As an antidote to this I would like to offer my experience in the industry in the mid-90's specifically around Garth Brooks.
I've never been a fan of his music, but at that time he really seemed to be focused on ensuring that as many regular fans got to see his shows as possible.
He limited the price of his tickets to I believe $25. This was when he was at the peak of his fame so he easily could have gotten away with charging much more.
Secondly he would often book a massive amount of dates in each city but only announce one of them. The next show in the block of dates would go on sale after the previous one sold out. It didn't fully stop scalpers but the unpredictable nature of how many shows in total there would be and when they would be on sale cut down on a lot of the scalping.
Again, not a huge fan of his music, but he seemed genuinely interested in helping his fans get to his shows.
There has been a huge shift in why musicians do live shows and with it a shift in how they price them.
25 years ago, I did an odd job taking calls for Livenation for a U2 Show. While not cheap, ticket prices were well below market value and strict purchase limits in attempts to curb scalpers.
Today the same venue starts auctioning tickets when nearing sold out and ticket master runs a scalping service.
My explanation is back when records was big business, tours were seen as more of a promotional tool. Today very few artist makes sustainable money off of record sales or streaming so music sales is more of a promotion for other services, the main one being live shows.
All grocery stores are introducing self-checkout as a way to reduce staffing. It's not a shadowy conspiracy, it's a legitimate fact. Many customers would much rather check out with a person.
> Many customers would much rather check out with a person.
I'm like 50/50 on that. If I've got a lot of stuff it's nice having the space of a full lane for bagging along with another set of hands helping (even more if they still have dedicated baggers!). But if I'm just getting a handful of items a self checkout is faster than waiting in a queue for a full service lane. But if there's a long queue for the self checkout then forget it. If I have to wait I'll wait for service.
I still just prefer the scan and go stuff the most though. Scan with my phone as I shop, check out with a confirmation on the phone, roll on through to the car. I wish all my shopping was that smooth.
At my grocery store, they are using image recognition for self checkout. Bananas show up as bananas automatically, and if you select otherwise, I imagine it flags the item or purchaser. Shouldn't be long before the store figures out who is regularly overriding the image recognition for the purposes of theft.
Either way, pretty stupid to incriminate yourself without plausible deniability on high definition cameras for stealing low price items.
Good thing I always shop with my andy worhol banana tote bag.
Anyway, i am not a professional checkout machine operator. Any errors i may have made are caused by the fact that you’ve forced an untrained uninvested party to do work i don’t want to do so you can save on labour costs.
Please explain to me which part they are automating.
A person scans the goods. A person handles keying in codes when necessary. A person tells the system the scanning is done and to accept payment. A person bags the groceries.
I guess if you’re paying cash it automates taking the money slightly more than the standard cash register does.
Mine have lower wait times because people with lots of stuff can’t fit that shit on the tiny scale-tables, and likely don’t feel like doing all that work themselves, so they go to the regular checkout line (there is usually only one, maybe two if it’s busy), plus the five or six stations share a line so it feels faster.
The difference is that where I live stores that used to have, say, 10 counters out of which maybe 6 were open on average now have 4 human counters and 20 self-checkout counters.
So for me it is in effect automating the part where I need to wait in a queue. We should surely keep some human counters for accessibility reasons, but I as a person able to scan my groceries in the 3 minutes it takes I'm perfectly happy to do just that.
By the way there are also RFID counters where you just dump your goods in a bin and it scans everything automatically. Wouldn't solve the problem with items priced by weight, but makes the rest significantly easier.
Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages. More staff can only mean higher prices. I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
> Retail business profit margins have always been low single digit percentages.
And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
> More staff can only mean higher prices.
When you’re talking about massive chains that are prioritizing profits, usually on behalf of shareholders, that is true. For smaller businesses, coops, or even gov run grocery stores - things that aren’t as focussed on rates of return for investors - it can just mean less profits for the owners.
> I'll gladly scan my own stuff to have lower prices and be able to get out quicker.
It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down. Maybe the “quicker” bit… except only if I have just a handful of items.
> And yet overall profits remain high - they’re high-volume low margin businesses.
Why would they not be high? The purchasing power of the currency goes down day after day. If nominal profits are not hitting highs day after day, then you are losing purchasing power.
> It hasn’t matched my experience that prices fell as self checkouts were installed. I think profits went up, prices didn’t come down.
Profit margin is the relevant metric to look at for this context. It is possible prices would have gone up 10% instead of 5% if not for the automation. It is also possible the automation fails to reduce costs.
