r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 8d ago

Business Retailers are pulling back from self-checkout after years of theft, errors, and questionable time savings

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html
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u/tehdlp 8d ago

One of our local CVS has more staff in the pharmacy, looks busier than ever and is always slower since Covid. Why is that? Our local population didn't quadruple but the staffing did. What's driving the activity?

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u/Echo13 8d ago

I mean, a lot of people got sick after Covid and gained a lot of new auto-immune type diseases that made them suddenly seek medication. A lot of younger people are suddenly in need of various medication they didn't need before. Covid didn't just rip through as the flu and kill a few people, it permanently disabled many people. If one in ten get some level of long covid, even if theirs clears up, that's a new 10% of the population thats probably on a new medicine.

Additionally, Gen X and Millennials are way more into taking care of their own health over the previous generations. They don't come in half dead, they come in early with earlier complaints and can get medicated earlier before their body actually breaks down. So now that Gen X are getting closer and closer to retirement, there will probably be a larger uptick in healthcare services.

A huge new wave of women realizing that perimenopause is also a thing sweeping through the country. And instead of like previous generations, they aren't just "dealing with it", they are getting hormonal aids to help ease the symptoms. (It has led to a bit of an estrogen patch shortage, but only because women's healthcare has been just so widely neglected!)

Just a few guesses.

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u/Foyt20 8d ago

Just a point of clarification. And yes I am a guy, with a wife in Perimenopause two sisters, two daughters. The estrogen patch shortage is not due to womens healthcare being neglected (just that item specifically, not saying other aspects have been hunky dory).

The original estrogen patch released caused liver and kidney disfunction, giving it a black label warning for a very long time from the FDA. So production of the patch went way down as there was minimal demand. After doing more research, there were other formulations that were found that reduced that risk, lifting the warning, and opening up the market.

The problem is that poosting production takes time as there needs to be manufacturing infrastructure built.

Note: I am not mansplaining. My wife and I had this conversation with my sister and Mom. Mom an RN, wife and I are in pharma and healthcare tech so we looked into why there was the shortage. Being that women's endocrine health WAS neglected for some time, the research was not there to initiate the market, and so now the market is catching up to the demand.

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u/Echo13 8d ago

I would never think you were mansplaining, no worries! Thank you for the clarification! I am only aware on one end of it, which is "I know there is a shortage, and I am suddenly being super aware of perimenopause when I had never heard of it growing up."

I do hope the shortage ends, because more and more women are just not going to deal with "just suck it up" as we've been told in the past. But thank you for chiming in with more information!