This is what happens when you try to “save” money by forcing people to use self-checkout.
Ist shopping on the sales floor free labor. Back when you would hand your shopping list to a worker and the would give you all your stuff. (funny enough online pickup has kinda brought that back). Things change over time
As someone else mentioned doing online pickup forces them to hire staff. I don’t mind wandering because sometimes I’m not buying, I’m comparing etc. But eliminating 10 cashiers to have customers scan their own, only helps the corporations steal more money from workers.
Yes, much more staff is hired for online shopping
However funny enough some store increased the hours they had for the front end, I worked for a Walmart that did a conversation and they added like 400 hours to the schedule for monitoring and running the registers. Biggest thing is now they can have 20 registers open and pay for 4 cashiers, before they would have just only had the 3 cashiers and 3 registers. So I would not say the self checkout took jobs, it changed how the job is done
I wish we had that out here, but here it used to be 15-20 lanes open, now it is maybe 4 and 20 self scan, but only two employees doing self scan. you get 2 people mess up and those employees are busy and so now you are stuck waiting in line for your self scan that went weird. also only a quarter of self scan actually are usable, the rest have the red light saying it is messed up
