According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales. Amazon called this characterization inaccurate, and disputes how many purchases require reviews.
Then manual reading was made remote. There were about 20 USPS remote envelope reading centers at peak. As the vision systems got good enough to read handwriting, then bad handwriting, those were cut back. Now there's only one remote envelope reading center in the US, and what gets there is really bad.
Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled".
99% of jobs are things people would rather not be doing (otherwise you wouldn't be getting paid for it). The point is that we can allocate this work in a way that minimizes the amount of time everyone has to spend doing undesirable work.
Are you mad that I sometimes pay "poor souls" to do the "menial work" of cooking me food so I can avoid doing it myself?
> The entitlement of the west has no bounds really.
A very bizarre response to "darn, this was so convenient" - I wonder if this is a troll.
1. Not all work is equally undesirable and the way people are paid is not related to that in any way (in fact isn't usually inversely related)
2. Minimising the undesirable work done in total means some people end up doing almost all of it and some basically none (or, if you consider all work undesirable, some people do only the worst and some only the least bad work).
If before, for example, everyone would spend half an hour of their day to cook for themselves, which might be inconvenient but is overall not a big impact on your quality of life, now we have overworked and underpaid restaurant and related staff doing intense work for crazy hours, which is is a devastating hit to their (and their families') quality of life. The sum of human effort spent on cooking may have gone down in this example, but instead of everyone being a little annoyed by it, some people are living like kings and some are slaving away for their convenience (obviously this wording is exaggerated, but if we look globally, this is basically what's happening).
Cashiers may have an undesirable job and self-checkout may distribute this undesirable labor among the many instead of burdening a single person with it but those people don't get paid for doing that job whereas the cashier did get paid. Self-checkout is also often slower than checkout at a cashier (it has to be because the cashier is trusted to ring up items correctly whereas the customer has a huge incentive to cheat).
The desirability of being a cashier also isn't inherent to the job. It has more to do with attitudes towards the person doing the job, both from customers and from their employer. Service staff often act as a lightning rod for all frustrations and disdain targeted at their place of work, i.e. they frequently get punished for things completely out of their control. They're also often seen as unskilled labor by their employers so they are treated as easy to replace meaning there is very little incentive to invest in their job satisfaction.
In other words, we have systems that not only require people to work even if the jobs they end up doing are undesirable and undervalued but also actively makes certain jobs undesirable by undervaluing them. If you want to change that, you need to change the system that makes those jobs undesirable, not just do away with the undesirable jobs. People seem to have fewer problems grasping this when talking about the virtues of overseas sweatshops (where changing the system is presumed impossible because the implication is that the system arises from a lack of economic development or cultural inferiority).
I am quite aware (and rather disappointed) we don't live in a more socialist system, but as we seem to be pretty much stuck under particularly nasty version of capitalism at least for the near future. So unless someone finds a way to turn the whole system around any time soon, I still think at least trying to make some of the worst parts of capitalism somewhat less unbearable is a good thing.
And the workers just sit idle when there is no customer and you have to physically go there. So I dont see the clear advantage, i see it more as a "choose your poison"
It wasn't all manual.
An important question to ask is how many minutes of camera-viewing there were per customer. Let's not assume too hard before we judge the level of wastefulness.
My criticism is towards the entitlement of shoppers who think self checkout is too clunky and having to interact with a cashier is too annoying but expect an army of people to work behind the scenes (be it anywhere in the world) to make it easy for them.
Now you're trying to redirect, and say "Oh well, those jobs would have lasted only a few years more anyhow!".
My respnse to that is the same:
I'm sure all those fired, new job seekers jn India agree fully with you.
Consider te perspective of those you aim to "protect".