It’s a pretty good loophole though. A stocks value is considered an unrealized gain when you receive it but don’t sell it. My company gives me stock, but I don’t sell it. If I had to pay taxes on that, I’d be fucked. Maybe they could create some kind of untaxed minimum based on some index. And possibly even brackets.

But of course there’s a reason they like it this way.

I don't think it would be difficult to outright forbid self-checkout at all, actually.

There's a difference between enforcing laws on individuals and enforcing laws on businesses. Businesses can't exactly run and hide, if they're using self-checkout they're going to get found out. That's distinct from something like the drug trade, which is all underground and hidden.

Do sin taxes really stop anything though?

But not one that relates to the thing that we're trying to stop them from doing. Cashiers aren't paid per item scanned, they don't get commission. They are paid an hourly wage.

If you wanted to pay customers a rebate for their labor at the market rate for a cashier, or one set by the state, that'd make sense to eliminate the gains the company receives from automation.

So 5 minutes of work at $15/hr = $1.25. So not much, but it mitigates the benefit of not hiring people.

Though, it's still a benefit because you pay a person whether they're actively working or not and you have to pay tax on human labor (contributing to social security, etc) so maybe hiking it higher than whatever the typical wage is for cashiers would make sense.

But either way, 10% doesn't make sense.

Cost of labor, overhead, and profit are already accounted for in that $150 price of the goods. That's why the store charges $150 for them - because that's what covers the wages, overhead, and includes the maximum markup they can get away with (~3% margin for grocery stores afaik).

All I'm saying is, they do have to be able to cover costs. So because of that and their thin margins, they'd just hike prices (probably more than they'd need to take advantage of the situation).

So it makes more sense to either tax them for avoiding using human labor and passing that labor on to customers (to help pay for the drain they're placing on the economy by not hiring people), or just ban the practice outright. Couple that with price controls to ensure they can't unfairly inflate prices. Things they can't avoid rather than a fee they can hike prices to avoid.

$100 is a decent basket where I'm at...

$100 isn't much of a big cart these days. That's a week or less of food for many.

That's not how math works.

2024
Revenue was $147B
Profit was $3.8B or 2.8%

The lowest estimate I found of sales volume through self checkout is 38%.
So a 10% self checkout discount is 3.8% hit to revenue. When profits are only 2.8% they'll take a 1% loss.

The CEO pay being only 0.4% of that $3.8B profit. Isn't remotely enough to matter.

This won't lower prices.

That's an abysmally small number compared to the amount of product they move.

Yes, sure, CEO's should make less. But that amounts to fractions of a percent on the typical purchase, not 10%.

Yah. That's what was already pointed out.

True. Very true. But the solution to that problem is a completely different conversation than what we have been having in this thread. That conversation starts with a "citizenship dividend".

Democracy takes the political power of the individual, conveys it to government, where it is used to provide all manner of services. Those services are available to everyone, but they are not utilized equally by everyone.

The individual is not currently compensated for the use of their political power. We are taxed proportional to those services that we use, but those taxes don't make it back to the source of the power that enabled those services.

That should change.

Each of us should be individually compensated for the government's use of our political power. We should each receive an equal dividend. The most common term for this dividend is "Universal Basic Income", and it should be enough for the food on our tables and the roofs over our heads. We should receive that income before we get out of bed on Monday morning. The 40 hours we typically work in the week should not be for basic subsistence, but should be entirely gainful.

If your cashier’s are not making a living wage, then maybe the minimum wage should be increased?

Minimum wage is certainly too low. It should be more than double its current hourly rate, but that's not the main problem here.

Where I am, if a minimum wage worker worked 40 hours a week consistently,

Cashiers are rarely allowed to work full-time hours. Management keeps the position open only for part-time workers. Cynically, the reason for this is so they don't have to provide benefits to those workers. Giving retailers the full benefit of the doubt, this keeps a surplus of workers on the payroll, allowing the retailer to schedule everybody during major shopping events like Black Friday. Regardless, these workers are typically denied sufficient hours to be able to earn a living wage.

The job isn’t always for the impoverished,

You've got it backwards. The job isn't for workers who happen to be impoverished. The impoverishment is because the job does not compensate workers adequately.

Also, I worked at grocery stores a lot when I was a younger person and I was never a cashier, but I knew most of them and I was able to go back there years and years after I left and see the same faces at the tills. A lot of wives with empty nests helping to save up for retirement, or simply to do something during the day while their kids are off at school or whatever…

So, you're saying that these workers are holding these jobs for something other than gainful employment? They are using them as some sort of hobby or recreation? They are willing and able to accept exploitative conditions because they aren't actually trying to live off the fruits of their labor?

The people you are talking about are, ultimately, enabling this exploitative behavior from employers. They are competing for work with people who do need actual gainful employment. Their recreational participation in the workforce devalues the labor of everyone else. I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to work recreationally, or that employers shouldn't be able to hire them. I'm saying that this practice should be strictly regulated, so that the employer can't use their willingness to be exploited to justify exploiting everyone.

I think we need to establish both a "minimum wage" and a "standard wage". The minimum wage would be the fixed, hourly minimum rate that we already have . The "standard wage" would multiply the minimum wage by 40 hours a week. Employees who aren't paid at least that weekly amount are on "substandard employment". A 40-hour/wk worker earning minimum wage makes a standard wage. A 20-hour/wk worker earning 2x minimum wage makes a standard wage. Substandard wages should be allowed, but restricted. An employer should not be allowed to compensate more than 10% of its labor with substandard wages.

What does it feel like answering rhetorical questions?

training and drilling for street to street fighting? Do you have a few hundred thousand members?

JFC you might be the ONLY person on .ML that gets it.

Like I am SOOOOOO SICK of internet edgelords with zero combat skills demanding we burn down society and roll the dice that whoever survives will do a better job.

I mean when it comes to grocery stores, most have little profit margin to begin with.