To me it’s a little bit like the convention of praising things that are handmade. Yes, a perfectly efficient world would factory-produce every item with clear-cut lines, but that gives people fewer meaningful jobs, and exposes us to fewer interesting flaws.
One other very tangible negative related to having mostly self-checkouts is petty theft. Many of us heard about the large rings of criminals that would steal massive numbers of low-value items from stores, no one would stopping them because there’s hardly anyone staffing those stores, and those that are there are overworked.
To me it’s a little bit like the convention of praising things that are handmade. Yes, a perfectly efficient world would factory-produce every item with clear-cut lines, but that gives people fewer meaningful jobs, and exposes us to fewer interesting flaws.
One other very tangible negative related to having mostly self-checkouts is petty theft. Many of us heard about the large rings of criminals that would steal massive numbers of low-value items from stores, no one would stopping them because there’s hardly anyone staffing those stores, and those that are there are overworked.