Supermarket self service checkouts.

[Catweazle]

People smashing looms to protect their jobs. You can't stop progress like this, and shouldn't try.

An alternative could mean the companies would be paying enough tax to enable the government to give the "spare" operators productive work, but this state interference hasn't been very successful so far.

If there was a reasonable incentive, then business could be persuaded to invest the extra profits into new ventures - the "much needed growth" we keep hearing about.

[biffvernon]

People smashing looms to protect their jobs. You can't stop progress like this, and shouldn't try.

Time for a history lesson with another quote from David Fleming's Lean Logic:

Faced with this loss of significance – vis-à-vis the overwhelming dominance of industry – two responses were open for households: one was to accept the fact of large-scale industry, and to look for ways of improving it, humanising it, reforming it, taking a greater part in it, or even taking it over in some way. The other was to try to disassemble it, to decentralise it back as far as possible to the household. The first of those solutions was pursued with some success; the second, the decentralist tradition, has remained much the weaker of the two, but it may prove in the end to have more staying-power. Its early advocates, during the roughly four decades from 1770 when it was making the news, reaching its climax in Luddism (1811-1813), were militant, hammer-wielding defenders of domestic production, of the integration of home and craft. It had seemed a permanent feature of life, with its handlooms, its domestic workshops, its high-quality craftsmanship, its cottage gardens and common land, and a tolerably effective negotiating position for independent traders. The troubles of this rock-solid institution were surely a temporary aberration...?

But the loss of independence came from many directions, and settled in: the key change was the machinery, driven by water and steam, with eye-watering productivity advances which could be of the order of 20:1. And the one man remaining where twenty were needed before, was required to move to town to accept factory discipline and breathe the smoke, leaving the other 19 with no evident solutions at all. Added to that was the absolute penury of being thrown out of work by a combination of a collapse of trade during twenty years of war with France, freak cold weather and failed harvests, the loss of land due to enclosures and, as a casualty of this moral earthquake, the break-up of custom, neighbourliness, reciprocities, households and community.

So they took to the hammer. The hammer was called the “Enoch” after the firm of blacksmiths that made it; the movement was called “Luddism” after Ned Ludd, a village simpleton living in Leicestershire, who one day lost his cool with some boys who were teasing him, chased them into a cottage where, unable to find them, he vented his anger on a couple of knitting frames. The method of protest – physically breaking machines – was crude, but it is hard to see what alternative was available to them, and the intention was understandable. It was not just, as the silk-workers of Derby put it, that they conceived themselves “entitled to a higher station in society” than was available to them in large, autocratically-managed workshops. Their needs were more fundamental than that: they needed to cope with the end of a millennium of community, which had been self-reliant not just in material and cultural needs but in the confidence that, when trouble came, they could deal with it themselves. This was trouble, however, of a new order: it gutted them of whatever capability they had.

The Luddites were defeated in 1812, but the ideas quietly lived on through the nineteenth and twentieth century with thinkers like Max Weber and Louis Mumford, and especially in the political philosophy of anarchism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), for instance, advocated small-scale production (and, despite his famous phrase, “property is theft”), property-owning in the case of small-scale producers. Then came Peter Kropotkin.

[UndercoverElephant]

On the other hand a company that improves it profits usually sees a rise in dividend and a share price rise both of which are good for anyone whose pension fund is invested that way.

What is good for employees is bad for ex-employees and soon to be retirees.

It has long been thus and self-service tills are just a modern incarnation of Cartwright's loom.

Which leads us where exactly?

[2 As and a B]

why stop at self service tills?
Shall we do away with prepackaged cheese and have a man in top hat and tails expertly cut you a slice?
Why just cheese?
Lets go back to the days of giving the storekeeper your shopping list and waiting for him to get it for you?
Epos tills are job killers too, lets get rid of bar codes, even a humble calculator puts someone out of work.

Dont get me started on tractors

jobs are not good.
Jobs are the bad things we have to do to to create value/wealth, the good things.

Wow! There speaks a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

[the_lyniezian]

Ah, self-service tills. Should be as much the enemy as self-issue machines in the library, but guess who used one in the university library last Saturday...

Frankly, if they ask you to use them and you can refuse, do so. If enough people do it, they might reverse their policy. Failing that, go shopping at somewhere that doesn't have such machines- I've yet to see a Co-op that has any yet, the local convenience store doesn't have any, and the farm shop we go to which still only takes cash or cheques to boot doesn't have any either.

[UndercoverElephant]

why stop at self service tills?
Shall we do away with prepackaged cheese and have a man in top hat and tails expertly cut you a slice?
Why just cheese?
Lets go back to the days of giving the storekeeper your shopping list and waiting for him to get it for you?
Epos tills are job killers too, lets get rid of bar codes, even a humble calculator puts someone out of work.

