
How China’s unmanned stores allow people to live with almost zero human contact - wllchng
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/7ibn8t/how_chinas_unmanned_stores_allow_people_to_live/
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donquichotte
Two large supermarket chains in my country have been replacing human cashiers
with machines where customers can scan their own goods. The cashiers are now
working as troubleshooters, helping people who have trouble operating the
machines.

The blessing of this is twofold.

1) It's much faster. I have an incentive to scan my goods quickly and pay
quickly - I'll be home, doing awesome things, sooner. The cashier has no
incentive to work quickly. They'll have to stay at work until 8pm no matter
how slow they go. Also, you can put 5 electronic cashiers in the place where 1
human cashier was. Parallelization.

2) The cashiers seem happier in their troubleshooter role than going _beep---
beep_ all day.

I really like this development.

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styfle
I used to work at Target and they had a system in place that would time the
cashier from when they scanned the first item to the time the payment was
placed and gave a letter grade based on how fast the experience was for the
customer.

It was a bit of gamification but also served as way for managers to see which
cashiers were slow and not meeting company standards.

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sunstone
It's not easy to live in China with no human contact.

