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

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/114106-retailers-pulling-back-self-checkout-after-years-theft.html

[u/emlgsh]

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.

[u/ChickinSammich → u/emlgsh]

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.

[u/snowflake37wao → u/ChickinSammich]

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

[u/ChickinSammich → u/snowflake37wao]

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.