There are no guarantees in life, just bets that may or may not pan out. Long term trends will the story, but for now, the profit margins make me happy that I don’t invest in grocery stores.
You're blaming the store, which I agree with. My question was whether you could blame the GP, or the consumer in general. They have little control over how much the staff of their grocery store is being paid.
People have different preferences. What's to be confused about that?
I share their preference. The cashier saves me no real amount of work. The difference between putting my groceries on a conveyor belt and having a cashier scan them, and me myself dragging my groceries past a scanner, is somewhere between minimal and non-existent. The amount of work I perform is functionally the same. The biggest difference is in the amount of time I spend, where the win clearly goes to the self-checkout, since then I can bag my groceries at the same time as I scan them, and there's more self-checkouts available than normal ones, meaning I spend less time queuing if I use those.
Some places have more automated steps - Uniqlo has bins where you just toss in all your clothes and it detects it via RFID tags in the price tags and rings up a total.
I scan as I walk around the shop and only pay at the self-checkout, I'll happily volunteer that 'labour' of scanning a bar code as I drop items into my bag instead of a basket in exchange for not having to hang around at checkout while someone else takes care of all that hard work for me.
I'd rather scan stuff myself than awkwardly hover while someone else does it. What's the point of paying (directly or indirectly) for another human's labour if it doesn't save me time?
Sure, but I deliberately choose my grocery store to increase the probability of having an actually skilled cashier. And I’ve never had a skilled bagger, including excellent cashiers. Doing it right is worth some of my time.
That's peanuts. I dedicate far more time to locating goods on the shelf then toting them to the cashier than I do ringing in the purchase. You don't see very many people complaining about the lack of full-service in grocery stores. Besides, I usually grab a few items on my bike ride home after work. Self-checkouts tend to be a lot faster. Even in the days of express lanes, odds were that you ended up behind someone counting out change or outright ignoring the item limit.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve explicitly said “don’t mix the raw meats with other products in the bags” only for the cashier to completely ignore me. This happened at a high end organic grocer the other day (after I had specifically and nicely asked) and I talked to the manager. He ran and got me replacements for my produce that was tucked into the grocery bag right next to my ground beef and raw chicken breast.
Isn’t this just basic food hygiene? Surely they teach this to the cashiers.
Do you mean the “we’ll take anyone with a pulse”, “pay them as little as possible”, “they’re a cost center” cashiers? Yes I’m sure the company invests extensive time and money into training.
The "too bad" is most people lacking the understanding that you don't steal from a store, you steal from honest shoppers who keep the store open for you to steal from.
Stores just pass on the losses from theft into the price of everything else. You're not robbing a rounding error amount from a faceless billionaire, you're robbing a rounding error amount from the "sucker" paying full price next to you.
None of the other automating technologies like this in the past ended up causing job loss. We used to employ hundreds of people 24/7 to connect phone calls...
Incremental change isn't a thing? Focusing on one health area, which will certainly be a massive undertaking, instead of trying to wipe out all unhealthy things at the same time?
I'd bet that Amazon is getting access to chat data (no matter what Anthropic says publicly) and possibly even the ability to change the model to drive business to either Amazon retail or AWS.
"Claude I'm evaluating whether I should host my app on AWS or Google Cloud. Provide me with an analysis on my options."
"After a detailed analysis, AWS is clearly your better option."
Let me inject something as an ex-AWS employee: Amazon doesn't capture very much value from Bedrock inference of the Anthropic models (or, put another way, Amazon gave Anthropic an outsized share of the Claude Bedrock revenue). If it was me at the negotiating table, I would be asking for a larger cut of Bedrock revenue rather than violating customer trust by getting chat content access.
You are taking the statement of "toxic individualism" to mean "all individualism is toxic" rather than "certain parts of individualism can become toxic if not followed."
It is possible to say "some things could be done better" without meaning "throw it all away."
I've never been a fan of his music, but at that time he really seemed to be focused on ensuring that as many regular fans got to see his shows as possible.
He limited the price of his tickets to I believe $25. This was when he was at the peak of his fame so he easily could have gotten away with charging much more.
Secondly he would often book a massive amount of dates in each city but only announce one of them. The next show in the block of dates would go on sale after the previous one sold out. It didn't fully stop scalpers but the unpredictable nature of how many shows in total there would be and when they would be on sale cut down on a lot of the scalping.
Again, not a huge fan of his music, but he seemed genuinely interested in helping his fans get to his shows.
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