What I'm hearing is NY Democrats are working to pass a bill that will increase prices at businesses using self-checkout by 10 percent. They aren't going to cut into their own profits.

The fun part that I have heard from a few retail managers is that the software that the self checkout uses costs as much or more per month than the employee would have.

Right, because if I self checkout my $200 grocery bill, that worker definitely would have made $20 in that few minute interaction.

I like the idea, but that's a terrible implementation. The cost of the bill has no relation to the money saved by using the machine and firing a worker. A flat amount no more than a % of the bill is tiny would be better. Like $1-3 but no more than 5% of bill.

I didn't have to do a whole research paper on this to know that if I'm doing somebody else's job as a customer, the company is saving money.

That "$300 billion" number is just completely made up. The math doesn't even remotely work.

The entire US grocery industry does somewhere around $1 trillion in revenue per year. For self-checkout to save $300 billion, that would mean roughly a third of every dollar spent on groceries was going directly to cashier wages. That is obviously not how grocery stores operate. Total labor costs for a store are only a fraction of their expenses.

And the idea that self-checkout was some massive money-saving miracle ignores the other side of the equation. Those systems cost a lot upfront, require maintenance, and they increase losses from theft, missed scans, and mistakes. A machine replacing a cashier doesn't magically eliminate costs; it just moves them somewhere else.

There is a reason companies like Walmart, Target, and Dollar General have started putting limits on self-checkout or bringing back more staffed lanes. If self-checkout was saving them hundreds of billions, they wouldn't be walking it back. They would be installing them everywhere they could.

This is the kind of post that hurts any community built around open discussion and critical thinking. A sensational claim gets repeated because it supports a certain viewpoint, while nobody stops to ask if it is actually true. The truth should matter regardless of whether it supports corporations, consumers, or anyone else. Being intellectually honest means checking the facts first, not just accepting information because it confirms what we already believe.

On a side note, totally support the bill in every way.