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Comment by detectivestory | Hacker News Reader

that didn't happen with self-checkout tills in supermakets...

Wdym? self-checkout definitely lead to fewer supermarket workers being employed.

Actually, it has been essentially balanced out by a greater need for behind-the-shelves workers to pack and load orders for online/app delivery and eCommerce orders.

This is how the economy often works. The loss of one kind of job to technology lets the business grow by using the same number of staff, or often even more, to serve new opportunities/markets/products/services.

The data seems to contradict that, if Freakonomics is to be believed (and some people don't like them, I get that). Apparently overall headcount actually increased as a result of self-checkout. E.g. cashiers did drop a little but loss prevention more than made up for it.

seems like a worse customer experience though. longer lines at checkouts and the self checkout process is unnecessarily slow to deter theft.

Some supermarkets let customers scan their items as they go through the store with a handheld device

My local Kroger variant does that. Or they did, maybe it stopped, now that I think about it. I never saw anyone use it. Intuitively it sounds like it could be handy, but it seems like in practice everyone just kept on doing things the way they're used to doing it.

I don't have the numbers on this, but if you look at per-capita self checkout probably had some effect.

Our population is increasing which means we need jobs to be increasing at same rates. The effect on supermarkets is they get more customers as population increases but they are able to lower the relative number of staff per customer.

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