Envious of Sweden. If that store were in America everything would have been stolen the first day.
Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
131–140 of 428 posts
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#132Ok but what if I wanted to shop without a smartphone, or don't own one? Don't get me wrong this is great for the current situation but like all things it doesn't only have good things about it.
Many grocery stores nowadays have hand scanners in addition to a smartphone app (they often had the hand scanners before a good app), so that + a payment point = problem solved.
Exactly. My local supermarket in the UK has this, including handsets for people not using the mobile app. Here's a decent overview of how it all works:
https://uxdesign.cc/the-ux-of-sainsburys-smartshop-f7b94af6e...
Sorry to disappoint aboringusername, but this is not a ploy to starve us all into carrying surveillance devices. Still, the tinfoil hat at least looks fetching.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#133I worked in a supermarket for a while and there was plenty of old people who came to that shop almost daily just to interact with another human being.
What's your point? That people should be indentured in low paying jobs to be old people's friends?
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole of the industrial and now computer revolution has been the degradation of human existence in the name of profit and progress. Elimination of employment that is a requirement for sustenance and a non-miserable life is common. Automation doesn’t create jobs, it shifts them, generally towards less well paid options. Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers?
> Sure there are a few engineers who make more money, but what about the non skilled laborers That’s a political problem. Obvious solution is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those that don’t. Make higher education free, pay people to learn, or to do research, universal basic income, etc.
Agreed these are policy problems, but as creators of technology we're responsible for the outcomes as well. Ignoring the problems in the name of progress, as others replying to my thread seem want to do, is unethical and immoral.
I’m on board with your suggestion. Let’s implement it. Alongside the progress in automation, not as an afterthought.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The value the self-scan systems have for the shop owners is not in automation but the fact the work is reported on customer, with of course no price reduction. That should be forbidden. I boycott those systems and wait for the human clerk to do his job, this way a little of the money made by the shop is redistributed.
I would rather do it my self for very little extra time use, rather than waste even more time waiting in line.
For me it depends. If I have a shopping cart full, including typically, a bunch of produce, I'll go to a cashier. If I've got a half dozen bar coded items to scan, I'll probably just do self-checkout.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I enjoy the interaction with the employees. If you want to pay for someone to be social with you why not do that separately to shopping? Seems funny to try to mix the two.
It's not only that, it's the fact that the stores have externalised the checkout process to customers themselves. I could never understood why should I, as a client, do the work that someone else can do for me (and more reliably, of course)? It's win-win, I'm not stressed at doing something wrong, I can do something else while my products are checked out and that person doing the product checkout also has a job. But…
> I can do something else while my products are checked out
But the point is we don't need the 'while my products are checked out' step. We could skip that. You save time, save more people handling what you're buying, save them having to staff a checkout and freeing them to do something else instead. That's the real win-win.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#137So this is basically run on a trust basis, right? And if you steal, you will eventually get caught on video and be blocked from entering the store? I can imagine this working well in small villages. You'll get a few thieves and vandals, but eventually you can weed them out. Pretty genius.
And you have to scan your bank card (which apparently in Sweden is a secondary ID card) to enter. I wonder if they do an extra verification to make sure you just didn't steal someone's card, maybe with a PIN? Hah, I guess for the vandals, being blacklisted by the network would be a big hassle...
The bank id is not a physical card. Rather, it's an app that provides 2FA and which is backed by the major Swedish banks. It is the de facto standard for electronic identification in Sweden. Originally, it was mostly a desktop application that helped you log on to your internet bank, but it has increasingly become a way to log onto web sites - anything from e-commerce to government agencies - while proving your identity.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#138I used to work at a major multi-billion dollar retailer. One of the biggest complaints from customers was waiting at the check out line, especially for small, quick orders. This is the future of grocery stores, like it or not. Employees are expensive and make mistakes, whereas machines are cheap, don't take breaks, and work pretty reliably once you set them up correctly.
My favorite supermarket has regular and 'quick' checkouts. I enjoy the interaction with the employees.
I love the quick self service checkouts and will line up for them even when a regular staffed checkout is free. I’m just the opposite and instead dislike interaction I guess.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I enjoy the interaction with the employees. If you want to pay for someone to be social with you why not do that separately to shopping? Seems funny to try to mix the two.
It's not only that, it's the fact that the stores have externalised the checkout process to customers themselves. I could never understood why should I, as a client, do the work that someone else can do for me (and more reliably, of course)? It's win-win, I'm not stressed at doing something wrong, I can do something else while my products are checked out and that person doing the product checkout also has a job. But…
In these stores, cashiers are waiting around most of the time. That's the issue. They couldn't stay in business because they had to pay for the cashier to checkout as well as wait around. By letting customers checkout, there's no more wasted money spent on employees waiting around.
Also, the stores that are most promising don't require checkout at all, so that's an entire category of human effort eliminated, for better or worse.
Re: Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
#140So how will the people who would have worked in a shop like this, afford to shop for food? In Sweden this probably isn’t as big of an issue, but not every country is as socially conscious.
Did the manure shovelers' families all die in squalor once Henry Ford brought the auto assembly line to scale?
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?