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Comment by sqrt17 | Hacker News Reader

You're probably right about the labor-saving techniques. In Germany, you get gardeners with automatic leaf blowers (i.e., faster, but more noise), and with a whole slew of bottom-tier jobs (such as supermarket baggers) missing. The car industry is purely based on robots and automation - which is probably the same in the US.

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I suspect this must be a European thing then. I'm in London and I'd assumed that leaf blowers were a universal thing, and I had to google "supermarket bagger" - it seems like a weird gimmick, is this common?

If anything, older Americans lament the reduction in the level of grocery store service over the years. While most stores (at least around Cleveland) have baggers, there is only one higher-end grocery which still loads one's bags in his car for him. The customer leaves his cart by the exit, drives his car up to the store, and some teenagers load the bags into the trunk ("boot" for those in the UK?).

Well, leaf blowers are sold in South America too, but we have supermarket baggers like in the U.S.

Something odd is that gas stations over here are called "service stations", and we get our cars filled (no filling it yourself), oil checked and other niceties - it's so disconcerting for me going to an European gas station (went to one in Vienna).

Wikipedia once again surprised me with the depth of the article on Filling Stations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station

I guess I'd only experienced full service stations before going to Europe.

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