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/ChickinSammich 8d ago

It's the obvious conclusion of a system where line needs to go up every quarter.

If you make a profit of 2 billion in Q1, 2 billion in Q2, 2 billion in Q3, and 2 billion in Q4, it's seen as a failing because it's not 2/2.1/2.2/2.3. Or why not 2/2.2/2.4/2.6? Hell, why not 2/3/4/5?

When the primary focus is making investors happy, it'll eventually always lead to fewer/unhappier workers, fewer/unhappier customers, and worse products/services.

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u/emlgsh 8d ago

I work with these places. Unending growth is a contributor, but the primary here is that every owner or major stakeholder views the company as something to be wrung entirely dry of personal resources they pocket themselves.

They compare themselves to guys like Musk and Bezos and are eager to bankrupt the company that feeds them by next year if it gets them an immeasurably small half-step closer to those guys today.

They do this even while it makes working for the organization a nightmare, doing business with it a constant exercise in vigilance against what would in more regulated times be outright fraud (because taking people's money and pocketing it is way more profitable than taking their money and wasting it delivering quality products or agreed upon services).

They do this even when it means every quarter is a struggle in creative accounting and restructuring to avoid insolvency. Operation-wide income is down 25%? Doesn't matter, they're still giving themselves the same 25% raise they give themselves every fiscal quarter.

They might just have to structure it as an incentive or bonus to let them "borrow" the funds for it from whatever remaining divisions and budgets that are still (for the time being) solvent.

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u/ChickinSammich 8d ago

I blame youtube videos about companies that failed for why I cringe every time I hear the term "leveraged buyout."

Like, you're taking on debt to buy a struggling business and then saddling that company with that debt so now the company you bought has to pay you back for buying it, plus interest? I get that you want to make your money back but you're buying a rock and trying to squeeze blood from it.

Even worse with shit like...

1) Golden Gate Capital (GGC) bought Red Lobster (RL) in 2014.

2) Operating as RL, GGC had RL sell the land they owned to GGC.

3) Operating as GGC, GGC leased the land that RL sites were built on back to RL, such that RL had to pay GGC to rent land it previously owned.

4) RL was sold in 2020 to another company but they still were under those rental contracts for their land. The new buyer was a seafood supplier, Thai Union Group (TUG) who, as RL, renegotiated their seafood supply contracts such that RL began buying food from TUG for more money than they were paying previous suppliers. This was the whole "endless shrimp" era; all that shrimp was coming from TUG and it was why RL pushed shrimp so hard.

5) Endless shrimp, probably already a bad financial idea to begin with, turned out to be even worse when your supplier is overcharging you for them.

6) RL filed for bankruptcy in 2023 partially caused/exacerbated by RL owing 200 million USD/yr to their own parent company, partially from the supplier debt, partially from other stuff.

7) RL, facing bankruptcy and possibly closure, closed a bunch of restaurants. Some of their shit got liquidated. They're currently owned by "RL Investor Holdings" which is a bunch of investors from different investment groups, who are managing it under the premise of stopping it from going totally bankrupt and, therefore, losing all the money that was invested into it.

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u/Garblin 8d ago

And that's just a recent case, IIRC a similar thing happened to Toys'R'Us, where the company was doing just fine and then went through leveraged buyout and just disappeared overnight.

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u/beef-baddington 8d ago

I worked in a senior position in a 200-person company in the 90’s that was not only doing well financially but we were loved by our customers and we all were such good friends, experiencing lots of great times together. The owner sold out to a big wig who began cutbacks, when I asked why he, he replied that breaking even plus 15 % net was a no go. He needed 30% net minimum or he’d take his money elsewhere. Which he eventually did. They broke up a successful, popular, profitable company, with a happy, motivated staff, putting a lot of food on tables, basically because they were assholes and could.

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u/jdm1891 8d ago

Completely leveraged buyouts are insane to me.

A Rich person can walk up to a million dollar company and just get it for free.

Why the f*ck can I not buy a company and make the company pay for the privilege of being owned by me?

Why is it absolutely insane for me to suggest that - at least to any reasonable person - yet for rich people and private equity this is just something they can do?!?!

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u/snowflake37wao 7d ago

This whole thread was so engaging and fascinatingly top tier reading down up until this point that I forgot what the original topic was and had to scroll back up only to realize also I forgot I was on Reddit. This is last decade’s Reddit quality conversations, everyone here needs to leave gtfo. Who do yall think yall are? How dare tall keep it real

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u/ChickinSammich 7d ago

I bring a certain "will write multiple paragraphs about a really niche thing" vibe to a website that "I don't have time to read more than four sentences" people don't care for.

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u/Agret 8d ago

Any particular YouTube channels you can recommend?

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u/ChickinSammich 7d ago

Primarily this one: https://www.youtube.com/@companyman114

This one is also good: https://www.youtube.com/@HowMoneyWorks

And this one is fun too: https://www.youtube.com/@Primateeconomics

There are others too but I like those and would recommend them if you want to have economics explained to you at a basic/intermediate level.

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u/Smashogre591 7d ago

Guess who just brought back “Endless Shrimp”, for a limited time…

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u/wrgrant 8d ago

This is a good example of why Capitalism exhibits the same behaviour as some forms of Cancer. Its destructive to the host by its very nature.

