It does not matter whether it's at Walmart, Target, your local grocer, or your local convenience store. In every instance, self-checkout is a function of a corporation to literally slave your labour.
Every price on every product in every store covers more than merely replacing that product on the shelf for the next customer. Obviously a portion of that price does pay for the store restocking that product and another portion is the profit for the store/corporation, but there's still paying the utilities (electric, telephones, heat, etc.) and the payroll for all the employees. Including cashiers.
Earlier I referred to "slav[ing] your labour." When you choose self-checkout, you are literally doing the job of one of the employees, specifically the cashier, and you are not being paid for it. Not even a small discount for doing the job. The corporation that own the store is making even more money off you as they get the profit(s) from the product(s) you are purchasing and they are not having to pay the expense of the payroll for the employee whose job you are doing for free.
Let's put this in perspective.
Regardless of where you work, what field you work in, or who you work for, the "company" [small company or multinational corporation], you are dealing with customers. Even if only indirectly. Now imagine if a customer came to your workplace and started doing your job without pay. Sounds great being able to go to work and someone else is doing your job for you, doesn't it?
Or would your automatic response be realization that if someone else is doing your job, then you no longer have a job.
That is what is happening in every store that has self-checkout. Trafficking is a new word for the slave trade. To my mind, self-checkout is little more than innocuous voluntary slave labour. Why should any company bother with hiring employees when they can get their customers to pay the company to do the jobs of the employees?
I will NEVER go through self-checkout with my order in any store! Any store that completely switches completely to self-checkout rather than actually hire people will be automatically boycotted by me. I do not care how much "faster" it is to just do it yourself using self-checkout, I am not going to participate in something that causes people to lose their livelihood.
The pandemic demonstrated just who the essential workers are. Thanks to self-checkout, companies are working to eliminate their positions so that unpaid, let alone underpaid, people can do the work. More money for the uber-rich and more unpaid labour for everyone else.
by Rev. J.T. Smith
