It seems like they will just mark everything up by 10% and then give that discount at self checkout. So they will pocket even more while harming those who don't use self checkout.

Or eliminating cashiers altogether.

honestly just cap executive pay. nothing they can do then

This is a good intentioned, well-principled idea, but it's a ham-fisted implementation that isn't going to have the intended effect and extremely easy to work around.

Can we go for upcharges on food items for modifying them next? If you are going to charge me $0.30 for adding tomatoes to a sandwich, you better damn well reduce the price by $0.30 when I remove tomatoes from a sandwich.

This is getting so out of hand in the USA.

Fun fact: With very little effort, you can give yourself a discount at checkout!

Unethical corporations are humanity's predators and we should hurt them however we can.

I didn't have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I'm doing somebody else's job as a customer, the company is saving money.

This is why I try to avoid self checkout. If I'm getting like 2 things and there's already a line, sure, maybe.... But if the lines are short, even if I only have a couple of things, I'll visit a real cashier.

Not because I need help with it, and not because I want to "stick it to the man" or anything. I want to be part of the metric that continues to justify that a cashier is still a position to keep, and pay someone for. I do it so that there will still be cashier's in the future, and someone can put food on their table because I didn't choose to do free labor for the 0.1%.

I know, I know. I'm so selfish, I should tHiNk oF ThE sHaReHoLdErS....

Personally, I greatly prefer these anyway.

As someone with social anxiety and ADHD, standing in line with a ton of people and then having to interact with a cashier is something I love to avoid.

That being said, I wouldn't mind a discount at all 😁

The discount comes from entering the code of the cheapest type of item no matter what item I picked up. Organic lady finger bananas? Looks like bulk Cavendish to me. I'm not being paid enough to know the difference when I'm using self checkout, a banana is a banana.

Ok, but since they're too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.

How about food is a human right and should be free at point of purchase, lol.

Edit: lmao at the three American or Israeli downvoters. Eat shit, fuckers.

There may be an unintended consequence of this. Corpos love to optimize to minimize any hits to their bottom line.

I could see any of these possibilities as a reaction:

• Self checkouts become overwhelmed so stores remove remaining paid cashiers to add more self checkout lanes.
• Self checkouts are reduced or removed to avoid giving any discounts.
• I believe I read that grocery margins are thin at the store and are much higher for manufacturers. I could see stores increasing prices across the board to recoup costs.

Hard to know for sure, the people seem to just rarely get a W these days that isn’t immediately wiped out by something else.

They will increase prices by 10% to offset this.

300 billion in pure profits to executives… that could have ended hunger in the US last year.

So the next time you use the self checkout, remember to glance over at the lone cashier who lives in your neighborhood, look them in the eye and make sure they know about your excitement to be working for the shareholders for free now instead of their former colleagues. And if on the drive home you see their former colleague is getting evicted because they were laid off, make sure to honk, lean out your window and let them know how much you enjoyed the sweet song of “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

Holy shit, that’s more than the employee discount I got working in retail.

EU should take note.

Unless I'm in a huge hurry I'll wait in the cashier queue, to do my tiny bit to help preserve jobs.

I'd say that self-checkouts are fundamentally a good thing, just like other forms of increased productivity are a good thing – but in today's society they can both lead to unemployment and lower wages. That is unnecessary.

One would think there are better ways of achieving this. How about we start to actually make solutions that make price conciousness easier? Actually enable the ”free market” people are raving about. Start mandating open data standards, make the companies publish realtime pricing information, allow people to build solutions that make consumers aware they’re overpaying.

Fuel stations would be a good example of this, my phone could notify me that the pump price is 10% lower 4 minutes away, if it only had access to that data.

I'm very much in favor of this. They place the burden of work on the customers, so they should compensate them.

This is why I always skip a few items at self checkout, if you don't want to pay the cashier, then you'll pay me instead

Crying about "free labour" seems pretty silly in this case. You're already going around the store picking your own shit, usually bagging it yourself, bringing it home yourself etc.

Right, because if I self checkout my $200 grocery bill, that worker definitely would have made $20 in that few minute interaction.

I like the idea, but that's a terrible implementation. The cost of the bill has no relation to the money saved by using the machine and firing a worker. A flat amount no more than a % of the bill is tiny would be better. Like $1-3 but no more than 5% of bill.

This seems like populist BS. For one, I don't think there's value in preserving jobs like cashiers - almost no one does that job because it's fulfilling. In a perfect utopia, this would be 100% automated.

The other thing is that I can't imagine this will have the result the law intends. The companies won't pay the 10% out of their own pocket, as they most likely couldn't. At least here in Germany, supermarket margins are pretty thin.

So they'd increase prices for all products to pay for this. Nothing would improve. Plus, going to the regular checkout would cost more than it does now.

I don't get it. This is such a non-issue compared to so many other problems. It's like they're trying to show they're doing something for workers but don't want to pay for it.

Not to mention some companies relentlessly prosecute "accidental" and accidental mis-scans in self-checkout, so you significantly increase your risk of arrest by using them. I never do.

- Ex-cop, have arrested people for such mis-scans, most frequently at Wal-Mart

I think companies firing people in favour of AI should also be forced to allocate some generous portion of those salaries back to same level and lower employees as wage increases

If the self-checkouts cost the company less, then it'd be good for them to pass on the savings - but in a capitalist world, that's not normal. If a company gets one of its food ingredients cheaper, does it usually drop its prices? Not unless it's already competing at that price.

Self checkouts are a good thing. They're not "us doing the shop's work". They're not "free labour". In fact, they're a boon to a lot of us as customers, and shops with them still have "traditional" tills you can use if you want (e.g. if you have a huge trolley of things or you want a nice chat)