OR Union Wants Voters to Limit Grocers to Two Self-Checkout Stations per Store

Did they not deserve consideration?

In retrospect a better argument may have been the millions of people killed... according to Wikipedia there have been 3,740,769 motor vehicle fatalities in the US in the past century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

My grandfather was from a town in Missouri and told me a story that when he was a kid, his little town had the biggest factory in the world to make a certain item. That item was stirrups and of course there aren't many horse riders and we don't need so many horse product factories. Today his town has no factories and there's basically no town left anymore, just an old building that was the schoolhouse.

They probably did and still do given the toxic gases spewed from exhausts.

Isn't New Jersey fun?

Gasoline is more dangerous in NJ than other states.

A lot of shrinkage is also caused by store staff too. So the two may offset each other.

The price of goods is a function of all of the costs associated with selling, so I think the cost in additional theft is ultimately put on the honest customers. That may not be such a terrible result though, since self checkout reduces cost in the first place. Since many customers prefer to save time / avoid human interaction by self checkout, it's probably a net gain either way you cut it.

Yes it does -- the cashiers will not be permanently unemployed but will find other, more productive work.

You are only delaying the inevitable. You are also tying someone to a job that provides no value other than a paycheck. I would rather go with Andrew Yang’s plan.

> A single self-checkout station probably replaces 2 cashiers. Not to mention they take up less space. It makes a lot of sense for the store owners but I don't think it makes much sense for the community.

That's not a reasonable position. The same could be said about many technological changes. Replacing jobs with technology, especially unskilled jobs, is always a win for society as a whole.

Do you live in Oregon or NJ? Was wondering if your opinion applies to self serve gas stations also (it's ok if it does or doesn't, just more food for thought). This can also extend to changing your own oil, or doing your own landscape work, cleaning house, etc.

Personally I hate having to use the self checkout (typically stores lately have only had one cashier open, with 20 people in line). Especially if I have a larger cart of groceries. A handful of items is fine, as it strikes a balance of (in)convenience and speed of checkout.

In fact, there are many things I hate about shopping -- you have to first put items in your cart, then take them out of the cart and put them on a belt, then put the bags back in the cart, take them out again to put them in your car, then take them out again at home, and finally put everything away. This is why I now shop at a local grocery store that doesn't use the conveyor belt, instead the cart goes right up to the cashier and they take it directly out of the cart, then put bagged items directly in another cart lined up on the other side.

There are some unintended side effects of self checkout lines you’re not considering that in my experience make them considerably (>2x) faster. They self select for people who have fewer items, are competent at using the machine, and are incentivized to be quick. Check outs manned with people are always slammed with customers with piles of groceries and even the express lane is staffed with a person who has no incentive to scan quickly.

Imagine what we could all do with the extra time and money we get from automated checkouts?

And you would trade that so the store can have people standing around waiting for you to decide to pay for groceries?

The quality of self-checkout varies a lot from store to store. The ones Walmart put in at their stores up here (Western Washington) a few years ago have been fantastic. I have none of the problems with them that had me avoiding self-checkout for years at other stores.

They have 9 on the side of the store the groceries are on, and 5 on the other side, with the regular checkout lines between them. One attendant at each set.

The self-checkout is almost always way faster than the regular checkout. Most of the time at the 9 unit side there is either no wait or a one person wait.

If the law were changed here to limit them to two units, I'd probably switch to doing most of my Walmart shopping in their app, and paying there, for store pickup just to avoid the regular checkouts.

> As it is, grocers typically have to have a single person at the helm of each bank of four to six machines. The machines are prone to requiring manual overrides, and often the single machine-herder is overwhelmed trying to keep up; I hear their grumbles. I find myself examining my basket while heading towards checkout and considering whether I think that a human cashier would give a smoother experience.

I simply cannot understand why this means that there needs to be _legislation_ to limit the amount of self service machines. Presumably if it's really as bad as you describe, there's a strong business case to fix it? Since the situation you describe makes it sound like it has the potential to hurt business.

If you are going to legislate for anything, legislate for installing machines which work. They exist - I use them all the time without any issues.

> I have had conversations with employees at the latter stores. The machines were ordained, installed, and configured by corporate order, with only a small amount of local training.

If the machines somehow failed to operate properly in Oregon but worked elsewhere, this would be a fair point... but presumably they are liable to break down in the same manner, causing the same issues?

A straightforward reading of http://oregonvotes.org/irr/2020/041text.pdf suggests that any Amazon Go location would be restricted to two checkout lanes, both automated. Amazon would likely argue that they have only one checkout lane per location, but that it is quite a speedy lane. The text uses the undefined word "station"; Amazon might well argue that they don't have any stations for their process. Amazon Go is partially affected by the findings, as well, but we already know that Go is obviously a tantalizing shoplifting target.

As somebody who might sign the petition for, vote for, and be affected by this law, this all seems reasonable. Amazon presumably wants their Go locations to have no grocer staff whatsoever, and only a token of security staff and restocking robots. Outlawing that seems difficult and not worthwhile. I think that we should be sympathetic towards automated bodegas; they won't be able to replace Plaid Pantry and 7-Eleven anytime soon in Oregon, unless they can sell tobacco, booze, lottery tickets, Hop cards, hot food, or any of those other things that the law requires a live human employee behind the counter to vend.