

Part of the pain is transition. We still have 80 year old people trying to write checks, or who never moved on from the days when you had to manually swipe the credit card imprinter. In a couple decades these people will be gone and will be replaced by Gen Alpha adults who think I'm weird for carrying a piece of plastic on me instead of having a smartwatch with my accounts tied to it that just automatically pays.