You’re comparing two labor intensive efforts. This is an article about a store that has no in-store employees. What jobs does such a store have to offer as a replacement?
I actually had a paragraph mentioning them, but I removed it because I thought someone would downvote me for being off topic, and not mentioning retail workers, which is what the article is really about. The game can't be won either way, I guess.
I understand that. Retail jobs don't tend to be high-salaried positions, with superior benefits packages. They're not the six-figure jobs we read about here on HN all the time, with catered meals and other embroidery. Nonetheless, the company needs people to fill those jobs, and finds them.
Is there some kind of intervention that you'd advocate that wouldn't devastate the company?
Retail positions are different than warehouse positions. It's like how UPS drivers make bank, but the guys who load the trucks break their backs for scratch (even with union representation!).
The fact that wages have stagnated while productivity has skyrocketed is proof that there is insufficient and possibly decreasing demand for labor.
Personally, I like all the new automated services, and I would say the benefits have outweighed the issues. The gaps in the system don’t require as many people as before to fill, or perhaps the ones that are required don’t need to be as highly trained so they offer lower pay.
For example, Home Depot and Lowe’s websites now show you exactly where an item is in the store, which is very helpful to a shopper. But that may also cause some employees to be made redundant as they theoretically have more time to assist with other things assuming they are helping fewer customers find things. This one change might not affect the numbers, but combined with online ordering, in store pickup, self checkout machines, it might all add up to a few less positions at the store.
In my specific industry we are replacing thousands of open positions nobody wants to do. Customers struggle to hire enough workers for us to ever be replacing humans. Walking around picking merchandise all day is a pretty inhuman career.
Almost all casual retail jobs in my area operate like this. It is somewhat stunning when you compare them to national chains not using localized labor practices.
That's a red herring. It's not the absolute number of staff in a particular supermarket that we're talking about, but the ratio of people employed to work done. Using their lowered operating costs to expand their business doesn't negate the fact that their checkouts are operating with less human labor.
My argument is not wether this was optimal by any metric; my argument is that they are already having employers go around the store opening cabinets, many times multiple times for the same customer. That incurs in the same menial work as having everything behind the counter, and is also a worse experience (at least for me).
Can’t comment on the Amazon Fresh approach. Not sure if the costs are lower, for example. It could be that they are operating at a huge loss already.
It seems like you're conflating several things. Productivity of the worker is different from the UX of the store brand and neither have anything to do with the job role.
A checkout operator at Costco can be 2x as efficient as a checkout operator at Walmart while having a completely different customer UX (both the worker and the store itself) and being paid different wages. So what? Walmart and Costco serve different markets and sell different products so of course they will be differently run businesses.
Nothing about this is abnormal so I don't understand your comparison. They are not interchangeable other than looking at them as general retail companies.
I guess I think the analogy would be more complete if nobody liked working cashier and most would rather be in stock. I'm claiming to be more productive at things that most people want to be doing anyway, so I could imagine there being an assumption that I'm just saying that
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