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Comment by buffet_overflow | Hacker News Reader

I go back and forth on this, and feel similarly about self checkout. Is it better to streamline the process and lean on the technology, where staff can watch their jobs slip away, or is it better to chose the human where possible?

I like a later analysis of the Butlerian Jihad from Leto II of Dune (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) that says

> "I point out to you […] a lesson learned from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

The more we use machines for these “easily handled” use cases, the more we tend to expect machine interfaces for more interactions, and at some levels, I think that’s dangerous.

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The way I see it, using those machines is labor that people usually get paid for. I don't want to do that labor for free. Furthermore, the professional cashiers are faster at it than the general public. They make fewer errors and are empowered to correct more errors themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to walk over and clear the error. Furthermore, checkout and bagging can be done in parallel which is faster than doing both yourself.

The only upside to self-checkout is lower labor expenses for the store. That turns into profit for the shareholders, not savings for the customers, so I don't care about that. And I guess maybe some people don't like the social interaction implied by human cashiers, but if you're not in the mood for that you can just keep your eyes down and grunt or something. Cashiers are used to people who don't want small-talk, they can generally take a hint.

Are you in the USA? I ask because that is mainly where I see complaints about having to do the cashier’s work. And I think that has to do with how grocery shopping is done in the USA: people drive up in their cars and buy a huge amount of groceries at once, so there is a lot to scan. Moreover, sometimes the bagging had been historically done by paid staff, so people weren’t used to doing it themselves.

But as someone shopping in Europe, I have never felt using self-checkout burdensome, because I’m usually just getting a few items for that evening or the next couple of days. Using the touchscreen is pure muscle memory, and the advantage of being able to listen to headphones or avoid social interaction outweighs the very slight inconvenience of ringing up my own purchases. Moreover, the queues for self-checkout are always shorter now than for the human cashiers.

I am in the USA but my grocery store trips are not at all like you describe. I walk to the grocery store, collect groceries in a single basket and have them loaded into one or two bags which I walk home with. I do this 1 to 3 times a week.

No matter the quantity of groceries, a professional can ring it up faster than I can.

> Moreover, sometimes the bagging had been historically done by paid staff, so people weren’t used to doing it themselves

Sometimes, but usually there is something like a 1:5 ratio (or lower) of baggers to cashiers so bagging your own while the cashier rings you up has always been common. The way I see it, bagging isn't really a real job, usually the store hires mentally disabled people to do it as a sort of charity to the community (also the feds pay half of their wages.) Anyway, bagging is easy. I don't have to deal with an obtuse machine to put some stuff in a bag.

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