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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Much of the value in "tech" is basically treating people like shit at scale. In this example, when a lot attendant was needed, they could only be so unhelpful. Now we don't need to pay them, can push their work onto customers, and simply magically drop any "problem" customers. Same with all this shit. Huge companies exist solely to prevent a human from getting human support, and many more extend the concept to "scale" without properly supporting customers.

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Oh, have you seen the number of self checkout at grocery stores? I need to do the work of a checkout counter person to pay? Wtf!

Actually as a consumer I prefer self check out. I am much quicker and it is more efficient because now you can have many of these tills in the same area that only a few would have fit, resulting in much faster experience than waiting in queues.

That experience aside, I don't believe there should be jobs where you simply don't think. Manual labour jobs are unfair because they don't reward the brain whatsoever, no creativity, no one loves to do them, and they create a market of labourers with little to no transferable skills thus putting them in an unfair situation if they want or are forced to get a different job.

You are much faster than a professional cashier? Congrats I guess. Also the space argument doesn't hold up. The cash register belts are not need on staffed registers if they are not needed on customer slaving ones. So they are approximately the same size minus the chair for one helpful human.

Not because of anything impressive other than the fact that most professional cashiers I have interacted with are not skilled enough to be as fast you imply because it is a high turnover job. The space argument depends on the fact that all customers are checking out simultaneously, not waiting in a queue.

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