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Comment by vvilliam0 | Hacker News Reader

Decent read as the manipulative uses of game design are often overlooked. Think about how "fun" it feels to scan your own items at the checkout and hear those nice tones. Uber and Lyft drivers have Pavlovian response when they hear a new ride beacon ready to accept.

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I scan my own items at the checkout because it's faster, not because of how fun it is for a machine to boop at me.

(that said if I have a lot of produce the human cashier is faster)

It's bizarre when people suggest it's some sort of capitalist scam that we can check ourselves out at the grocery store.

Surely all of the upsides of self-checkout have a higher weight than the machine beeping at you.

Also, they beep because your attention is spent rotating each product to let the scanner find the barcode, and you might not notice that it scanned otherwise, and accidental multiple scans cost the customer money.

Self-checkout shifts the physical and mental labor traditionally done by a worker onto the consumer to save money. Instead, I'm paying for the product _and_ performing the labor traditionally done by someone else chiefly to save the company money in labor costs. Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that, but in a sense it is the quintessential capitalist scam.

That was already done with the supermarket in the first place and nobody minded - old school stores had everything grabbed by the clerk from behind the counter and totaled on your bill of goods. It had longer wait times and you couldn't just pick the best apples for your bushel.

Like everything in capitalism it is just a strategy - if shrinkage or other issues are more of a concern they would keep it behind the counter like jewelry stores or if people reacted negatively enough it would fail.

Standing in line waiting for someone else to scan my groceries is just as much of a waste of time.

The faster I can be out of there, the happier I am. And, less labor spent on scanning items means the store can be open for longer hours, have more organized shelves and be cleaner, etc. All in all, this is automation that increases the efficiency of the operation. Yes, you pay some cost in that you have to place your items into bags (with the current iteration of the technology) but I think you the customer get something out of that work, even if it's just a slightly lower rate of price increases.

It is time to think seriously about how we are going to deal with fewer jobs available. Will the increased corporate profits that result be spent on giving cashiers education to become knowledge workers to further increase these profits and the efficiency of society? Will the money be fed into basic income or public services, so that everyone in society will be taken care of even if there are no low-skill jobs for them to do? We are already seeing what happens when we don't think about these things in certain industries, and it's not great. Someone will have to step up and say, we will be the country that takes care of everyone, because the "work 8 hours a day and you get a house" era is long over.

As I said,

> Opinions may vary about the convenience, efficiency or "upsides" of that

I highly doubt that the savings on labor cost will translate to "longer open hours, more organized shelves and cleaner, etc", I would guess the savings translate to more profit and more concentration of wealth at the top.

Look, I'm not so much of a luddite that I _refuse_ to use self-checkout lines, I'm just realistic about what the motivations are: maximizing profit.

I feel like the motivation of any business is to maximize profit. Even if there is a side goal of improving society, in the end, you can't do that if they turn off your electricity for non-payment.

Employees usually are much faster than customers to scan groceries - thousands hours of practice make perfect. Plus, those anti-theft machines that give you instructions "scan next item, put item in the bag, take the last item out of the bag" - they slow things down considerably.

Also, the number of labor required stays the same, just now it's unpaid labor.

you must love buying gas in new jersey.

Oh I must be thinking about Target self checkouts specifically. They have a nice ringtone when you use it compared to the normal beep from the cashier.

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