Would you like to see an example of a badly conceived policy? Here you go:
The bill to require discounts for self-checkout will probably not pass. But what’s notable is that if this bill did pass, it would have exactly the opposite of the effect its creators want. The stated justification is that customers are doing unpaid labor by scanning and bagging their own groceries, and that this discount would compensate them for that effort. But the bill is part of a more general effort to disincentivize automation in the retail industry, in order to protect working-class jobs. Rhode Island’s Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, which requires grocery stores to have “a minimum of one manual checkout station in operation for every three self-service checkout stations,” takes effect at the start of 2027, and similar bills have been proposed in other states
The standard objection to this bill, I suppose, would be that self-checkout already gives shoppers a discount, because it allows stores to save money on hiring human labor, and that these savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. That argument is correct as far as it goes, but it means the debate ends up as one of technocracy versus populism—protecting the livelihoods of a few cashiers versus giving a huge number of consumers very slightly lower prices. There’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.
But in the case of New York’s proposed self-checkout discount, the problem is that the bill would actually make grocery stores fire human cashiers in favor of more self-checkout.
