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 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.