What I’m hearing is NY Democrats are working to pass a bill that will increase prices at businesses using self-checkout by 10 percent. They aren’t going to cut into their own profits.
The fun part that I have heard from a few retail managers is that the software that the self checkout uses costs as much or more per month than the employee would have.
Right, because if I self checkout my $200 grocery bill, that worker definitely would have made $20 in that few minute interaction.
I like the idea, but that’s a terrible implementation. The cost of the bill has no relation to the money saved by using the machine and firing a worker. A flat amount no more than a % of the bill is tiny would be better. Like $1-3 but no more than 5% of bill.
“democrats” “fighting for worker rights”, are we doing this in big 26? No wonder american left is dead.
I didn’t have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I’m doing somebody else’s job as a customer, the company is saving money.
That “$300 billion” number is just completely made up. The math doesn’t even remotely work.
The entire US grocery industry does somewhere around $1 trillion in revenue per year. For self-checkout to save $300 billion, that would mean roughly a third of every dollar spent on groceries was going directly to cashier wages. That is obviously not how grocery stores operate. Total labor costs for a store are only a fraction of their expenses.
And the idea that self-checkout was some massive money-saving miracle ignores the other side of the equation. Those systems cost a lot upfront, require maintenance, and they increase losses from theft, missed scans, and mistakes. A machine replacing a cashier doesn’t magically eliminate costs; it just moves them somewhere else.
There is a reason companies like Walmart, Target, and Dollar General have started putting limits on self-checkout or bringing back more staffed lanes. If self-checkout was saving them hundreds of billions, they wouldn’t be walking it back. They would be installing them everywhere they could.
This is the kind of post that hurts any community built around open discussion and critical thinking. A sensational claim gets repeated because it supports a certain viewpoint, while nobody stops to ask if it is actually true. The truth should matter regardless of whether it supports corporations, consumers, or anyone else. Being intellectually honest means checking the facts first, not just accepting information because it confirms what we already believe.
On a side note, totally support the bill in every way.
I frequent a DG Market in a rural area. They shut the self checkouts down pretty quick due to theft.
I really thought leaving Reddit would reduce the occurrence of this but honestly it was naive of me. This sort of clickbait crap is everywhere including Lemmy. Its unfortunate
Reddit is a cesspool but unfortunately so is the wider media ecosystem for the most part.
Highly upvoted too. Yes it is exactly the same here, just a little different biases.
It’s a shame because I can’t find a platform to get away from this type of nonsense. It’s all the same, false claim is made and nobody even asks if claim is true they just assume it is and start arguing about it in the comments.
Like, what’s the point? Wish there was a platform similar to this that actually permanently banned people sharing blatantly false or misleading content.
It’s how media works, rage get’s click and the lack of critical thinking skills is incredible prevalent everywhere.
To further add some numbers (and their source) to this, the average grocery cashier makes $15-16 an hour, or liberally $35k a year. Note that this isn’t the entire cost of a cashier, the checkout equipment and POS systems cost money too - let’s assume that and the automatic checkout system are in the same order of magnitude. There were about 800k grocery store cashiers in the US in 2017 (source) so that’s about $28 billion, or ~3% of that proposed $1T revenue.
Many factors not included in this calc, more importantly regional variations in costs. Food prices and wages are higher than average in NY, 10% might not be pretty well calculated for that state. Also, human employees must be insured/have benefits, and machines do not require this. That cost savings on stores isn’t in the calculus here.
Also a huge fan of holding food chains accountable for fair pricing. Hope this becomes effective!
Also a huge fan of holding food chains accountable for fair pricing. Hope this becomes effective!
Most grocery stores are running at 2% profit margins. There isn’t anything for this to be ‘effective’ for, except you just raise prices 10% across the board and pocket the extra from actual cashiers still being used. It sounds great on paper until you dig in and realize it’s a completely asinine idea.
deleted by creator
I’m not arguing my own dissertation here. And I’m definitely not doing an MLA format on a Lemmy comment.
But feel free to actually verify the information on your own if you want to take up your time doing that.
For the record, I did actual research for the information stated above but you don’t have to take my word for it.
Not OP, but a 2 second Google search turns up that it is in fact about 1 trillion. https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts
I didn’t see your comment until after I deleted mine. But yeah I saw a comment below that actually had statistics from datausa.io.
