alt Hacker NewsIn general I'd rather interact with a machine than with the kind of person who can get hired as a cashier where I live - likely someone cognitively disadvantaged or who is an immigrant from a poor part of the world with limited English skills.
Precisely because our society is rich, and reasonably meritocratic (and has a lot of immigrants from poor, non-English-speaking parts of the world), people who are reasonably smart and conscientious don't last long in low-pay, low-status jobs like cashiering - they get promoted or quit to do something more lucrative. This is Patrick McKenzie's concept of The Sort (https://x.com/patio11/status/1818781344702644311). And it means that my experience of interacting with a cashier is likely to involve interacting with a menial laborer who is difficult to communicate with; meaning I'd rather avoid that interaction altogether and just press buttons on a machine.
It's also increasingly appearing to be the case that checking out yourself is adverse selection.
People with money have others shop for them, or ship to their house. The checkouts are for those who labor in that system who must now submit to the panopticon.
If you stumble into a big retailer like Walmart or Home Depot now yourself, it's like you crossed a zero-trust boundary. Security guards, motion-activated cameras that play sounds and nag you to remind you you're surveilled, manned turnstiles to stop door crashes with loaded carts -- all these adversarial controls suggest you're now in the wrong customer channel.