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from the who-is-going-to-ask-if-I-want-fries? dept.
72 years after [Clarence Saunders] attempted to patent his idea, advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are making the dream of a worker-free store a reality. And American cashiers may soon be checking out.
A recent analysis by Cornerstone Capital Group suggests that 7.5m retail jobs – the most common type of job in the country – are at "high risk of computerization", with the 3.5m cashiers likely to be particularly hard hit.
Another report, by McKinsey, suggests that a new generation of high-tech grocery stores that automatically charge customers for the goods they take – no check-out required – and use robots for inventory and stocking could reduce the number of labor hours needed by nearly two-thirds. It all translates into millions of Americans' jobs under threat.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:33PM (2 children)
Automated checkout will not get rid of all the cashiers. My local Kroger has 4 automated lanes and there's always at least one "cashier" close by monitoring what's going on. If you want to purchase tobacco or alcohol, they need to check your ID. If you have a problem, price is wrong, item won't scan, they're there to help. WalMart has them too, for the same reasons, but I'm not sure of the cashier-to-automated lanes ratio b/c I never shop there.
I do most of my grocery shopping at Save-A-Lot, Big Lots and a local produce store [facebook.com]. None of them have automated checkout.
For consumables I really don't buy much more than meat, eggs, produce, nuts, cooking oils and spices. Fish I buy local [facebook.com], same w/ cheese [facebook.com]. It's nice to be able to consult w/ them if I'm trying something new and am not sure which cheese would work best. I want to be able to look at the items I'm buying, smell the produce, check expiration dates, etc. For household products I suppose it wouldn't matter as much.
Plus it's always nice to run into people I know and chat it up a bit, or talk to cashiers I've known since they were kids b/c they grew up w/ my daughters.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @07:35PM
That's my local home depot ratio. Just yesterday I was buying water softener salt and the nice lady used her portable scanner to save me the effort of waving the salt bags in front of the scanner and stacking them on the anti-shoplifting digital scale. Then at payment time I tried to use my "chip card" credit card which crashed the chip reader hard, black screen then boot up screen, which crashed the entire register. Nice cashier lady used her magic computer to move my transaction to one of the working registers, lockout tagout the dead register (LOL) and I completed my order. I should check online to see if I got double transactions, LOL.
This is not necessarily bad. The other registers didn't need as much baby sitting as mine, so her job is more interesting on average than if they hired four cashiers to have "fun" only a quarter of the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @07:41PM
Zuck thanks you for the FB links.
And yes, it's insane to bribe a cop in public.