I still say that they should back up their rebuttal with their own sources instead of just spitting out a number.
Ok, but since they’re too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.
I mean kinda? There’s a natural price cap in place for basic needs like this because of their relationship to labor. People need to eat to live and work, and if they can’t afford to, must riot or die. This places a limit on the allowable range of grocery praces in relation to wages. If there was 10% slack to raise prices, they would’ve done it already. 'course, that doesn’t account for the effects of benefits like SNAP, if those rise to match.
(Not that can’t do it, if they’ve morons. it would just turn out to be an enormous mistake. 💀)
I guess they could still do it “safely” if everyone switches to using the self-checkout? Then the rise would only hit people on normal checkout. I guess what this does is unevenly distribute the cost of groceries between people that can use the self-checkout and those that can’t. So it like, harms old and disabled people mostly? And people that shop during peak hours when there’s a self-checkout queue.
And also it incentives supermarkets to fire cashiers, like a Pigouvian tax on hiring them. Fuck.
They will increase prices by 10% to offset this.
Grocery prices have gone up 25% to 30% since 2020. It has been at least three full years since the pandemic was declared over. And food prices have gone up at around 10% since then.
They don’t need an excuse to add 10%, they’re doing it anyway.
Sources:
https://americandefault.org/statistics/grocery-price-increase-since-2020/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2025/june/food-price-inflation-slowed-in-2023-and-2024
General inflation has went up 30% since 2020. So it matches food increases perfectly.
Fun fact: With very little effort, you can give yourself a discount at checkout!
Unethical corporations are humanity’s predators and we should hurt them however we can.
I grab my zero dollar curtesy gum every time I am at one.
Can we go for upcharges on food items for modifying them next? If you are going to charge me $0.30 for adding tomatoes to a sandwich, you better damn well reduce the price by $0.30 when I remove tomatoes from a sandwich.
This is getting so out of hand in the USA.
Oh that’s one of my gripes. My son likes to get an egg mcmuffin with no meat, extra cheese. You’d think the slice of meat and cheese would cancel each other out. And I think they are up to charging $1 for a slice of american cheese. And its been this way for over 15 years.
It’s not just the US. The race for the biggest profit has hit its limits on the best value front. Now it’s pretty much all on deception and enshittification.
It seems like they will just mark everything up by 10% and then give that discount at self checkout. So they will pocket even more while harming those who don’t use self checkout.
Or eliminating cashiers altogether.
It also doesn’t really make sense to do it as a percentage. A cashier’s wage is typically hourly, and the labor market has settled on a particular wage for cashiers in this area - say $15/hr.
If I have a $150 grocery bill, a 10% discount would be $15. For maybe 5 minutes of work. Working out to an hourly wage of $180/hr (60/5 = 12, 12 * 15 = 180).
So if they’re saying “we should be compensating customers for being made to do labor”, they’d be compensating them at roughly 12x the going rate for cashiers in this example.
Now if it’s just meant to be punitive, OK. But then why not actually address the real issue: displacement of workers by technology and passing the labor burden on to unpaid consumers - either make that illegal or tax the company to help mitigate the harm it’s causing by eliminating jobs.
Imagine the lines at self checkout for ~$10(+) off on decent-sized carts
$100 is a decent basket where I’m at…
$100 isn’t much of a big cart these days. That’s a week or less of food for many.
For the last point, it is easier to tax unfavored behavior into the ground than it is to outright forbid it. That’s why sin taxes exist after all.
I don’t think it would be difficult to outright forbid self-checkout at all, actually.
There’s a difference between enforcing laws on individuals and enforcing laws on businesses. Businesses can’t exactly run and hide, if they’re using self-checkout they’re going to get found out. That’s distinct from something like the drug trade, which is all underground and hidden.
Some people fucking love self checkout. If you ban it, you’ll have disability advocacy groups up your arse on behalf of autistic people and others with social anxiety.
ADA compliance will kill the entire thing. You can’t charge someone for accommodation of a disability that prevents them from using the self checkout. All the human-staffed registers will be posted as handicap accessible, and they will default to the “discounted” self-checkout price.
when I recently went back to using a staffed lane, I told the folks I had anxiety about being in the lane, and the cashiers comforted me.
