Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gargoyle | Hacker News Reader

I must be weird. At no time has the idea of a line ever influenced my decision to go into a convenience store.

You must be lucky to live where you do. I’ve definitely timed visits to Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Wal-Mart to avoid long lines at checkout.

The self checkout doesn’t help, it actually takes longer than a good cashier.

Agree; Costco is far more palatable on a Tuesday at 7 PM than on a weekend.

I think of Go as a better self-checkout. Those machines are awful, and Go’s tech basically does the same thing but in a smoother, more scalable way.

>I think of Go as a better self-checkout.

Yeah, I don't think this type of thing is actually that big a deal for a supermarket where stuff needs to be bagged etc.

But it seems like a qualitatively different experience than self-checkout at a convenience store/small grocery store.

I also expect a lot of US readers tend to think in terms of either supermarkets or fairly junky 7-Eleven style convenience stores. But there are a lot of places in Europe where there are more intermediate options like the Marks and Spencer markets.

Amazon Go is much more akin to a 7-11 than to a Trader Joes or Costco. They have yet to show that this model even works on this tiny scale. The capability of this tech to scale up effectively to an actual grocery store much less to a warehouse type store is completely unknown. (I personally wouldn't count on it.)

> The self checkout doesn’t help, it actually takes longer than a good cashier.

Yep. Someone who scans and packs thousands of items a day is going to be much better at it than I am, given that I'd only scan a few dozen items a week.

Unless the lines are really too long, I'll always take a cashier over using the self-checkouts.

Or maybe you've never experienced a convenience store with a significant line.

If there are 2 or 3 people in line that doesn't dissuade me from shopping there, but if I see a long line of a dozen people winding through the store, I almost always go somewhere else.

I've run into that at gas station convenience stores a lot -- I go in for a drink or snack while pumping gas and if there's a long line, then I just go back to my car and leave.

NYC Trader Joe's aren't convenience stores but my shopping times are informed almost entirely by the expected line length.

Or people like me who don't go shopping in convenience stores at Saturday are weird. I only do it under duress if I forgot something the other day, because I know the line will be so damn long.

Happens all the time to me, I'd rather give my money to someone with more appropriate staffing than wait in line to buy something.

So where do you go instead?

Sometimes nowhere, sometimes down the street. I do the same thing for restaurants, if there's a wait or my reservation isn't ready on time I'll go somewhere else. There's tons of competition out there, no need to waste my time for the benefit of a business owner.

>I must be weird. At no time has the idea of a line ever influenced my decision to go into a convenience store.

I've walked into a store to buy something in the half hour before some large lottery is about to close (and everyone seems to be buying tickets), and walked right back out again.

Lines are also the primary reason I don't shop at certain stores (e.g. walmart).

I avoid Safeway and Trader Joe's because the lines are so damn long...

I agree with you, and go one step further. I refuse to use self-checkout. For two reasons.

1. I don't like the thought of contributing to a system that costs people (cashiers) their jobs. 2. The whole reason I go to a store is for customer service. If I wanted self check-out, I'd order online from one of the same-day-delivery outfits.

I don't like the thought of contributing to a system that costs people (cashiers) their jobs.

People in boring, low paid jobs shouldn't be there. There are far better things people can be doing than working a till. The idea that we're doing people a favour by 'enabling' them to have a job when that job is tedious menial work a tiny compute can do is nonsense. We need to automate those jobs away to free people to do more interesting, fulfilling things.

We also need to do things to work out how to enable those people to do more interesting work, like figuring out how to pay people if the free market fails, but that's a separate issue.

Not a separate issue to the person losing their job!

These have to be solved together, or big trouble will be coming.

> or big trouble will be coming

The implication here is that the trouble isn't already on it's way. Those jobs are operating on borrowed time at this point and I think they'll be gone sooner than most people think. This is a problem that we should have started addressing several years ago at least.

>We also need to do things to work out how to enable those people to do more interesting work, like figuring out how to pay people if the free market fails, but that's a separate issue.

Seeing as the free market has deeply failed many, MANY people (and stands to fail even more in the near future), I would hesitate to put more people out of work before addressing this "separate issue." Lots of people can have their lives ruined before those in power decide it's time to think about how to ameliorate the damage done.

In the history of economics and politics, that has never happened. Tumult creates unacceptable carnage, and the solutions fall out of the carnage. Furthermore, we don't always correctly predict the form that carnage will take, so it's not even as if we know what acceptable solutions might be until things are already in freefall.

So although it's a nice sentiment, I'm not so sure it's realistic.

When textiles automated in England, the carnage included a generation of weavers starving to death.

Consumerism and technology have coincidentally grown to provide a few more generations of employment. But now that's ending.

And sure its not happened in history, because we've never been exactly here before. But we're here now! And there's no sign that solutions will fall out of the sky to fix things. I for one don't want to wait for starvation or revolution.

then don't wait for it - ontario NDP adopted basic income as a platform point, basic income tests are happening in a number of countries. Advocate for it or something else that is attempting to solve that problem.

At the very least, we can push back against the notion that this upheaval is "for the best" simply because it's the outcome of the market. It's Panglossianism at its worst. Sometimes things that benefit capital are bad for the world and for the rest of society. Wealth doesn't trickle down except by political will. That political will can only organize when we, the very fortunate few who have better resources and education than most working class people, begin to give a shit about something other than what is technologically possible or efficient.

That's correct. But this is why you should shape your purchase habits in different ways than choosing lack of automation.

For instance, choose to shop at a coop grocer, where the workers are paid a livable wage and usually also become member-owners with voting rights and a share in the profits. (There are also consumer advantages to consumer coops, obviously.) In this case, it'd be to the workers' advantage to automate things which make sense to automate as they share in the higher profits and possibly a higher wage as well.

Personally, I don't use self-checkout usually because cashiers are almost always much faster when you have a lot of stuff. But generally, I'm much in favor of automation.

Just think of all the people that were displaced when the horseless carriage came about. Society will adapt. It may be painful for those directly affected, especially in the short term, but that won’t stop progress.

There are some people who are really only capable of doing these "boring, low paid jobs". Not everyone is capable of being an information worker or a hard physical laborer.

Once a basic income or solid safety net has been established, we can consider whether it makes sense to take actions in order to not obsolete low paid jobs.

Heck its not all about low paid jobs. That's just another domino. Folks who used to be office managers, technical writers, factory line managers find themselves automated out of a job. They turn to lower-paid jobs.

To compound it all, now the lower-paid jobs are going too. Leaving a 'bow wave' of steadily-lower-wage folks completely out of options.

Your second point doesn't apply here. No matter what you have to walk around and pick up the items you want (at least for now, if you're going to a B&M). The difference here is waiting in line vs. just walking out of the store when you're done.

And yet self-checkouts have not replaced cashiers. I often see more people waiting for cashiers than in the self-checkout line at the stores I visit. When I use the self-checkout I'm giving the cashiers an opportunity to have more time to serve those who choose them instead.

Lastly, every time I walk somewhere I don't fret about costing a taxi driver their job.

I'd rather just give someone money to live and let them find something productive they'd like to do with their time than shoehorn them into menial jobs that don't need to be done for the sake of having a job.

1. I don't like the thought of contributing to a system that costs people (cashiers) their jobs.

So only when you need customer service you care about their jobs?

Come on think about your statement for a moment and realize what the internet has done. You are part of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com