I don't think it would be difficult to outright forbid self-checkout at all, actually.

There's a difference between enforcing laws on individuals and enforcing laws on businesses. Businesses can't exactly run and hide, if they're using self-checkout they're going to get found out. That's distinct from something like the drug trade, which is all underground and hidden.

Do sin taxes really stop anything though?

But not one that relates to the thing that we're trying to stop them from doing. Cashiers aren't paid per item scanned, they don't get commission. They are paid an hourly wage.

If you wanted to pay customers a rebate for their labor at the market rate for a cashier, or one set by the state, that'd make sense to eliminate the gains the company receives from automation.

So 5 minutes of work at $15/hr = $1.25. So not much, but it mitigates the benefit of not hiring people.

Though, it's still a benefit because you pay a person whether they're actively working or not and you have to pay tax on human labor (contributing to social security, etc) so maybe hiking it higher than whatever the typical wage is for cashiers would make sense.

But either way, 10% doesn't make sense.

Cost of labor, overhead, and profit are already accounted for in that $150 price of the goods. That's why the store charges $150 for them - because that's what covers the wages, overhead, and includes the maximum markup they can get away with (~3% margin for grocery stores afaik).

All I'm saying is, they do have to be able to cover costs. So because of that and their thin margins, they'd just hike prices (probably more than they'd need to take advantage of the situation).

So it makes more sense to either tax them for avoiding using human labor and passing that labor on to customers (to help pay for the drain they're placing on the economy by not hiring people), or just ban the practice outright. Couple that with price controls to ensure they can't unfairly inflate prices. Things they can't avoid rather than a fee they can hike prices to avoid.

$100 isn't much of a big cart these days. That's a week or less of food for many.

$100 is a decent basket where I'm at...

That's not how math works.

2024
Revenue was $147B
Profit was $3.8B or 2.8%

The lowest estimate I found of sales volume through self checkout is 38%.
So a 10% self checkout discount is 3.8% hit to revenue. When profits are only 2.8% they'll take a 1% loss.

The CEO pay being only 0.4% of that $3.8B profit. Isn't remotely enough to matter.

This won't lower prices.

That's an abysmally small number compared to the amount of product they move.

Yes, sure, CEO's should make less. But that amounts to fractions of a percent on the typical purchase, not 10%.

Yah. That's what was already pointed out.