The General Economics Thread

There are other tradeoffs. People who are not doing that job every day will be slower to scan items and may make more errors, meaning that each individual station will operate more slowly than if it were staffed by a person. The attendant job must also be terribly boring.

The people scanning half a dozen times slower are the ones likely to find a normal checkout, where available. It's a net gain.

Indeed, if you scan your groceries weekly, you'll be about as fast as a cashier. And it's not even a concern if you can carry a scanner with you while shopping, where you can be as slow as you wish without holding anyone up.

You can also set up way more self-checkout stations then manned cash registers in the same space. So even if people are slower checking themselves out, you will have to spend less time waiting for a station to open up. Heck, most of the time, I don't have to wait at all.

I am all in favor of self-checkout lines, despite originally having some difficulty with them due to the inevitable "unexpected item in bagging area" stuff.

Now, it is a hill I would die on, and accuse anyone that opposes them of being a Luddite!

"So even if people are slower checking themselves out, you will have to spend less time waiting for a station to open up. Heck, most of the time, I don't have to wait at all."

I don't see that happening here. It's routine for half the self-checkout lanes to be closed, and often more, presumably because they require maintenance that management is unwilling to pay for.

Enterprises will always look for ways to economize, regardless of what econimizing they have done before.

I've never once seen a self-checkout machine out of order or closed. That is a weird mentality to have too, because it defeats the whole point of self-checkout.

But then, Dutch companies aren't quite as insistent on maximizing profits at all costs as American ones. We really do have a cultural difference in that case.

Edited by Redmess on May 15th 2022 at 10:29:13 AM

I've seen them out of order occasionally. Generally, the payment stuff has gone wrong somehow. But never enough to mass close the things.

Yeah, outside of COVID distancing you’ll normally see maybe 1 out of 12 broken and another 1-2 out of 12 reduced to card only for some reason.

That’s the most common thing, where the person supervising the self-checkout goes “are you paying by card?” and upon a yes directs you to a specific one.

That might also be a difference. The self-checkouts I've been at only accept cards. I can imagine that cash would increase the failure rate.

I don't mean broken, I mean someone has shut the checkout station down. They seem to be basing it on how many customers are in the store at one time.

Well, that's just dumb.

Yeah that’s a new one to me, I’ve never seen self-checkouts turned off the way you’d shut traditional checkout lanes due to customer numbers. They’re all turned on all the time the place is open.

Like, that's entirely the point. You don't need staff to man them, so they can all be operational all the time.

Don't ask me, I just shop there.

At Walmart, I routinely see the first three or so either disabled or seemingly in the middle of maintenance, and it's always the same three every single time weeks apart. It gives the distinct impression they simply don't care to fix them when they have a dozen more waiting.

My Wal-Mart is extremely lax on maintenance in general - self-checkouts are sometimes down, the restroom stall doors are routinely broken (admittedly, that's partly because there's a lot of druggies who like to get high in there) and it took a while for them to fix the floor after the last big quake.

I see a self-checkout station out of order every so often at Costco, Giant, or Wegmans but there are always enough working to move customers through. I try to avoid Wal-Mart for my own self-esteem.

Edited by Fighteer on May 17th 2022 at 11:57:40 AM

The store that routinely keeps half their self-checkout stations shut off is Kroger, btw.

Twitter deal leaves Elon Musk with no easy way out: Strength of $44B agreement comes into focus as Musk appears to have second thoughts.

Interesting. So this airtight contract is not just a thing Twitter did to keep Musk from getting cold feet. It's apparently a leftover from the financial crisis.

I made a study of the financial crisis of 2008, and I'm challenged to understand what "investors backing out of deals" had to do with it.

Well you would know better than me, then.

From the article, I am guessing a lot of business mergers fell through because buyers pulled out as the financial crisis hit, leaving those affected companies int he lurch. The article also mentions a few cases of this happening at the start of the pandemic.

It also notes that there is more at stake for Musk than just money: his reputation as a businessman could suffer from walking away, and this in turn could affect what deals he could make for his other companies.

"Could" doesn't always equal "will." Musk's personal brand will still be pretty strong. Trump followed the same path, after all.

Yeah, but Trump was good about creating this mythology around himself about being a great businessman. I'm not really seeing that with Musk.

Trump brand while strong was build more on the idea of trump being a tough, no nonsense buissness man and for a while it was generally efective, hell I belive that when I saw the aprentice.

For what I sae Musk brand is in part tie up with him being a visonary and all that silicon valley nonsense.