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Ordered food at a McDs recently? Touchscreen kiosks replacing workers. Some franchises are working on AI auntomated drive throughs. Yeah, the robots are here, they just dont look like robots.
There are still people in the kitchen and that will not change for quite a while and isn’t there a labour shortage?
It’s not the service workers and blue collar guys jobs that are the most threatened by self learning neutral networks, chst bots using them and other “classic” computerisation.
It’s the jobs where both input and output are computer files.
Hard to do drug testing on hallucinating chatbots
Drug testing is an unconstitutional violation of privacy
Have you gone to a supermarket lately? Self checkout all over :)
As someone who has worked a lot of retail, they’re saving 8-16 man hours a day MAX. The national average hourly wage for a cashier is $13.81, so that’s $110.48-220.96. You still need to maintain manned registers so you have bodies for closing duties and a pod of self checkout registers still requires at least 1 body to run them. During non-peak hours it’s perfectly reasonable to only have 1 register open with a pod of SCO’s, and that register is mostly so you can sell alcohol and cigarettes. For closing you still need 3 or 4 bodies to deal with the after work rush and closing duties like trash, counting tills and other miscellaneous duties.
Self checkout only is a tool to improve the productivity of 1 person, some people are just upset at how effective they are, as shown by their prevalence. The real reason to be pissed off is that they don’t care, you’re still going to buy the same amount of stuff, you probably won’t even make any changes to your purchasing habits. This is underscored by the trend of retailers locking more and more inventory behind cages and lockboxes, and sales don’t go down, some retailers even think they result in more sales because more product is available to be purchased.
P.S. As someone speaking from the employees point of view, the biggest issue comes from the fact that consumers want to shop on the weekend to comply with their mon-fri lifestyle. Which in turn means someone else has to give up their “weekend”. This alone accounts for most of the issues I’ve seen post covid with staffing shortages, nobody wants to work when their friends or family aren’t, and they’re not getting any incentive pay for working the crappy hours. As a society at some point we have to recognize that this absurd obsession with weekends leads to most of the frustrations we’re talking about. If people could more evenly distribute their alotted time to do chores we wouldn’t have these gigantic lines to services that nobody wants to work at.
So at $110 per day savings, a $5000 console would pay for itself in 45 days. Seems like a no-brainer from a business standpoint.
Lol you think they cost $5000. My current store had them upgraded at the beginning of the year, with existing infrastructure already in place it took a team of 8 contractors 4x8 hour days. Assuming standard “professional” pricing of $100/hr for labor that’s 8x4x8x100=$25,600 in labor.
I have no idea how much the hardware costs but most stores aren’t using the Chinese knockoffs you see on Alibaba for $5,000. The real ones most people use that can take cash are substantially more complicated and require software support to tie into the store’s inventory system. Our regional IT guy was at my store 10 hours a day for a week after just to get things working.
If they cost 100k, its still a net cost savings, as well as a major drop in liability potential with employees. They are, from a financial perspective, the obvious right move.
I agree, thats still not why they’re so popular though. You wanna know where they make money? The cashier doesn’t actually want to bug you about that extended warranty or the current charity or the cost of a bag in some states. The machine has no feelings. It just does what it’s supposed to do that day.
Never gets sick, never in vacation, no paying any benefits, never complains…
It also means you have 4 lanes open with 1 body.
P.S. industry standard seems to be 4 SCO’s per 1 attendant but I know Walmart sometimes does up to 12 per 2 attendants.
