this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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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 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
Highly upvoted too. Yes it is exactly the same here, just a little different biases.
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 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.