• Oijkuij@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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!

    • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.