this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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How on Earth did an editor allow an article containing both of those sentences, only two paragraphs apart, to be published?
They’re correct though? Retailers expected them to be able to get rid of employees, but they didn’t and in fact increased the cost of employees.
The author of this article is speaking out of both sides of their mouth, though. The context of the first statement is "they want to reduce staff and it's not even working!" and the context of the second statement is "they want to reduce staff and in many cases it's working!"
If the author intended to say what you said, they should've said that instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either it's a bad thing for labor, taking away human jobs, or it's a bad thing for companies, requiring more workers to do the same job. Or it's a bad thing for consumers, because companies should need more workers but aren't. But the author needs to make one of those points, not simply suggest all three at once.
Lol, not by my observation.
Every store in my city that installed these systems reduced checkout staff by 75-90% (in the checkout lanes). Walmart, grocery stores, you name it. I bet if we pulled some stats we'd see a major drop in hours, which means a huge drop in insurance, taxes, HR overhead, etc, etc. No matter how much labor rates went up (they didn't), those cost reductions are massive in comparison.
Just consider their software contracts - systems are often licensed/supported at rates determined by scale: transactions per minute, # of objects being stored, etc. If there's an HR system that handles hours, scheduling, pay, etc, etc, they likely pay annually for a system scaled to employee count (it's BS, but it's a metric companies use). Drop your employees by 75%, and on support contract renewal you can drop to a lower tier support. Source: I've been responsible for doing just this - reducing footprint so we can reduce support contract costs. I've save my company somewhere between $70 and $90 mil on one system this way. Not for HR, but it doesn't matter, this is often how support contracts are done in the enterprise world.
I have two grocery stores that had 6 lanes staffed at busy times. Since they installed self checkout, there are two... TWO checkout staff. That's a ~~33%~~ 66% reduction during rush hour. And for off hours they'd have 2, maybe 3. That's now 1 or two. That's 50% or 66% reduction, depending.
It's not like grocery checkout attendants do much more than that - shelves are stocked by the vendors themselves, maintenance by others (Walmart is retail, so different).
I never see more than 2 or 3 checkout attendants these days, some stores have even removed the "extra" checkout lanes, so they couldn't even bring people back in if they wanted to.
And let's not get started on other retail chains, which can be even worse.