this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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No one historically shit on floors in supermarkets. They did historically have more cart spots, but decided to save money and cut jobs. The assumption is people will start doing the work for them.
They were very much right.
They put on self-service tills in the hope that folk would do it free. When they used to hire 30 checkout staff, they now hire 2 per 12 tills, so they save on 20 checkout staff per shift. Of course they weren't redeployed to shelf stacking, as they already had shelf stackers. They just went to the job centre.
If you are happy being complicit in the losses of jobs, go ahead. Persuade yourself you're moral and descent. You can either clap on the AI job losses as they hunt "productivity".
Supermarkets have jobs to keep the car park clear, and if it only needs 1, they'll hire one. If it needs half a shift, that person goes inside half the shift, but now they need less shelf stackers as they're over subscribed, so they can remove one head count off that. If a supermarket has a cart spot near my car, I'll use it. If I have to walk 5 mins out my way to the entrance, it'll be placed neatly to the side joined to other abandoned carts not filling spaces and not blocking access to folk getting past.
In a classless stateless utopia where food was free and no one had to work it would still be considered polite and common courtesy to put away your shopping cart when you're done using it at the local food co-op.
The floor shitting analogy is that we shouldn't have people doing something rude just because it creates or maintains another job. Everyone can agree on the floor shitting analogy and it maps perfectly onto this argument. If you want you can add a preamble of "in this world, everyone used to shit on floors and there was a janitorial staff to clean it up."
So by this logic you want gas station attendants back at gas stations, and for people to stop using ATM machines in favor of tellers? Maybe we shouldn't use computers because of all of the stenography and data management jobs that were lost, not to mention all of the paper mills that were shut down as people moved away from using so much paper. As you see, jobs appear and disappear all the time. Why do you want people doing meaningless redundant jobs for the sake of their employment? That's just cruel.
Maybe we should bring back the lamplighter guild and get back to using horses. Gas lights and carriages created a lot of jobs that were rudely snuffed out.
In that example, yes it would.
I don't agree with your premise. When Tesco had more cart stations, I used them. I use them in Asda because they aren't far from the car, but when they remove stations to cut jobs, they are the ones being rude.
I'm not in the US. We never had gas station attendants. I guess fuel theft was never the same issue here as in the States.
It's very hard to use bank tellers. Many branches got shut down. It was never really a thing in my lifetime.
It's very easy to accept situations when you don't see it change. You accept it as fact. Young folk just accept you don't have data privacy because it never really existed in their life time.
Supermarkets automate things or put the work onto customers not to pass those savings on to customers, but to increase their margins at the cost of peoples jobs. Some folk are just fine with that.
Many would welcome automation if the gains and benefits were shared around. But it isn't. The rich get richer and the unemployment line grows. The media train folk to hate the unemployed, like it was their choice their job was removed.
If the only way to keep a fairer wealth distribribution is to keep folk in jobs, so be it. We don't have basic income or a 4 day week yet.