Went to get some laundry services and called the number. I was leery as I am in Toronto area and number was Nova Scotia.
A male sounding person answered and I started posing questions about laundry services they offered. This guy was the politest person I had heard in over a decade. Concise but vague. I thought it was VOIP delay as there was a 3-5 second pause for him to reply but realized that it was too consistent. It was a fucking AI attendant talking at me. I said stick your AI, I will not be using your services and hung up.
Grrrrr me want human.
This. The only example where I pick a robot over a human is self checkout… and that’s cuz it’s faster due to there only be 1 queue for several checkouts. Not because it saves me money.
Got to costco and I’ll readily take a cashier line because it’s generally faster than the self checkout unless you only have a few items.
You choose to go to a store that has outsourced human labor to machines. Even if you only occasionally use the self-checkout yourself, many other shoppers use the self-checkout. The prices you’re paying for your purchases are lower across the board because they don’t have to pay for as many cashiers.
Are there no stores (for the particular goods you’re buying in this example) that have zero self-checkout? If there are others that employee humans exclusively to check out, then your philosophy should have you shopping only at those and not at stores that have replaced humans with automation. I should warn you, those stores are probably more expensive to shop at.
In theory yes. But that’s not going to be universal for every product. Not every product can become a “loss leader”. So to a degree it depends on the individual shopper.
While that’s true, you have to admit that stores with zero checkout automation also likely lack the buying power to purchase in bulk like the large retailers who can afford checkout automation.
My philosophy with grocery shopping is I want it to be done asap. IMO self-checkout isn’t inherently faster than cashiers. It’s arrangement of single queues leading to multiple registers that speeds up the lines.
Additionally, I prefer to bag my own groceries so that I know the fragile items won’t be damaged getting them home.