I have social anxiety, practicing in the staff lane, has helped me with this. At least, in this small area of life.
I get the point, but if a person doesnt ever push themselves, they wont grow.
Sure, I’m just saying, this wouldn’t be a hard law to enforce.
It would be a very dumb law that has zero chance of passing. It would be like banning cars to keep horses employed.
Except horses aren’t allowed to vote, so actually, it’s nothing like that.
We’ve given up so much as consumers. There was a time when people would be pissed that the store was making them do unpaid labor. Now we don’t bat an eye.
My concern here is less about enforcement and more about getting the law passed and through the court system in the first place.
You don’t think they’ll drag such a tax through the court system? Our enemies don’t want any restraints on businesses, anything we try to do will be fought.
Do sin taxes really stop anything though?
They definitely have some effect, simply because they push prices up.
If I have a $150 grocery bill, a 10% discount would be $15.
If you have a $150 grocery bill, it’s being hiked to ~$166.66 before you get to the checkout. Then the 10% discount is bringing it back down to the $150 you were paying before. The net discount is zero: you’re paying exactly what you’re paying now.
If you keep going to the cashier after this, you’re paying the company the hiked price, which gives them an extra $16.66 for maybe 5 minutes of cashier labor. The company turns around and pays the cashier $1.66, netting an extra $15 from you for their shareholders.
Cost of labor, overhead, and profit are already accounted for in that $150 price of the goods. That’s why the store charges $150 for them - because that’s what covers the wages, overhead, and includes the maximum markup they can get away with (~3% margin for grocery stores afaik).
All I’m saying is, they do have to be able to cover costs. So because of that and their thin margins, they’d just hike prices (probably more than they’d need to take advantage of the situation).
So it makes more sense to either tax them for avoiding using human labor and passing that labor on to customers (to help pay for the drain they’re placing on the economy by not hiring people), or just ban the practice outright. Couple that with price controls to ensure they can’t unfairly inflate prices. Things they can’t avoid rather than a fee they can hike prices to avoid.
or tax the company to help mitigate the harm it’s causing by eliminating jobs.
Well. Discounting items in self-checkout is actually a tax on the company for using self-checkout.
But not one that relates to the thing that we’re trying to stop them from doing. Cashiers aren’t paid per item scanned, they don’t get commission. They are paid an hourly wage.
If you wanted to pay customers a rebate for their labor at the market rate for a cashier, or one set by the state, that’d make sense to eliminate the gains the company receives from automation.
So 5 minutes of work at $15/hr = $1.25. So not much, but it mitigates the benefit of not hiring people.
Though, it’s still a benefit because you pay a person whether they’re actively working or not and you have to pay tax on human labor (contributing to social security, etc) so maybe hiking it higher than whatever the typical wage is for cashiers would make sense.
But either way, 10% doesn’t make sense.
Can you imagine if they discounted it based on time? People would be scanning .4 items per minute lol
The problem with your logic is that I can scan the items slower and make the compensation more fair, if I scan the items 12x slower then I’m being paid a fair wage for that 150$ purchase.
So am I being punished for being fast?
That’s the only way it could work.
Grocery stores average margins of ~3%. They can’t do universal 10% discounts.The CEO of Kroger made $15.63 million in 2024. Pretty sure there are lots of ways they could make it work. They choose not to.
That’s not how math works.
2024
Revenue was $147B
Profit was $3.8B or 2.8%The lowest estimate I found of sales volume through self checkout is 38%.
So a 10% self checkout discount is 3.8% hit to revenue. When profits are only 2.8% they’ll take a 1% loss.The CEO pay being only 0.4% of that $3.8B profit. Isn’t remotely enough to matter.
This won’t lower prices.
Do you think the CEO compensation is the only place they are siphoning off funds to the oligarchs? And even with all the greed, they are still admitting to robbing $3.8B from the working class. That’s all profits are.
The system rewards greed and corruption. So that’s what they do. They conspire with other corporations to inflate prices. They take advantage of disasters to gouge consumers. These aren’t conspiracies, they are things that have been admitted to under oath and discovered through investigation.
