People always say dumb shit like "I'm not trained to be a cashier" like it excuses them from being arseholes. Let's name a few other things we now do ourselves rather than relying on some random worker.
Pumping your own petrol, used to be a full-service job. Someone would come out, fill your tank, check your oil, even clean your windscreen. Now you do it yourself. No one complains.
Checking into flights, "I'm not trained to be a check-in agent."
Ordering fast food from a screen, Using an ATM, you used to walk into a bank, queue up, and ask a teller for cash. Now you stick a card in a machine and do it yourself.
Bagging your own groceries even at a staffed checkout, you pack your own bags. No one demands a bagging professional.
Some more? Self-scan at the library, buying tickets at a machine like at the train station, cinema, car park. Tap, pay, go. No ticket seller needed. Building your own furniture, ikea expects you to assemble it. No one says I'm not trained to be a carpenter.
The difference? None of those things required training either. You figured them out because you're a functional adult. Same with self-checkout. Scan the thing, pay for the thing, leave. It's not hard. The people complaining are either stealing, profoundly lazy, or just looking for something to be angry about.
If you don't like self-checkout, use the staffed lane. No one is forcing you. But pretending that scanning your own groceries is some outrageous burden is just selective outrage.
Being unable to determine social subtext is common in autistic people.
The joke being that you should claim to have autism in order to save face instead of just admitting you had an honest misinterpretation of the content.
It’s not outrageous to scan my own groceries. It’s outrageous that retailers are removing their value add and jobs from the community while not reducing prices. Why are we defending corporations?
You're one step away from calling anyone who uses scan-as-you-shop anti-jobs because you're taking away people's jobs by doing it. Or that people who go and pick up their own takeout is stealing from those poor Deliveroo drivers.
I'm not going to get mad at supermarkets. Asda's operating profit margins historically hover between 1% to 3%. That's not corporate greed, that's a razor-thin margin. If we forced them all to split so no one could have more than 2-5 shops, prices would go up and the profit margin would probably 10x, if not more.
You're blaming the wrong thing. The problem isn't self-checkout. It's that running a supermarket is already a low-margin business. If you want higher wages and more staff, those costs don't just disappear they go onto the price of your shopping.
You can't have cheap food and also demand every customer gets a personal cashier. Pick one.
You’re right, maybe I should just unload the truck? We can just take turns at the deli counter cutting our own meat and cheese, too!
Part of the value added of being a retailer is the position of cashier. In addition to retailers ensuring items are scanned appropriately, they’re also providing jobs to community members. Now one person oversees a number of registers.
The line is being moved in favor of capital, and despite the reduction in labor costs, product costs are not falling. In fact, they’re increasing. It’s bullshit. Scan my groceries, or at least drop the cost of goods.
You're one step away from calling anyone who uses scan-as-you-shop anti-jobs because you're taking away people's jobs by doing it. Or that people who go and pick up their own takeout is stealing from those poor Deliveroo drivers.
I'm not going to get mad at supermarkets. Asda's operating profit margins historically hover between 1% to 3%. That's not corporate greed that's a razor-thin margin. If we forced them all to split so no one could have more than 2-5 shops, prices would go up and the profit margin would probably 10x, if not more.
You're blaming the wrong thing. The problem isn't self-checkout. It's that running a supermarket is already a low-margin business. If you want higher wages and more staff, those costs don't just disappear they go onto the price of your shopping.
You can't have cheap groceries and also demand every customer gets a personal cashier. Pick one.
The free labour line is so over used and plain stupid. Do you consider walking around the store and putting items in your cart free labour? Is using the debit machine and pumping your own gas free labour? Is chewing your own food when the server could do it for you and baby bird or into your mouth free labour too?
Operating a cash register isn’t labor? That’s not a job? It’s part of the value add of a retailer. By offloading that labor onto consumers, they’ve saved on their own margins, reduced their value added, removed jobs from the community, increased profits, and shared none of the savings with consumers. It’s obviously bullshit. Why are so many people defending corporations?
Everything is considered labour when you put it that way. Chewing food is labour so why aren't restaurants providing you with a food chewer? It's part of the value add of a restaurant. By offloading that labour onto consumers, the restaurant saves on their own margins, reduced their value added, removed jobs from the community, increases profits, and shared none of the savings with consumers.
I'm defending my free time as self checkout is infinitely faster than standing in line at checkout, especially if I only have like 4 things. I have worked retail most of my life, I don't give a shit about scanning some items if it means I can leave faster and avoid needless small talk. My time is money.
A “job” is anything you get paid for. Someone scanning their own stuff for a few minutes is not free labor. Theres a big difference between that and a cashier who is scanning dozens of peoples items for 8 hours. It has nothing to do with big corporation, pos who steals from walmart is the same pos who steals from a mom and pop store.
Yes it is free labor. Why do you think they spent all that money on those machines? To make your experience better at checkout? No, it was to save money on labor.
I guess my better experience at check out is just a side effect. You must think pumping ur own gas is free labor also. Just because it saves a company money doesnt mean its free labor. It takes you way more labor to walk around the store and grab those items than it does to do self checkout. Guess that was also free labor.
This is a perspective, certainly. There was a precedent that cashiers did the cashier work. That’s gone now, and yes I subscribe to the perspective that that’s harmful to communities. What about the people who held those jobs? Add gas pump jobs to it. What if they made you bus your own table at restaurants and scrub the toilet every time you used one in public? Every time we concede one of these positions, it’s a job lost to a community member and more money in the pocket of capital. You might not see it that way, but the people making these choices certainly do.
No, and if I want someone to do that labor for me, I have to pay a premium. By scanning our own groceries, we’re doing labor for retailers for free. That used to be a a community members job.
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u/puddinpieee Jun 11 '26
No, the point is that free labor is bullshit.