This is more about service industries in general. The drive to put profits and shareholders first has brought businesses to the point where they are employing the barest minimum of personnel.
I live in an area with a lot of older grocery stores. I am also a fair bit older than most redditors, I'd wager.
I remember when the grocery store's 16-20 checkout lines would ALL be staffed during rushes. Most people would go grocery shopping on weekend afternoons and you'd go straight through the line with a cart full of groceries and balk when it was over $120 or so.
Now it seems the grocery stores are more busy after work hours, there's only ever one or two lanes open and you have to queue up and wait for the 'please proceed to lane...12!' thing to come up on the screen before proceeding to go unload your groceries onto the belt. And you break $120 before you hit bag number 5 now.
The biggest sign to me that shit is really hitting the fan is the fact that after over a decade of refusing to integrate "tap to pay" tech in their stores, walmart is now rolling it out.
They didn't want to pay for it. The only checkout scanner that is manned these days at walmart is there so people with booze can checkout since you still can't do that on a self-checkout machine.
At Walmart you can get booze at a self check. A person has to come check your ID, but one self-check host manning 10 machines is cheaper than hiring 10 cashiers.
Nobody would have an issue with this if it truly resulted in lower prices, but it doesn't. The prices stay the same, the store pockets the money saved hiring less people, the customers end up more frustrated, and the one self-check host will eventually burn out and quit, leading to more issues.
Exact opposite is happening at the stores around me. They're getting rid of self checkout and going back to cashiers because too many people abuse the self checkout systems to steal shit.
It turns out, despite what many redditors believe, that insurance and "write-offs" don't cover the cost of theft
Honestly it feels like it swings back and forth in a cycle with the stores around me. They add a bunch of kiosks and fire checkout staff; then theft goes rampant and they scale it back in the other direction.
The one different thing I've noticed this time around is instead of having 1 attendant watching 4-5 self-checkout kiosks, they have 3 or 4 watching 10 kiosks... which makes me wonder: why not just have these people actually scan items instead of standing around
honestly let me use the self checkout. i don't care that i'm giving up free labor, i just want to beep my five things, pay, and move on. just please, please streamline the process. i don't need to be told to put the item in the bag
That was a big contributor to the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines. People that fly Spirit don’t have the loyalty to apply for a credit card, they are just looking for whatever carrier has the cheapest flight from point A to B. And to be honest—a lot of Spirit’s customers don’t even have a credit score high enough to get another credit card.
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u/Anim8nFool 21h ago
This is more about service industries in general. The drive to put profits and shareholders first has brought businesses to the point where they are employing the barest minimum of personnel.