The numbers are public. You can do the math and convince us.
say you’ve never worked in accounting without saying it
They’re welcome to lie with the numbers! But then I can at least reason about it. Right now, we’re looking at some cherry-picked end points and ignoring the proposed numerics entirely.
We’re looking a 2 different things here. I’m doing the math on a specific policy and how it would effect a specific company. You come back with generalizations and broad conceptions.
You are right generally. We agree generally. But here specifically, this policy won’t do anything to help that. It’s bad policy-making. We’re both right.
That’s an abysmally small number compared to the amount of product they move.
Yes, sure, CEO’s should make less. But that amounts to fractions of a percent on the typical purchase, not 10%.
Sure they can. They hike prices 11.11% and the 10% discount brings them right back to their original price. Their 3% margin stays a 3% margin. They can even post the “discounted” price on the shelves to make it seem like customers are getting a good deal.
Yah. That’s what was already pointed out.
You’re pretending that stores can just arbitrarily raise prices. They already set their prices as the maximum the market will bear. And yes, ultimately the point is to make self-checkout cheaper than regular.
They arbitrarily raise prices all the time. Have you not noticed? And are you going to just stop eating food if it suddenly costs 10 percent more?
You think that was arbitrary? Do you have any idea how much work stores put in to setting prices? It’s more complex than this, but to illustrate, companies will maximize for total revenue, so quantity sold times price. And they know that whenever they raise the price, even by ten cents, some number of people will not purchase that item. They only raise prices if they predict the decline in sales will be more than offset by the increase in revenue per item.
It may seem arbitrary to you, but it’s anything but. The prices in the store are already at what the company estimates to be the optimum total revenue level.
yeah you’re right about your point so far, but this is different. if every grocery store in town were forced to raise prices by 5%, then they could all do it because all their competition does it too.
but if only one store decides to do it, then the customers would change to the other store nearby who offers lower prices.
Note that cheaper self-checkout means more demand for it (and less demand for cashiers). So we’ll have fewer jobs, and worse service for those who can’t (for w/e reason) use self-checkout.
Most of its happening anyway.
This is why I always skip a few items at self checkout, if you don’t want to pay the cashier, then you’ll pay me instead
Is there no scale? Do you pocket the item? How does this work?
If you scan one item and put two on the scale, it will usually just accept it.
The scales and the items aren’t all that accurately documented, so it doesn’t always know the difference.
Whole lot of scanners are moving towards cameras and detection along with just automatically documenting when you didn’t scan something. Clock over the felony amount in your state and they can just automatically send the info to the police. Target has been doing it for years.
There may be an unintended consequence of this. Corpos love to optimize to minimize any hits to their bottom line.
I could see any of these possibilities as a reaction:
- Self checkouts become overwhelmed so stores remove remaining paid cashiers to add more self checkout lanes.
- Self checkouts are reduced or removed to avoid giving any discounts.
- I believe I read that grocery margins are thin at the store and are much higher for manufacturers. I could see stores increasing prices across the board to recoup costs.
Hard to know for sure, the people seem to just rarely get a W these days that isn’t immediately wiped out by something else.
Yeah, you just raise prices 10% and pocket the difference when people end up having to use more cashiers because the self checkout is too full from fools thinking they are getting a discount. It’s no different than all the stores with ‘reward’ programs where you get cheaper or better prices. They track everything you buy and sell it, making more than the amount you are saving. Seems better to recognize that automation of things like checkout is here to stay and incentivize alternative methods to keep people you know, fed, housed and alive.
Hmm… I’ve read the opposite about margins: grocery store chains centralize purchasing so that they have a huge leverage on manufacturers.
For NY in particular, they shouldn’t be able to raise their price easily as the city will have its city-owned stores to compete with them.
Yes price increases seem the most likely for pharmacies but not grocery stores. There is still sufficient competition in grocery stores, and enough of them without self checkout lanes. It would be hard to get away with a price increase when a cheaper alternative exists.
Pharmacies however… As much as I prefer small pharmacies, they often are tooo small for everything. Simply can’t find everything one might need. There’s basically just CVS and Walgreens, and they both are big into self checkout. Those two would collude for sure.
If a bill requiring 10% discounts at self checkout comes into law, they will all think the same thing: Increase the prices so the price at self checkout is the same, and people have to pay extra for a cashier.
