Work Reform

It seems like they will just mark everything up by 10% and then give that discount at self checkout. So they will pocket even more while harming those who don't use self checkout.

Or eliminating cashiers altogether.

honestly just cap executive pay. nothing they can do then

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.

This is a good intentioned, well-principled idea, but it's a ham-fisted implementation that isn't going to have the intended effect and extremely easy to work around.

Can we go for upcharges on food items for modifying them next? If you are going to charge me $0.30 for adding tomatoes to a sandwich, you better damn well reduce the price by $0.30 when I remove tomatoes from a sandwich.

This is getting so out of hand in the USA.

Fun fact: With very little effort, you can give yourself a discount at checkout!

Unethical corporations are humanity's predators and we should hurt them however we can.

I didn't have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I'm doing somebody else's job as a customer, the company is saving money.

This is why I try to avoid self checkout. If I'm getting like 2 things and there's already a line, sure, maybe.... But if the lines are short, even if I only have a couple of things, I'll visit a real cashier.

Not because I need help with it, and not because I want to "stick it to the man" or anything. I want to be part of the metric that continues to justify that a cashier is still a position to keep, and pay someone for. I do it so that there will still be cashier's in the future, and someone can put food on their table because I didn't choose to do free labor for the 0.1%.

I know, I know. I'm so selfish, I should tHiNk oF ThE sHaReHoLdErS....

The discount comes from entering the code of the cheapest type of item no matter what item I picked up. Organic lady finger bananas? Looks like bulk Cavendish to me. I'm not being paid enough to know the difference when I'm using self checkout, a banana is a banana.

Ok, but since they're too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.

There may be an unintended consequence of this. Corpos love to optimize to minimize any hits to their bottom line.

I could see any of these possibilities as a reaction:

• Self checkouts become overwhelmed so stores remove remaining paid cashiers to add more self checkout lanes.
• Self checkouts are reduced or removed to avoid giving any discounts.
• I believe I read that grocery margins are thin at the store and are much higher for manufacturers. I could see stores increasing prices across the board to recoup costs.

Hard to know for sure, the people seem to just rarely get a W these days that isn’t immediately wiped out by something else.

Personally, I greatly prefer these anyway.

As someone with social anxiety and ADHD, standing in line with a ton of people and then having to interact with a cashier is something I love to avoid.

That being said, I wouldn't mind a discount at all 😁

They will increase prices by 10% to offset this.

How about food is a human right and should be free at point of purchase, lol.

Edit: lmao at the three American or Israeli downvoters. Eat shit, fuckers.

EU should take note.

Unless I'm in a huge hurry I'll wait in the cashier queue, to do my tiny bit to help preserve jobs.

Holy shit, that’s more than the employee discount I got working in retail.

I'd say that self-checkouts are fundamentally a good thing, just like other forms of increased productivity are a good thing – but in today's society they can both lead to unemployment and lower wages. That is unnecessary.

300 billion in pure profits to executives… that could have ended hunger in the US last year.

So the next time you use the self checkout, remember to glance over at the lone cashier who lives in your neighborhood, look them in the eye and make sure they know about your excitement to be working for the shareholders for free now instead of their former colleagues. And if on the drive home you see their former colleague is getting evicted because they were laid off, make sure to honk, lean out your window and let them know how much you enjoyed the sweet song of “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

I understand, even agree with the principal.
But don't grocery stores average low single digit margins? A universal 10% discount might not be workable. Unless the point is to eliminate self-checkout. But then why not simply do that?

I'm very much in favor of this. They place the burden of work on the customers, so they should compensate them.

This is why I always skip a few items at self checkout, if you don't want to pay the cashier, then you'll pay me instead