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 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.
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!
I frequent a DG Market in a rural area. They shut the self checkouts down pretty quick due to theft.
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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.
Ok, but since they’re too cowardly to implement real price controls they just raised the price of everything by 10%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not to mention some companies relentlessly prosecute “accidental” and accidental mis-scans in self-checkout, so you significantly increase your risk of arrest by using them. I never do.
- Ex-cop, have arrested people for such mis-scans, most frequently at Wal-Mart
Is an ex-cop and ex-bastard?
Sounds like a tax on those who need a catcher or can’t use the self checkout for various reasons. I could see stores just removing all the staff on the tills and switch to a self checkout only.
these things are pay-as-you-want checkout IMO
Now watch as Hochul kills it because “it’s bad for the economy”.
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.
At first they promised us it would keep the prices down, I already knew that’s not how businesses operate but hey…I got no influence over this so let’s see how it works out.
A few years after grocery prices triple with all kinds of excuses, yes excuses…claims about how what when where and why it happened which all turned out to in reality be nothing more then a temporary nuisance, but prices never went down because duhh it’s a business.
So here we are, paying the wages for jobs we do ourselves and a 200% tip to boot.
I really think we should keep track of the amount of time spent at the self checkout and make a bill for the store manager under the title: “freelance register operator” at a polite $40 bucks an hour.
They saw how popular Mamdami is and saw the writing on the wall.
We don’t need to replace every single one of them, just enough to scare the rest.
Fuck yeah. I can get behind this 1000%