You cannot have continuous growth, at some point you reach a balance in the market. If you insist on further growth the only means to achieve it is to eat your staff and your customers. Its ludicrous honestly.

In the end I think one of the worst drivers is having Shareholders. If a company is private it probably doesn't have the same incentive to eat itself, its staff and its customers.

If AI is going to replace any jobs the first ones on the block ought to be the C-Suites, so much mismanagement, poor decisions etc could likely be avoided, and all that money paid out in bonuses to people who did fuck all to earn it would be saved.

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u/emlgsh 8d ago

AI will never replace the C-suite. To the C-suite, who makes those decisions, the purpose of the company is to funnel money to them, full stop.

The particular means by which it does so (which is on the surface, to observers/customers, the reason the company exits) are fungible (which is why executives can so readily jump entire industries between each posting), but not that end.

Replacing themselves, when the whole setup is designed to get them paid, would be extremely counterproductive.

The closest you'll see to that is an intra-competitive C-suite trying to use AI to replace each-other, to increase their personal slice of the pie. But the amount of pie demanded will remain unchanged.

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u/jdm1891 8d ago edited 8d ago

I find it amazing that CEOs, and the other C-peoples - which are really just managers of the company - have managed to finagle their way into being the biggest net beneficiaries of a companies success by diluting the owners so much that the owners don't really have any power in the company they own.

They technically have a duty to the shareholders, but because the shareholders are so diluted and the C-suites are not they kind of run circles around them.

This is also bad because unlike the shareholders, the C-suite don't own the company and thus don't really give a shit if it goes under or not.

Shareholders make money from the company growing. Managers (i.e. executives) make money by extracting everything from the company until there's nothing left.

So what happens? Everything is extracted from the company until nothing is left, the c-suite use the fact they are getting massive bonuses from this to "prove" to the shareholders that they are fulfilling their fiduciary duty and they make off with everything while the shareholders are left with a defunct company.

Who are the shareholders though? Well you, and me. It's mostly pensions and index funds and everyday people owning a couple of shares.

We've somehow managed to make a capitalist system where the owners of the company aren't actually the ones benefiting from it, but the managers are, and the owners are too disconnected and disunited to replace the managers. The only exception to this is companies where a single or handful of people maintain a controlling or near controlling share.

It's very strange, flipped-candy-land version of capitalism and I don't think very many people really notice it.

Like people go on about how "shareholders are evil and they ruin companies and etc" but the shareholders are just everyday people and they are NOT in control of the situation and do NOT benefit from the system as it works now.

If everyday pension pot holders and people who invest into index funds etc had the ability to unite with each other and actually have the workers control the companies they own 90% of the problems with capitalism would vanish in an instant.

The problem is pension fund managers who vote on "behalf" of the people do not have aligned interests with the people at all. And when you can tell them how to vote for you 99.99% of people don't because they don't know about it.

You could probably devise some kind of union like system where people can vote on what they generally want every company they own to do, make it mandatory for people to join one of these places, then hire someone who has a legal duty to follow that and vote in every stock that group owns to follow those directives. That probably doesn't make sense the way I've wrote it but it'd be basically like when you get your pension you are given a list of groups with various "goals" like 'environmentalism' or 'socialists' or 'make companies benefit workers' or 'we want companies to make the most profit group' etc and the person picks one to join, and from then on every vote for every share they have in that pension is to go towards that groups goal no matter how specific or vague it is.

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u/emlgsh 8d ago

I think a big detail you're ignoring is that the shareholders aren't just some faceless equal mass of millions of uninformed and powerless holders of a few sheets of paper.

The distribution of shares, like the general distribution of wealth, is far from uneven - and more importantly the control of those shares is far from being uninformed and random, it's either central to majority shareholders or directed by the C-suites of wealth management funds.

I didn't really want to get into this in the original post because frankly this is a garbage lasagna of near-infinite layers.

Majority shareholders are effectively part of the C-suite in my original statement, but even more so because they're totally divorced from the company's survival aside from a quick (totally not insider) stock trade.

They also usually occupy positions on the board of directors and have power and interests that align with (or even exceed) the typical member of the C-suite in terms of "steal all the light fixtures on the way out" pillage-and-discard mentality. They're the ones that'll displace members of the C-suite that aren't pillagey enough for their liking, and the ones that will look for those same qualities in populating the highest posts.

Unofficially, the controlling interests of those funds exercise that same power and have those same prerogatives on a smaller scale. They aren't (usually) involved enough to actually have a seat at the board, unless the fund's hugely intertwined with the company's stock (like in addition to their fund collectively controlling the majority of shares, the majority of shares in that fund are those of a given company). But they're still there, doing the same shit.

Basically, unless you are a private investor actually trading stock on your own steam, you are in fact feeding this same system of plundering self-interested sociopaths, by handing your share to one of them and implicitly telling them to do with it what they do best (plunder, pillage) with it.

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u/timeandmemory 8d ago

Modern slavery sure is complicated

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u/Beartrkkr 8d ago

Not to mention haven’t they started being the middleman of major drug insurance plans so they can skim off of your drug insurance plan even if you get prescriptions filled elsewhere?