littlegreenpills posted:self-service checkouts were pioneered circa 2006 and to this day their prevalence has not increased. human cashiers are still generally cheaper. so it is with all automation. im going to make an effortpost on how in this and other ways technological progress has in many important ways actually slowed down in recent decades
i don't think human cashiers are cheaper, i think stores are worried about losing older customers who don't want to use a robot cashier. also people are bad at bagging their own stuff so self-checkout as it is now is too slow for more than a couple of bags worth of items.
i'm sure you know that supermarkets are one of the most ruthless and lucrative industries. their only focus is customer activity and preference analysis and planning and organizing every single cubic millimeter of the store. since they can't really compete by product selection they can only compete through psychological tactics like product placement and shelf configuration etc. considering how much attention they pay to even the slightest detail, if self-checkout cost more money than having a cashier, there would be no self-checkouts, period.
actual factories, where no human comfort needs consideration, are the real places to look at for robotization of production.
but whether it's the falling rate of profit or robotization either trend will make the real value of labour fall. there will be less to do, either way...
drwhat posted:littlegreenpills posted:self-service checkouts were pioneered circa 2006 and to this day their prevalence has not increased. human cashiers are still generally cheaper. so it is with all automation. im going to make an effortpost on how in this and other ways technological progress has in many important ways actually slowed down in recent decades
i don't think human cashiers are cheaper, i think stores are worried about losing older customers who don't want to use a robot cashier. also people are bad at bagging their own stuff so self-checkout as it is now is too slow for more than a couple of bags worth of items.
i'm sure you know that supermarkets are one of the most ruthless and lucrative industries. their only focus is customer activity and preference analysis and planning and organizing every single cubic millimeter of the store. since they can't really compete by product selection they can only compete through psychological tactics like product placement and shelf configuration etc. considering how much attention they pay to even the slightest detail, if self-checkout cost more money than having a cashier, there would be no self-checkouts, period.
actual factories, where no human comfort needs consideration, are the real places to look at for robotization of production.
but whether it's the falling rate of profit or robotization either trend will make the real value of labour fall. there will be less to do, either way...
this is what i meant, i should have said "human cashiers are more profitable to use". if self checkouts were cheap enough to pay for their own installation costs - which would also happen if cashiers got higher wages - then they would be rolled out across the board even if customers ended up being less satisfied. mcdonalds doesn't serve rare tenderloin even customers would probably like it better than a big mac
and i dont agree with your idea that they wouldn't exist at all if they weren't more profitable than cashiers - they had to be installed in the first place to find out cos they was no way to tell before the fact (you can't prove customers don't like em by theorizing about it), retailers like WalMart DID remove large amounts of them some years ago because they figured out most of them weren't as profitable as human ones, and the ones that remain were left in place because in specific instances they were profitable
littlegreenpills posted:this is what i meant, i should have said "human cashiers are more profitable to use". if self checkouts were cheap enough to pay for their own installation costs - which would also happen if cashiers got higher wages - then they would be rolled out across the board even if customers ended up being less satisfied. mcdonalds doesn't serve rare tenderloin even customers would probably like it better than a big mac
and i dont agree with your idea that they wouldn't exist at all if they weren't more profitable than cashiers - they had to be installed in the first place to find out cos they was no way to tell before the fact (you can't prove customers don't like em by theorizing about it), retailers like WalMart DID remove large amounts of them some years ago because they figured out most of them weren't as profitable as human ones, and the ones that remain were left in place because in specific instances they were profitable
Yeah I think this supports the point drwhat made about how ruthless the grocery business is. Someone tried rolling out self checkout for that experimental reason, and everyone else in the business had to play along because it was too big of an advantage if it worked to allow someone that large of a head start of firing all of their labor.
Self checkout is a bit different from the idea of consolidating labor into robots (capital), I think, because it's more about shifting the labor burden from paid labor to unwilling slave labor by making the customers do for free what the stores were previously paying human labor. I don't think anyone has directly tried going fully automatic yet, but it's been talked about for years. There have been articles since at least the 90s about putting RFID tags in everything and you get scanned on the way out the door and the price of goods is automatically charged.
The problem with a lot of these attacks on cashiers as disposable labor is that they always greatly simplify theft to a degree which requires more loss prevention personnel and security systems etc, which end up costing just as much. Cashiers are also very scalable and modular in that they can also be given short hours and sent to clean up a spill or stock a shelf during slow times. Capital solutions like robot cashiers or RFID scanners, in addition to theft enabling, are not really multi function capable.
MarxUltor posted:it's more about shifting the labor burden from paid labor to unwilling slave labor by making the customers do for free what the stores were previously paying human labor
this doesn't get talked about much but yeah disguising this as technology will be a big trend if it can be made one
the fact that it isnt profitable to do so right now though is a symptom of general slowdown and ongoing crisis in the capitalist system imo, which is what i sort of meant in the first place about technological progress slowing down
but even off the top of my head I can imagine how if Amazon became even more vertically integrated than it is now it could enforce tightly standardized packaging sizes on all its suppliers so that their own boxes can be efficiently packed via a some simple algorithm, in which case building a packing robot becomes a lot easier (more like a fixed set of arms by the conveyor belt maybe but what do i know). that eliminates an awful lot of galley slaves. and anyone who's actually being paid to come up with this sort of system is going to know how to do it much better than me.
so this is what i mean when i say there isn't a great deal of point in discussing the specifics here on rhizzone dot net, no matter how it tickles our autistic testicles in the way our girlfriends would if we had them
theres lots and lots and lots of potential ways to eliminate labor, not just via literal machines but rearranging social relations to enable the use of the machines. but it largely hasn't happened to the extent it could, and i think this is yet another symptom of capitalist crisis
Edited by zauberfart ()
