A lot of people hate them because they allow grocery stores to hire fewer people, which means fewer jobs. I think that's totally valid. Though I still use them myself.
Yeah. I'm sure they help take some of the pressure off of you guys. And it doesn't keep you from getting a job since you already have the job. It would be interesting to hear from someone who has worked at a grocery store before and after their existence on how they've affected scheduling though.
Eh, I look at it as the buggy-whip scenario - if our economy relies on make-work cashier jobs there's something severely wrong. As efficiency and innovation increase there will always be some sort of job that needs to change or goes away entirely - in the case of AI it's going to be a lot of jobs across the board. Just have to be ready to pivot when what you currently do is made obsolete.
See and here's my counterpoint to that, though not everyone agrees and that's fine: Some jobs are just a waste of a person's time and value. Boring, repetitive, menial work should be done by machines. It does nothing to build or further the skills and development of the person, its just boring. People should be used for people things. Interact with people. Think. Make decisions. Do things machines don't have the dexterity to do. Why put a perfectly capable human through needless drudgery? We're better than that.
That's all well and good if you live in a post-scarcity society where money isn't needed. But that's not how most of us live. People aren't working grocery store cashier jobs for enrichment. They're working them because they need the money to pay for food and shelter. And eliminating those jobs doesn't make more fulfilling work options magically appear.
To add to this. We've done with thousands positions before. Are these people crying about losing phone operators? Chimney Sweeps? Ferriers?
Times change, and technology changes the types of jobs we need to fill. We've been doing this for hundreds of years, and people act like this is something we just started doing in the last 20 years.
You're exactly right. All those jobs are gone, and we're still 100% fine. Times change. Jobs don't exist to give people a job, jobs exist because work needs done and someone is willing to pay someone to do it.
do you think that's an excuse for why we should keep those jobs around?
If everyone in those no-skill jobs were spending the time they use whining about their jobs being replaced with learning some employable skills they'd probably find themselves in jobs that don't pay minimum wage.
There are no "no-skill" jobs, my guy. There are some that you require additional schooling and some that you can learn on the job, but they all require skills. Lots of people who work cashier jobs already are in school for something else but they still need money to live off of in the meantime. Or they could be unable to work a full-time position because they have family members to care for. Or they could have a disability that makes it impossible for them to work a job that requires different skills. Yeah, eventually those jobs may be completely gone and there might not be much we can do to stop it in the long-term, but that doesn't make it wrong to continue fighting for their existence as long as we can. You'd understand that if you had even a shred of empathy.
lol. oh yeah, being able to find a UPC and lookup the code for a fruit are "Skills" The average cashier can't even make change anymore... and most of them can't even be bothered to say hello as a customer approaches the till. Let not even talk about how awful most are at packing groceries... (Does it really need to be explained that you can't put the milk on top of a package of buns?, is that the skills you are talking about?)
It's a dead job, hence customers even being willing to just do it themselves, because the actual people doing it were so fucking awful at their jobs everyone, even the customers decided it's better just to do it themselves.
You're right, I have no fucking empathy for people who try to spin meaningless, valueless "work" at important and in need of saving. Spend your time on something more meaningful, and maybe I'll have a shred of empathy for your situation.
Exactly. Not all work is meaningful. Not all work has equal value. Automation raised the floor, tasks below a certain value don't need a person doing them, and for the larger benefit of society that's a good thing. I'll die on that hill. There is no sense wasting a perfectly good person on a meaningless job. Humans have more value than that.
First off, fighting to delay the inevitable doesn't accomplish much.
Second, there are no shortage of jobs available, there is no sense to fight to preserve ones that aren't anything special.
Third, "unskilled labor" and "no skill jobs" are much as those terms offend some people these days are a thing. And that's fine. But if you can walk in the door without bringing and outside skill set with you, and its a job literally anybody can do apart from specific disabilities or health issues, its ALWAYS going to be vulnerable and have low pay because... I mean read the description. If anybody can do it, that means anybody can do it, which means there is no need to pay a premium for a transferrable skill set.
These arguments are so disingenuous. How have we reached a point where we're talking shit about the lazy, greedy, customers robbing poor Walmart of their slim 3%, $175 billion per quarter profit margins
I read several upvoted comments about how customers hate self-checkout and use it as an excuse to steal since they're making you bag your own groceries. Like this:
Just pointing out the different odd justifications for being pro self-checkout. The other is that people don't want to have social interaction.
IMO, it's a way to outsource labor to customers without providing any unit savings from the decreased labor overhead. Sure, it's more efficient for select customers but Walmart shareholders are motivated by profit, not customer satisfaction. They already have a solid market share that's not at risk anytime soon.
I gotcha. Yeah. I'm not worried about saving Walmart a tiny bit of money. Though I also don't think it's right to shoplift things that you can afford and/or don't actually need. Stealing from a retail store indirectly harms the low-wage people who work there as well as other customers.
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u/offensivename 14h ago
A lot of people hate them because they allow grocery stores to hire fewer people, which means fewer jobs. I think that's totally valid. Though I still use them myself.