Programmer Humor

I hate shopping at Lowe's now because they physically removed the regular checkouts and only have a square of self checkouts. They did this so one "cashier" can watch over everything, saving labor on multiple cashiers. They also paired down every other department so it's just as hard (or possibly harder) to get assistance in a department as at Home Depot. Feels like I'm watch the death spiral in full swing.

Less shoppers means less staff. Less staff means service suffers. Poor service means less shoppers. Rinse and repeat. This is happening at almost every brick and mortar retail business though, not just Lowe's. It's like the entire economy has turned into Circuit City trying to keep the lights on.

I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

My local grocery store has half the self checkouts they installed permanently disabled, and plans to remove them. They never got rid of human cashiers, but they misjudged the optimal ratio of selfcheck/cashier way too heavily on the self check side.

I only know a single place with exactly two of them. The nearest Ikea. Other than those two it's human cashiers everywhere.