I didn't have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I'm doing somebody else's job as a customer, the company is saving money.

That "$300 billion" number is just completely made up. The math doesn't even remotely work.

The entire US grocery industry does somewhere around $1 trillion in revenue per year. For self-checkout to save $300 billion, that would mean roughly a third of every dollar spent on groceries was going directly to cashier wages. That is obviously not how grocery stores operate. Total labor costs for a store are only a fraction of their expenses.

And the idea that self-checkout was some massive money-saving miracle ignores the other side of the equation. Those systems cost a lot upfront, require maintenance, and they increase losses from theft, missed scans, and mistakes. A machine replacing a cashier doesn't magically eliminate costs; it just moves them somewhere else.

There is a reason companies like Walmart, Target, and Dollar General have started putting limits on self-checkout or bringing back more staffed lanes. If self-checkout was saving them hundreds of billions, they wouldn't be walking it back. They would be installing them everywhere they could.

This is the kind of post that hurts any community built around open discussion and critical thinking. A sensational claim gets repeated because it supports a certain viewpoint, while nobody stops to ask if it is actually true. The truth should matter regardless of whether it supports corporations, consumers, or anyone else. Being intellectually honest means checking the facts first, not just accepting information because it confirms what we already believe.

On a side note, totally support the bill in every way.

Ok, but since they're too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.

Now watch as Hochul kills it because "it's bad for the economy".

They will increase prices by 10% to offset this.

Fun fact: With very little effort, you can give yourself a discount at checkout!

Unethical corporations are humanity's predators and we should hurt them however we can.

This is why I always skip a few items at self checkout, if you don't want to pay the cashier, then you'll pay me instead

Can we go for upcharges on food items for modifying them next? If you are going to charge me $0.30 for adding tomatoes to a sandwich, you better damn well reduce the price by $0.30 when I remove tomatoes from a sandwich.

This is getting so out of hand in the USA.

Sounds like a tax on those who need a catcher or can't use the self checkout for various reasons. I could see stores just removing all the staff on the tills and switch to a self checkout only.

Not to mention some companies relentlessly prosecute "accidental" and accidental mis-scans in self-checkout, so you significantly increase your risk of arrest by using them. I never do.

- Ex-cop, have arrested people for such mis-scans, most frequently at Wal-Mart

Won’t this just encourage people to use self-checkout as it will make using an employed checkout lane more expensive?

I don’t think many people know how harmful self-checkout is to their neighbors employed the store. I made a comment to a Costco employee about how I was glad they added the hand scanners to self-checkout, and their response was to educate me that self-checkout isn’t good for the employees because it means fewer jobs. I’m was so self-absorbed in my own day-to-day life that I did not even think about the impact it had on Costco employees. I didn’t even think about the fact that here I am talking about this pain point of self-checkout (having to use the stationary scanner) and relief about having a better option (the hand scanner) when the best option is already there (employees handling the checkout). The real solution is to just open up more jobs, hire more employees to do the scanning and bagging. I stopped using self-checkout after that.

I went to Aldi recently. You have to put a quarter in to get a shopping cart (I haven’t carried around quarters in ages). The shelves often get into a state of disarray. The line for the 1 employee doing checkout is massive, but self-checkout is also a huge pain in the ass. Continuously cutting jobs to increase profits is a race to the bottom, and yet people who can barely afford groceries think they couldn’t live without a discount chain like Aldi. We are saving pennies by giving up our time doing our own checkout, when we could be getting paid to check people out, providing them some convenience and doing so with greater efficiency instead. I’ll add that many items at Aldi’s are actually more expensive than at other grocery stores, if you’re not paying attention you could end up paying more than a place with more employed checkout lanes.

There may be an unintended consequence of this. Corpos love to optimize to minimize any hits to their bottom line.

I could see any of these possibilities as a reaction:

• Self checkouts become overwhelmed so stores remove remaining paid cashiers to add more self checkout lanes.
• Self checkouts are reduced or removed to avoid giving any discounts.
• I believe I read that grocery margins are thin at the store and are much higher for manufacturers. I could see stores increasing prices across the board to recoup costs.

Hard to know for sure, the people seem to just rarely get a W these days that isn’t immediately wiped out by something else.

At first they promised us it would keep the prices down, I already knew that's not how businesses operate but hey...I got no influence over this so let's see how it works out.

A few years after grocery prices triple with all kinds of excuses, yes excuses...claims about how what when where and why it happened which all turned out to in reality be nothing more then a temporary nuisance, but prices never went down because duhh it's a business.

So here we are, paying the wages for jobs we do ourselves and a 200% tip to boot.

I really think we should keep track of the amount of time spent at the self checkout and make a bill for the store manager under the title: "freelance register operator" at a polite $40 bucks an hour.