I'm on strike

[michravera]

I probably would have just left the twelfth bag in the cart without scanning it. As long as the final receipt says twelve bags and I have twelve bags, there's not really much to be gained by having the extra bag voided, and it would be obvious I wasn't stealing anything should I be confronted on the matter.

I do recognize that as an option.  For me it was simpler to start the transaction over at a different terminal so I could be seen to scan every item I paid for.  If I had opted to skip one unit of soup to compensate for the unit that scanned twice, I would have had to think about how to slip it into the bag without looking like I was shoplifting or otherwise triggering (possibly automated) loss prevention measures.  I don't have a problem presenting my receipt and purchases for inspection on exit, but if I am summoned from behind my back, I am not going to hear it and will therefore keep on walking, looking more and more like a thief.

I had a similar issue with the security gate at our old main library.  (The current library, which opened in June 2018, does not have gates.)  The technology was based on magnetic permeability, and was not especially reliable.  Often books would fail to demag successfully and would set the gate off; to make matters worse, not all items had magnetic tags, and sometimes items that did were not demagged before being sent out to branches to fill holds (only some branches had security gates).  One time I walked out the gate with a book that set it off and got almost all the way to the parking lot (a walk of about half a block) before I saw a strange expression on the face of someone walking in the other direction.  He was reacting to the security guard and a (very pregnant) library clerk in full pursuit.

The security gates were far too old to have been fitted with visual indications for ADA accessibility, so I eventually had to finesse the situation by running a sound analyzer on my phone to detect when the gate chimed.  This was after I tried the easier approach of eyeballing the clerks behind the desk to see if they reacted to a sound when I walked through the gate; I discovered that they tend to ignore chimes produced by people walking into the library, only to drop into a sprinter's crouch when a person walks out.

The thing to realize is that those people making $40 per hour are generally worth what they are getting paid to their company or their job wouldn't exist and the people making $10 per hour are NOT all worth what they are getting paid. This means that some make only the $10 per hour because others aren't worth the $10 per hour. It is very tempting in an era of higher minimum wages to automate, keep good employees at lower wages, and eliminate all of the positions for the lower wage workers.

The stylized justification for a minimum wage is to guarantee workers the ability to make a living by preventing employers from exploiting their monopsony power over unskilled labor.  The movement for a higher minimum wage (especially in high-cost states and metropolitan areas) is about the fact that the current federal minimum wage is much further away from being an actual living wage than it was in the late 1960's/early 1970's.  It is not really intended to address the fact that a higher wage bill does incentivize employers to transition from more labor-intensive to more capital-intensive ways of producing the same basket of final goods and services.

Wages paid are indeed more likely to reflect an underlying market valuation for, say, the $40/hour crowd than the minimum-wage crowd, simply because there is always more competition for unskilled jobs.  The $40/hour folks have typically invested in education and skill development to give themselves extra wage bargaining power.

Moreover, as technology improves and business processes evolve, capital becomes more readily substitutable for labor.  The advocates of a higher minimum wage are, of course, correct when they say that higher wages do not necessarily result in higher prices for the consumer, but the movement is so recent that the price data almost inevitably reflects short-term conditions.  The effect of capital-for-labor substitution is later seen in jobs that simply vanish.

I don't see how labor can ever compete with automation.  I think of the old days where your computer was a roomful of clerks with slide rules, for example.

My gut reaction is that unionization can't stand in the way of innovation and automation.  Although I am all for workers being unionized when their jobs are necessary, when their jobs are modernized and mechanically automated, then jobs are a necessary casualty (I think of toll collectors).

I think defiance of automation is a losing position for an union to take, not just because of the underlying economics (the historical evidence suggests that resort to capital-intensive processes generally increases total factor productivity), but also from a dignity-of-labor vantage point.  I think that except in certain niche or boutique settings, doing by hand what a machine can do faster and better subtracts something intangible but still valuable from the worker's humanity.  A case in point is outsourcing coupon processing to underpaid workers in Mexico to save spending the up-front capital cost of equipment for the same purpose at an US-based office (something that actually used to happen in the 1980's).

That all said, if automation really starts to take over, it does make the argument for a guaranteed basic income more and more feasible.

We already have the likes of Elon Musk saying that 30% of all current jobs will disappear to automation.  This may very well be a net loss (in other words, the jobs that go away will only be partly replaced by new jobs that involve variants of machine tending).  I find the concept of UBI interesting, but we in the US have a far stronger pew-renter mentality than Canada and the western European countries, so I would expect a proposal to introduce UBI to collide forcefully with that.  In its own way it is very erosive of human dignity to draw one's living from subsidy payments, so I think some version of UBI makes the most sense in a social context that stimulates a sense of productive occupation in recipients.

I am fond of quoting Ronald Reagan the 40th US President "The increased minimum wage has all but eliminated theater ushers. I can absolutely assure you that this is not because theater goers enjoy finding their way to their seats in the dark."

The minimum wage has never been a living wage in my lifetime. That is to say that one couldn't support a family on it. It is doubtful that one could have ever supported one's self on it working only 40 hours per week. The minimum wage when I got my first "Adult" job in 1978 was $2.90 per hour (just up from $2.65). Working a 40-hour week this would have made you about $500 per month before taxes (CASDI and FICA grabbed about 8% of that leaving you more like $425 with some minimal income tax withholding). At that time apartments in decent areas of Sacramento (not known as the most expensive place to live at the time) were just under $250 per month. Most places wouldn't rent to you unless you could show 3 times the rent in take home pay. But, let's say that they would rent to you. That left you $175 to eat and move. They stopped airing the "change back from your dollar" ads in about 1974 or 5 but let's say that you could eat at McD's 3 times a day for under a dollar (which you couldn't then), that would have cost you $90 (it would have been closer to $200 which puts you over budget already). When you could find gas, it was less than $1/gallon. So, as long as you had only a 20 mile round trip commute to work, you could run your already paid for PoS car that never needed repair for $30-50 per month.

4 sessions of roller skating, 8 daytime movie tickets and 12-pack would run you about $50. Could you get by? Not without a roommate or two and usually a second part time job!

[vdeane]

Looks like Panera Bread is also moving to phase out cashiers.  I stopped at one for lunch in NH off I-95, and the only employee outside of the kitchen in the entire store was the person assigned to direct people to the kiosks.  They didn't even have the people who usually roam the floor and might pick up your stuff if you happen to leave when they're near your table.

[US71]

Looks like Panera Bread is also moving to phase out cashiers.  I stopped at one for lunch in NH off I-95, and the only employee outside of the kitchen in the entire store was the person assigned to direct people to the kiosks.  They didn't even have the people who usually roam the floor and might pick up your stuff if you happen to leave when they're near your table.

So far, mine hasn't. Maybe I need to grab lunch when I finish my doctor's appointment?

[vdeane]

It might be a New Hampshire thing.  Or that location.  It was on I-95 just across the border, so it probably caters to long-distance travelers and people from MA looking for tax-free shopping.  When I was there, it was the most empty Panera I have ever seen.  There were only a couple other people there, around 11:30-noon on a Friday.