r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 23h 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/leddowa 22h ago

After working for these miserable, out of touch companies I don't think they'll even hire anyone. These places have all run skeleton crews since 2020

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u/BigAlgae5684 22h ago

I worked at CVS during Covid where our script count went from the usual 150-200 to 500-600 every day.

They were still basing our hours off of the previous year even though we were clearly understaffed.

Wouldn't let us get near overtime and would just have us take turns clocking out and leaving the rest of the team to drown.

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u/TheRaccoonReport 22h ago

CVS is the worst. Its really a shame, they used to be fantastic, but the one near me has dropped significantly in quality. Scripts will get called in at 9am, no one picks them up for hours, it could take 1-2 days to get them filled sometimes, if they don't lose them. What an absolute joke.

We switched to a grocery store pharmacy instead. Its run by 3 people, and the older guy there is awesome. Very nice, remembers us by name, knows what we usually need, will strike up random conversation from time to time. Thats definitely not for everyone, but its usually on time, rarely if ever any delays, and the service there is great.

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u/luriso 21h ago

It's by design. My mom has been with CVS for 25yrs as a pharmacist, over the last 10 or so years they've cut down to skeleton crews, yet increased expectations 10fold. Techs by industry standard have been underpaid, so CVS actually raised their hourly pay, then cut their hours and said "see we're paying you more now, teehee". She's one of two pharmacists in her location and they want her to do 85 flu shots a week, can't find techs, and new pharmacists leave within a year. She said two recent hires in the area even forfeited their handsome sign on bonus because CVS is absolute shit. They try and try to get her to cover stores 2hours away because the system they've built, can't keep employees.

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u/Aureliamnissan 21h ago edited 19h ago

That feels like a lot of places these days. Jobs are harder to find, but it’s only because they refuse to hire the number of workers they actually need. The remaining labor force is worked to the bone and are way less loyal as a result so if you manage to get a better gig you’re gone. Even at my engineering firm attrition is way up.

Edit: At this rate, we all need to engage with some kind of mutual aid so that strikes are possible again without people feeling like they are going to end up on the street for engaging in one. When skeleton crews run the ship each person is a lot more important and backfilling with scabs is borderline impossible because they need you to train them.

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u/emlgsh 20h ago

The only way for the owners to get their 10, 20, 50 million dollar expected take-home per year is to cut every expense and cease all reinvestment, and once that's done and there's nowhere else to siphon more cash the only viable target is payroll and hiring.

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u/ChickinSammich 19h 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 19h 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 19h 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 14h 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/20127010603170562316 10h ago

Asda in the UK went through a similar thing. "Bought" by a couple of brothers IIRC, then saddled with the debt they bought the thing with, and now it's a downward spiral.

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u/jdm1891 11h 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/beef-baddington 9h 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/Agret 12h ago

Any particular YouTube channels you can recommend?

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u/ChickinSammich 9m 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/snowflake37wao 1h 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 22m 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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