Dont get me started on tractors

jobs are not good.
Jobs are the bad things we have to do to to create value/wealth, the good things.

Wow! There speaks a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I think it boils down to a basic judgement call about what the means and ends of our society are? What is the point in what we do?

For Dominic and his ilk, the point is profits. Everything is arranged with the final goal in mind of making as much money as possible for the owners/shareholders of the companies who do stuff. It is assumed that if we aim for this goal, everything else (e.g. human happiness) will follow. It does not, of course, but that's the idea.

For Marxists the final goal is human happiness/fulfilment. For Greens the final goal is ecological sustainability.

Capitalism is bankrupt.

[DominicJ]

Biff
Its funny, because as far as I'm aware, 95% of the population isnt unemployed today.....
Yet you said that 19 out of every 20 people were made unemployed......

Could it be, that they went out into the world and found new jobs, doing things that couldnt be done before?

The NHS is the nations biggest employer, it would be ****ed if the seed drill had never been invented and we still needed 70% of the populace to manualy plant wheat seeds.

But we dont want to put anyone out of a job do we?

DN65AF
I used to really try to support "local" business, but I finaly came to the conclusuion that in the local shop keepers mind, our relationship wasnt customer/businessman, it was farmer/livestock. He was entitled to my shopping in the same way I'm entitled to my chickens eggs.

I've had dozens of small businesses try to keep my custom by preventing others competing, but only a few lonely exceptions have ever asked me how they could win my custom from the likes of ASDA.

[DominicJ]

UE

For Greens the final goal is ecological sustainability.

Whats sustainable about wasting a scarce resource?

[UndercoverElephant]

UE

For Greens the final goal is ecological sustainability.

Whats sustainable about wasting a scarce resource?

Depends what you mean by "wasting." Are we "wasting" fish by leaving them in the sea until they get big enough to breed? Are we "wasting" trees if we do not chop down our forests?

"Wasting" is chopping down trees then burning them instead of using the wood to make something or leaving it there to rot (which is definitely not wasting it.) I think you think "wasting" means "not taking it for human use." In which case you need to go back to the drawing board and work out what "value/wealth" really means with respect to natural resources like forests.

[lancasterlad]

The world we end up with is down to the small decisions we make in our everyday lives - where and how we shop is part of that.

I live in a village and we've already lost our library. If we in the village don't use our local shops and pubs, they will go, unlikely to return.

[DominicJ]

UE
We are wasting peoples time by having them sat behind a check out scanning items, the time wasted by shoppers queing waiting for a check out.

A bank of 4 self scanners manned by 1 check out worker might bve as fast as two conventional tills, but uses half the staff.
That frees up a worker for other duties, within the supermarket itself, or elsewhere in society.
A worker scanning shopping on a checkout isnt in a hospital feeding a dementia patient, or planting trees as part of a forestry project.

[2 As and a B]

I'm confused Dom. Are you now saying that ASDA (in the OP) should use the money saved reducing their staff overheads to fund hospital feeding a dementia patient or planting trees as part of a forestry project?

[the_lyniezian]

UE
We are wasting peoples time by having them sat behind a check out scanning items, the time wasted by shoppers queing waiting for a check out.

A bank of 4 self scanners manned by 1 check out worker might bve as fast as two conventional tills, but uses half the staff.
That frees up a worker for other duties, within the supermarket itself, or elsewhere in society.
A worker scanning shopping on a checkout isnt in a hospital feeding a dementia patient, or planting trees as part of a forestry project.

Question is, where are these jobs in hospitals going to be coming from (with limited NHS funding and all that) and the same for forestry? Or if they're to be volunteers, how many people do you think will bother to sign up for nothing more than free tea and biscuits and the satisfaction of doing something good? Unless we have some sort of Venus Project/Zeitgeist Movement style setup, where such things presumably become the social norm, it won't do any good.

Also, I doubt at least in the short term, people are going to get to grips with self-scanners as well, meaning they may end up being slower than actual checkout operators.

And it will add to overall levels of frustration having to cope with stupid, and stupidly-programmed machines which don't realise that you neither have brought a bag nor want to use one, and keep telling you "Unexpected-item-in-the-bagging-area" ad nauseum.

[the_lyniezian]

The reason Aldi makes a profit even though it sells goods so cheaply is partly because it ensures that its operation requires the minumum number of the most expensive cost - staff.

And that's probably because they only ever seem to have one checkout open at a time... (well, that's Lidl actually but they're pretty much the same sort of setup).

[DominicJ]

the_lyniezian
Confusing money with resources never goes well, but in short,
if ASDA no longer pays as many staff, it makes more profits, more profits = more taxes = more nurses.

My point was more, people are a scarce resource, like oil, or timber, or Fiat Pandas, there is a finite amount, resources used wastefully cannot be used for more productive purposes