> Nothing is really "free".

There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.

My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result.

Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage.

Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.

Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.

Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot.

(I find ways to make it worth my while..)

If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.

> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer

How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?

I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.

I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.

> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer.

Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.

I wouldn't go to a restaurant that used QR codes twice. But I can't go to a different supermarket as there's only one in a reasonable distance away, or use another train line, or avoid a government form.

Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain.

Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.

No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.

I had a Korean colleague who remarked how backward the US is, you have to do everything over the phone, and you lose signal in elevators.

> It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.

It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?

When I hear arguments like this I feel compelled to point out that the people running these businesses live in the same world as you.

I don't know how old you are or if you remember, but the examples you gave used to be the most common sources of complaints, delays, refunds, etc. when the employee would do a shitty job (fairly often). The world of the past really was objectively worse.

Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.

You still have to wait in line even with the shipping label because they have to scan it into the system.