The only way to realistically encourage corporations to reduce their margins within the current system is by establishing an alternative which is cheaper, and thus acts as competition which pushes the price down. So basically what Mamdani is doing with city-owned grocery stores.
The same goes for housing. Provide decent but simple housing at low rates, and the slumlords will either need to lower their margins or compete on quality instead.
I mean when it comes to grocery stores, most have little profit margin to begin with.
Hard to know for sure, the people seem to just rarely get a W these days that isn’t immediately wiped out by something else.
fun fact: the winning and the losing are not causes of each other. if you win, you will probably lose some of it later. however, if you don’t win, you will probably still lose something later. so it’s not better to not win just to avoid losing later. you lose anyways, the question is only whether you also win some.
There may be an unintended consequence of this.
The consequences will be a flood of lobbying money into the next legislature races
Now watch as Hochul kills it because “it’s bad for the economy”.
honestly just cap executive pay. nothing they can do then
In fact, let’s just screw the whole thing and seize the means of production…
“seize the means of production” as if that’s an easy/good thing to do. then what, the employees own the company? and they get paid depending on company profitability? well, not every company turns a profit. what if the company has a bad year? will the employees go hungry? who says that it will turn a profit next year?
Then the employees decide what to do themselves in those situations. If it fails it fails, but they would be laid off or not be making money even if they didn’t own the company because their boss wouldn’t be able to pay them.
Bang up idea, when have you ever seen the government run something correctly/efficiently?
USPS?
There’s tons of examples if you actually care to look. Trash pickup is an easy example. I’ve lived in places where it was managed by the city and places where it was run by private companies. The city always showed up on time and never raised prices without justification.
Guess what the private companies did on a regular basis? And if you want to talk about efficiency let’s consider whether or not it would be better to have four different companies running four sets of trucks on four overlapping routes through the city as opposed to one entity handling the whole thing. The only thing efficient about the private companies running things is the way the money is siphoned off to some rich asshole instead of being managed by accountable local officials.
If its so efficient why do trash companies exist? I live in a city that has municipal pickup and all my friends that own apartments/restaurants all have private business dumpsters because the city sucks at doing a simple job…
The government needs to stay in its lane and out of business.
If its so efficient why do trash companies exist?
If private companies are so efficient then why does the government exist?
Do you see why framing the question that way doesn’t help you address the actual problem? I’m guessing you don’t since you seem unwilling to consider the possibility that private ownership is not the ideal solution to every service problem. I don’t think you need more than a cursory glance at the state of the US to throw that idea out the window but things must seem pretty good to you if you’re still stuck in that mindset.
Not stuck in any “mindset”. Been around the block a couple of times, not my first bbq, and every time any government gets involved they fuck it up and steal. Nope not on my watch.
And government exists as (and was intended) to hold the social contract we all have with each other together by the rule of law. Otherwise it entropy.
Been around the block a couple of times
So has your 5 trash companies
whether your government only makes chaor or actually helps, depends a whole lot on the government and especially on the people in it. there are good governments, for example here in austria.
the issue is more, whether your government represents you and whether they care about you. that is something that depends on your local context.
so i can tell you from an example why private companies exist that do things that are typically done by public companies … here in austria, there’s a railway operator called WestBahn. They provide passenger trains on the route from vienna to innsbruck (roughly). That’s the only route that they service. Why do they do it?
because it’s one of the most provitable routes in all of austria. it has many, reliable passengers. servicing that route turns a profit. servicing many other routes, for example bus lines in some remote village, is still necessary, but obviously doesn’t turn a profit as it has maybe 3 passengers at a time.
so, they pick the 1 route that’s actually very profitable, only service that, and leave every other route to the state-owned alternative. that’s what’s happening.
train networks, schools, healthcare, heck even social housing, here in central europe
The police and most three letter agencies, when you understand their purpose is to protect the wealthy.
Works for me.
A lot more frequently than I see private industry run something correctly/efficiently.
the government
Who said shit about the government?
