Can you provide an example where “Most people … choose the non-human one because its significantly cheaper to the consumer of the product/service.”
Sure. Frontier airlines charges a fee to talk to a customer service human agent while the same tasks can be accomplished for free through the app/website:
Canconda@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
This. The only example where I pick a robot over a human is self checkout… and that’s cuz it’s faster due to there only be 1 queue for several checkouts. Not because it saves me money.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You choose to go to a store that has outsourced human labor to machines. Even if you only occasionally use the self-checkout yourself, many other shoppers use the self-checkout. The prices you’re paying for your purchases are lower across the board because they don’t have to pay for as many cashiers.
Are there no stores (for the particular goods you’re buying in this example) that have zero self-checkout? If there are others that employee humans exclusively to check out, then your philosophy should have you shopping only at those and not at stores that have replaced humans with automation. I should warn you, those stores are probably more expensive to shop at.
Canconda@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
In theory yes. But that’s not going to be universal for every product. Not every product can become a “loss leader”. So to a degree it depends on the individual shopper.
While that’s true, you have to admit that stores with zero checkout automation also likely lack the buying power to purchase in bulk like the large retailers who can afford checkout automation.
My philosophy with grocery shopping is I want it to be done asap. IMO self-checkout isn’t inherently faster than cashiers. It’s arrangement of single queues leading to multiple registers that speeds up the lines.
Additionally, I prefer to bag my own groceries so that I know the fragile items won’t be damaged getting them home.