I started using grocery self-checkouts during COVID, but I’ve kept using them because there’s rarely a line (and I’m a misanthrope). I’d probably go back to using regular human checkouts if I had to dig through all my crap to prove what I bought.
Having said that, I’ve noticed myself making mistakes. I’ve accidentally failed to scan an item, and I’ve accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I’ve probably missed a few.
I guess the easiest answer is for grocery chains to reinvest some of those windfall profits and hire more cashiers.
Corporations want it both ways …
… docile workers that will work for little or no pay, which make them poor and more apt to want to steal in order to get cheap food
… honest customers that won’t steal, even if they become desperate because corporations refused to pay them a living wage to afford food
Economically speaking … it’s a no brainer … pay people a living wage and pay for more cashiers to work at the front … the company makes more money by securing purchases and keeping everyone honest and you maintain a workforce of highly paid people who go to spend their money with your stores anyway
Instead, we want to maintain a system where money and wealth continually keep getting shoved to ever smaller groups of people and we wonder why those of us at the bottom keep trying steal and rob the system just to get by.
‘If you give a man gun he can rob a bank; if you give man a bank he can rob the world.’
It’s not the job of corporations to treat people well, they’re an entity designed to maximize profit within the framework they operate in.
A democratic government is designed to represent the will of the citizens. If we aren’t happy with the way corporations treat us, then we should vote in a government that will regulate corporations to force them to treat us well.
The goal should be jobs that are boring to humans being automated completely AND not having theft because people don’t need to do it in order to have a good life.
It get harder and harder for government to regulate corporations as they get bigger and bigger and are multinationals. That’s what happens with tax heavens.
I understand corporations motives, but the parent commenter explains well that it doesn’t work well if they are too greedy about it.
When do you do when your choice in voting is carefully handpicked insiders from a group that has insulated themselves from outside forces over the past 50 odd years and the only choices with a real chance of winning are not going to work in their constituents best interest?
When do you do when your choice in voting is …
The answer’s the same
- Pick the least bad
- Repeat
And also
A. Fight for better voting so that minority candidates with good ideas get the nod they need.
I get the whole living wage thing, but a cashier’s position was never a living wage, in the past it was a wage used to supplement a family’s income, or to pay for post secondary tuition. What changed? My local Wallyworld supercentre was the first in the region to go self serve, the manager said he couldn’t find staff, but in all honesty whether it was a living wage or not, I think he just didn’t want the staff.
The minimum wage was enacted to provide all citizens with a basic quality of life, including food and housing. Full stop. Everything after your incorrect statement is irrelevant as it is founded on an untrue principle.
My bad. I never knew a 16 year old working at a fast food outlet was supposed to support a family. I formally apologize as a white colonial male with priviledge
How far in the past? I’m sure I remember unionized cashiers at, I think, Safeway getting paid comparable to me as a unionized welder in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I could be completely wrong about that, because I think it was the whole store on strike, not just the cashiers.
A couple of my aunts were cashiers around the same timeframe, one of em a single mom. I don’t know how much they were paid, but they had decent apartments in Toronto around Roncesvalles with enough square footage for a kid and his cousins to get “up to speed” (I mostly recall the injuries)