We should seize the means of production. Us.
seize
in other words, steal. i’m actually fine with that if it’s for the greater good. the question is: would it work? do you have any idea how to run a company on that scale? there’s a whole lot of companies that have business connections all around the world. what happens to those? can you handle these connections? what if other companies think that you’re not trustworthy anymore and refuse to do business with you? how do you handle these cases?
also what about money? just that the company is now held by workers does not somehow suddenly make it have much more money. especially grocery stores maybe have 3% profit margins, that means, even if no CEO siphons off wealth, the company’s ability to spend money increases by maybe 3%, so wages could go up 3%. just to inform you, about what’s realistic here. it’s not as if you’re suddenly having a 3x wage increase.
in other words, steal.
Not quite. “Steal” would imply that the people you’re taking it from have a legitimate claim of ownership over it.
do you have any idea how to run a company on that scale?
Some of us do. And maybe it doesn’t need to be such a large scale in the first place.
what if other companies think that you’re not trustworthy anymore and refuse to do business with you?
Seize them too.
also what about money? just that the company is now held by workers does not somehow suddenly make it have much more money. especially grocery stores maybe have 3% profit margins, that means, even if no CEO siphons off wealth, the company’s ability to spend money increases by maybe 3%, so wages could go up 3%. just to inform you, about what’s realistic here. it’s not as if you’re suddenly having a 3x wage increase.
What about money? If we have the labor, the tools, the farms, and the factories … what do we need money for?
i think you’re unreasonably assuming here that a revolution would happen everywhere on the planet at the same time. realistically, that’s not the case. you start with one place, then another, etc. and in the meantime you have exactly the problems that i cited. how to interact with other entities, etc?
Good luck with that bub.
It’s not the government who would control the means of production, it’s the workers. In theory they might use a vanguard party to seize it non-violently and then redistribute it, so in that case it may pass through the government’s hands. But that’s not the only way to seize the means of production. When properly done though, it would end up in the hands of the workers, every laborer owning their own tools and equipment so they can work for themselves instead of some faceless corporation.
The difference is that the government has no shareholders or incentive to turn a profit, unlike companies. However it can sell luxury goods at a high price, to subside other goods like food or housing from the markup.
No share holder, we are all share holder in the US government if you pay taxes, are you daft?
Oh wow, where are my us government shares? When are the dividends getting paid out? Can I vote to invest more of my taxes into public schools so the education system does not fail it’s shareholders?
You have safety, food standards, drug standard, medical standards, social safety nets, roads, etc.
Thats the shit they are ok at, the rest leave it to companies.
You have safety, food standards, drug standard, medical standards, social safety nets, roads, etc.
And they’ve all been gutted starting with Nixon.
Try harder troll.
And how does this work out? Do companies not lobby against safety or environmental regulations if it hurts their profits? Is the water safe to drink everywhere? Is medical care available to everyone who needs it, regardless of income? Does everyone get social security, even if he could not pay in because of health issues, accidents or other reasons that prevented him from working full time for 40 years?
Surely the us president will get right on it drafting an executive order!
Arent they often paid in stock?
Define pay such that it includes stocks, bonuses, rebates, real estate, food, clothing, transportation, or any other item that can be exchanged, borrowed against, or otherwise converted to cash money. When they find a loophole just close it.
The problem with this isn’t the concept. It’s getting politicians to implement it.
It’s a pretty good loophole though. A stocks value is considered an unrealized gain when you receive it but don’t sell it. My company gives me stock, but I don’t sell it. If I had to pay taxes on that, I’d be fucked. Maybe they could create some kind of untaxed minimum based on some index. And possibly even brackets.
But of course there’s a reason they like it this way.
Stocks are not a necessary piece of compensation for anyone. Besides, if you can borrow money from a bank using stocks as collateral then it is effectively a liquid asset that you absolutely should pay tax on. The simplest solution to that problem is to disallow stocks from being used as collateral.
Every loophole can be closed if we decide we want to. The ones that are still open were intentionally left open to benefit the rich.
I think if they handled it in such a way that you borrow against it in any fashion, what you borrow is taxed. Kind of stupid it isn’t that way already, but here we are.
Except where I live you do actually have to pay taxes on stock you receive as a bonus, if you don’t have the cash on hand, you just liquidate part of the stocks.
Yep, this is one of the reasons we need a tax on wealth. If you’re wealthy enough you can also just borrow against your stocks at very low interest rates.
