How China’s unmanned stores allow people to live with almost zero human contact

Two large supermarket chains in my country have been replacing human cashiers with machines where customers can scan their own goods. The cashiers are now working as troubleshooters, helping people who have trouble operating the machines.

The blessing of this is twofold.

1) It's much faster. I have an incentive to scan my goods quickly and pay quickly - I'll be home, doing awesome things, sooner. The cashier has no incentive to work quickly. They'll have to stay at work until 8pm no matter how slow they go. Also, you can put 5 electronic cashiers in the place where 1 human cashier was. Parallelization.

2) The cashiers seem happier in their troubleshooter role than going beep---beep all day.

I really like this development.

It's not easy to live in China with no human contact.