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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic.

At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it.

Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.

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A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap.

I have never seen "no" registers open though.

Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.

Walmart seems to agree that they like them as well. Renovated stores are entirely designed to streamline the self-checkout experience.

I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right.

Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too.

Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.

>At least where I am in the US

I am somewhat perplexed by that statement.

Are you implying that there are major jurisdictions in the US where WotC wouldn't have been able to fully enforce compliance with their (originally) overly restrictive license?

Presumably michaelcampbell means "There might be ethical corporations elsewhere, US equivalents of Mondragon Corporation for example, I don't claim to have proven the complete nonexistence of corporations that give a shit"

>>At least where I am in the US

>I am somewhat perplexed by that statement.

I doubt that you are, honestly, and knew exactly that I meant "where I am, I am seeing evidence of corporations pushing profit to limits we haven't seen before".

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