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Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

> How much of that cost reduction goes into building new stores?

Probably almost none of it, at least not directly.

> How many new stores in any case are going to food deserts rather than places more profitable for the retailer?

Probably a lot of them.

Places where it's profitable to run a grocery store already have grocery stores. Food deserts exist in the first place because they're not profitable places to put grocery services for one reason or another. Lowering the fixed cost of running a grocery store means that some places that previously could only support N grocers can now support N+1, so that's where the opportunity is. This is no less true when N=0.

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Oh good, so poor people in the ghetto would have to slog their way through checkout themselves more than we privileged people would, shopping as we do in more profitable stores.

Otherwise if you mean that all of a retailer's stores should have self-checkout in equal measure, then we're back to square one: The same places are as less profitable as the more profitable ones. Why impose this deeply unwanted downgrade on your already profitable stores?

I'm not making an argument about market mechanics. I'm just saying that it's dishonest for a retailer to claim self-checkout is about anything other than the obvious.

If providing groceries to food deserts were really a motive for these cost savings, there is one thing they could do to promote self-checkout that would absolutely work where all of those other efforts in the article don't: Offer the tiniest token discount for doing it yourself.

But they don't, and there's the answer.

> I'm not making an argument about market mechanics.

No, but I am :-D.

Pretty obviously the motive for these cost savings is _cost savings_. But that extra profit has to go somewhere.

Sometimes it'll go into lining the pockets of whoever owns the store, which kinda sucks. Go advocate for higher capital gains taxes. I'll be happy to help. Past a certain point, though, stores that just pocket the extra profit won't be around for long. Someone who's willing to make less money as a grocer will come along and start a cheaper store across the street.

Most of that savings has to go to somewhere. Either there's more checkout lines or a better selection or cheaper goods across the board or whatever. Sometimes a store will be profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. At this point, the savings are mostly priced in. We are already benefiting massively from this automation.

Everyone hates these automated checkout terminals, but I doubt many people really want to have their neighborhood grocery store close and all the rest in their town get more expensive.

How much money do they really save when you include initial capital costs - six figures for four to six lanes - and maintenance/updates?

What's the projected lifetime?

I'm also sure we're going to have even faster RFID readers within a decade at the outside, so I'm wondering what the savings will be over that period.

I suspect speed and throughput is at least as much of a motivation as expense.

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