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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

The supermarket itself is union busting. Before Big Grocery took over, stores paid people to take turns order and fetch all your groceries for you. Customers walking through aisles like a volunteer stock clerk is exploitation!

If a customer doesn't want or need a checkout clerk, they shouldn't be required to pay for one. Employees are entitled to good working conditions and fair wages, not entitled to unnecessary jobs.

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The biggest change in my memory was the evolution from family-run business to chain store. Growing up, there were probably a dozen small markets in my home town. The next level of de-skilling was offsite butchers and scanning registers (our best local store also doesn't have scales, everything is by quantity or is pre-weighed). The next big change might well be no checkout at all.

No doubt, Safeway is going to complain about Amazon drone-delivered groceries like poor Borders bitching about Amazon (after killing off thousands of small bookstores).

Generally, I'd say that the biggest change in grocery stories happened in the 1960's, not now.

>If a customer doesn't want or need a checkout clerk, they shouldn't be required to pay for one.

It's too late for this. Any cost saving in using self-checkout will be transferred to the supermarket, not to customers.

Grocery as an industry has one of the lowest profit margins of any industry. It’s also very competitive. So I would expect that savings from self-checkout will offset other rising costs (e.g. $15 minimum wage) and allow consumers to continue to enjoy low costs.

I would guess that the cost savings are negligible. It's about convenience foremost.

Super markets are a thin margin industry and initial capital is low (you only need to start with one store). Unless you live somewhere where the local planning Czars can say no to anything less classy than whole foods there will be plenty of competition. I'm not too worried.

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