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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

I saw a statistic that roughly 10% of the US workforce is in some form of "customer-facing service" role and I just have to wonder how many of those jobs are nearly gone, or already gone. Even if it's a 5% reduction, or 3% over the next decade, that seems catastrophic without a completely new category of jobs to replace them.

I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout. I stayed in a hotel recently and I didn't even talk to someone at the front desk. I just checked in at a kiosk and got my room card. There was no one else around.

I guess the people that used to do those jobs are all just driving Ubers and Doordash now?

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> I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout

That’s at least one trend I’ve seen reversed. All the self checkouts around where I am have been removed because the stores realized that the self checkouts and honesty system only works when the times are good.

Video surveillance and facial recognition is in use here to prevent that kind of thing.

You should see what target does to all their stores…

Someone still has to show up to deal with the perp. And the cops have been ‘quiet quitting’ for awhile.

Only works when the times are good though. If you’re getting 50-100 people a day trying to steal, the cops aren’t coming

In stores I’ve been in the highest density of cameras is directly above the checkouts.

The reversal of self checkouts has been one I've seen spottily, but I do totally agree. I've seen some Walmarts close their self checkout while others keep them open. I guess each store may do their out loss calculations and take action based on that.

I personally like self-checkout a lot. At the grocery store I used to go to, I swear I could get my stuff scanned and bagged in half the time as the cashier, and that's not counting the time waiting in limited lines (since there are usually way more self checkouts so the time-to-first-scan is also lower). Very slow and they seemed to hate small talk (also a let down, because the only redeeming part of a manned line to me is casual conversation with the cashier and those in line).

It varies a lot in my local experience from no self-checkout, to a mix, to mostly self-checkout with one or two backed-up lanes of cashiers. Whether it's good or bad for me personally depends on the type of merchandise and how much I have.

In general, I essentially always interact with a front desk at a hotel and it varies at a grocery store depending on lines and the merchandise I have.

Those who are still employed by my local grocery store don't seem too motivated to do their jobs. It's an unfortunate but foreseeable scenario that expedites the problem where people prefer self-checkout.

I wish we'd pump the brakes on efficiency and profit.

> I wish we'd pump the brakes on efficiency and profit.

This is not legal, executives of publicly traded companies are required to put maximizing shareholder value above all other considerations.

I suspect the implication was that consumers and voters would do the brake pumping. I don't think anyone expects CEOs or boards to be socially conscious anymore. The idea that companies would care about externalities is quaint.

That’s not true. Theoretical maximum shareholder value would be achieved by firing all employees and selling the company for scraps, yet we don’t see that happening. Fiduciary duty doesn’t mean you are required to squeeze profits above all else.

It would be easy to argue that would usually not maximize value in the long run, which is why they don't do that.

However, some PE firms have been successfully doing similar practices.

It's not that simple. I'll point you at this Harvard Law Review article[1] to start but shareholder value is not the only consideration for executives and doesn't even need to override.

1. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/will-the-real-sha...

This is misinformation. They are accountable to whatever the board and shareholders require of them, so long as that is legal.

Huh I wonder if this has anything to do why all our products are enshittifying.

If it were that simple, businesses could never offer say a 10% discount or buy-one-get-one.

Nope nope nope. They are required to act in shareholders' interests. This is not the same thing as "stock price must go up".

This is flat-out false.

For reference:

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. - https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-354

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits.

(Emphasis added.)

They're pretty good near me

And of course, there's this idea everything needs to be done like the house is on fire, but I'm usually fairly happy if I see someone getting a break to look at their phone and doesn't notice immediately that I'm standing waiting or whatever. Or ambles over at a leisurely pace, that's fine, take your time, it's hard running around all day

> take your time, it's hard running around all day

This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.

>then relax as I bag them

Around where I live (Boston area), there are almost universally baggers. This was something that went away for a bit but, while I will if needed, I almost never bag my own groceries.

Self checkouts are something I avoid unless I'm genuinely pressed for time and there's a self station open. It's a small thing, but I'd rather keep the human checkers employed.

So you've never had a cart FULL of groceries? Or are you one of those people that do 30 items at self checkout?

Buying an entire cart full of groceries that will last for weeks is a somewhat American cultural thing. I'm not saying that I've never seen it, but the norm where I live in Europe is to have one of those hand-held baskets and getting enough for 2-3 days tops.

Definitely an American thing.

Or they just don't live in cities which not everyone in Europe does either so they can't just walk a few blocks to grab supplies for a day or two.

Uber and DoorDash are full…

No, those people aren’t driving for Uber now. Let that sink in for a moment.

Less hospitality jobs, less customer-service jobs, less retail jobs, no mall jobs, no manufacturing jobs, gig economy is full, corporate jobs being replaced by AI, trains going autonomous, trucks going autonomous, this is end game capitalism. Those who own, own it all. Those who don’t, own nothing, will never own anything, will only rent/lease/borrow their lives.

This string of words made me shudder, gave me a chill.

Too true.

I go to a cashier lane whenever possible because shakes fist at cloud no one's paying me to ring up and bag my groceries.

Also, unless job automation is tied to some kind of UBI or Freedom Dividend or whatever, we're facing a dystopian future with a starving underclass. Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?

> Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to?

The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.

That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically.

Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our current economy.

Ah yes, historically. I've heard of "history".

> Ah yes, historically. I've heard of "history".

Heard of but never actually looked into? Sorry, you set yourself up for that one.

It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)

What happens when the jobs the migrant workers left the farm for are automated away? Do we expect other jobs to appear that won't also be automated?

Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?

> Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?

It seems to do a bit of both. People do slightly more work with lots more automation to help them, and automation generates work as well (e.g. once upon a time you'd occasionally send a memo out; now anyone can email anyone else and it all needs archiving).

> to supplement what the household could not grow

Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.

> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing

Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.

So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.

No one's paying you to fill up gas either. Do you always go inside and ask someone to do it for you?

Yeah, that's what the attendant is paid to do (I live in New Jersey). They've tried many times to make self-serve gas legal here, and I won't have it!

If I grew up getting my gas pumped for me, I would resist that going away too. Admittedly, this is my status quo bias.

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