This thread seems to be populated by competent people. I would like everyone to step back for a moment however and consider how many incompetent people exist.

Think about self-serve checkouts, and how despite items being clearly labeled and the machines having item lookups, people still struggle constantly. Now imagine how many more people would struggle without the label.

Think about the employee wrangling the self checkout dealing with increased frustrated customers. Think about how fickle customers can be, throwing up their hands at a minor obstacle and deciding to just buy avocados from now on from the store across the street that still uses stickers. You know these people exist. You know they exist in number. So do markets, so the laser etching is mitigating the problems they'll have from removing stickers.