Minimum Wage: What's the Other Argument?

[Borachio]

You can easily shoplift from a shop with self-checkouts just by scanning one item but weighing another. It just works by matching the weight of the item you scanned (known from its database) with the weight of the item you just put in the bagging area. So instead of putting the cheap 1L bottle of water in the bagging area, you put the 1kg of expensive meat in instead. Then you leave the water in your shopping basket and pay 39p for £25 worth of steak. I mean, it's really, really easy to shoplift now, and yet basically everyone still pays the right amount, because they're not thieving bastards.

Presumably, the amount of money they save by having a lower headcount outweighs the amount of money they lose from shoplifting.

Does this work? It wouldn't work for me. Every self-checkout I know of has a member of staff hovering nearby to help us out with when we inevitably cock the procedure up. And I'd be sure to be spotted not scanning something expensive. I've got a very guilty-looking back of the neck apparently.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Does the meat not sound the alarm when you leave, though?

No, because there isn't any widespread use of 'sound the alarm' chips in conjunction with self checkout. When you buy something expensive that has a chip in the packaging an attendant has to deactivate the chip, so if there were widespread use you would be right back at needing a bunch of attendants.

What stops people is the off chance that the human attendant will notice. In theory that one attendant monitoring the six lanes is pulling up the read from individual lanes at random and eyeball testing. So when you scan the water and drop the meat in the bag if you happen to be the one being checked you get caught.

Once again, no amount of technology makes any difference because at the end of the day the human is the deterrent.

 

[Mise]

I don't see how reducing the number of checkout staff from ~20 to ~5 isn't making a difference.

 

[Lohrenswald]

In Norway, home of giants, there is no minimum wage (unless the trade unions have fought for one)

 

[Zelig]

They also still have very nearly the same staff they had before they went to self checking. If they didn't they would not be 'working just fine' and they are well aware of it. The self check lanes free up staff to move among the aisles, which reduces inventory shrinkage (theft). They also clean more, keep the shelves more orderly, and interact with customers. Self check is a win, but reducing staff isn't how it wins.

Why on earth would you need to "free up staff" at a grocery store? They're not highly skilled positions, you keep hiring more people until the marginal value of hiring another person isn't positive. If people moving among the aisles is profitable, people will move among the aisles regardless of the number of people managing the checkout.

Where are you even getting these ideas? I've never been to a grocery store with the staff equivalent of the self-checkout machines just wandering around the aisles.

What stops people is the off chance that the human attendant will notice. In theory that one attendant monitoring the six lanes is pulling up the read from individual lanes at random and eyeball testing. So when you scan the water and drop the meat in the bag if you happen to be the one being checked you get caught.

Once again, no amount of technology makes any difference because at the end of the day the human is the deterrent.

If shoplifting is as easy as you claim, why would humans be a deterrent in the first place? You can just grab whatever you want and walk out.

With a majority of the store layouts here, you don't even need to go by the tills to get to the exit, so whether the checkouts are staffed by humans or not is completely irrelevant to someone who's shoplifting.

 

[civvver]

Keeping with thread intentions:

No I don't support raising the minimum wage. Although it's a pretty ambivalent no. I really think it doesn't make much difference either way.

The best argument I can think of for raising it is it hasn't kept up with the pace of inflation since it was implemented.

The problem with minimum wage arguments is that people frame it as an ideological discussion rather than an economic one, or they pretend to frame it as an economic discussion without actually being familiar with any of the empirical data regarding the effects of minimum wages.

That's probably the most enlightened post here.


Simply changing the minimum wage in a free market will just cause the market to adjust. The net gain or loss will be negligible. Yeah, there might be inflation, but if there's inflation the widgets and services my company is selling also go up, opening the door to increased salary for me. I may have temporary loss of buying power but it should even out over time.


In my view changing the minimum wage makes little to no economic impact. To me this is purely a political issue which is why I am against it. It's nothing more than pandering to the poor and inciting class warfare. Raising the minimum wage really isn't going to help them out except to make them feel better and feel like they're getting pair more.


But there's another component to consider I haven't seen mentioned here. There is a very regressive tax in the US called FICA which pays for social security and medicare programs. You get no deductions against it and it's about 8% of your income paid by you and a matching 8% by your employer and to make this even more stupid it stops over a fairly high income amount, $117,000 in 2014. So someone making minimum wage pays the full 8% of their income in FICA taxes. Someone making $150,000 pays 8% on the first $117,000 and 0% on the next $33,000. Which I guess if you are treating social security as it was intended as indeed insurance premiums that kind of makes sense. The amount it pays out also caps so someone making 150k ends up getting back the same in benefits as someone who only makes 50k, yet they still pay in quite a bit more. So it's not totally regressive if you consider it in that sense. But at this point I don't, since most people just see it as a payroll tax.


What's the point of my above paragraph? Simply this- I believe a huge impetus in Washington for raising the minimum wage is to deceptively increase the amount of payroll taxes collected so they can tell their constituents that social security and medicare are fully funded due to increases in revenue. Maybe that's a little too conspiracy theory for some people but comon, you don't think at the very least politicians have considered that? Let's face it, if you make $7 an hour or $12 an hour you're paying little to no income taxes if you're really on your own or have a family, yet you are definitely paying that 8% FICA tax matched by your employer. Every dollar the politicians raise min wage is another 16 cents in their social programs pocketbooks. And of course we all know how they raid those coffers and borrow against it to fund other stuff as well.


Some other poster early in the thread also made a really salient point- I'd tell you my stance if I knew what the minimum wage was meant to accomplish. Because there is no consensus here. Is it simply the lowest you can pay a person legally or is it meant to be a living wage? Because the two are entirely different. And beyond that, a living wage for whom? A college student living with mom and dad or a single parent of four? Once you realize those arguments I think you can start to see using the minimum wage as a means of providing a minimum standard of living is really stupid.


If we want to provide a minimum standard of living there are better ways to do it such as free health care, subsidized or free housing and education, increases in food stamp programs, etc. (When I say free I mean free for those who use them and paid for by others via taxes of course. Nothing is free). And if you want to say hey we want to reward those who do work then fine, give them income tax credits that require they are working. Then you don't have college students and part time spouses also earning $15 an hour and the family of four is well supported by other means.


To summarize: Don't raise minimum wage because economically it's basically zero sum. It's a political issue that's impossible to solve with an artificial price control. Instead accomplish your political agenda in a better manner.


EDIT: I forgot to mention one other thing. I don't think our goal as a society should be to put everyone on some magical minimum standard of living platform or for income equality. Let it be as insanely unequal as the market dictates, who cares? What we should strive for is breaking down the barriers to entry. The problem with poor people is not that they are poor or stupid or lazy, it's that they have very few opportunities to break out of their social hierarchy. It's much harder for a poor person from the inner city to get a good education than a middle class person from the suburbs and research shows time and time again that the biggest common factor towards your income is quality and level of education. Work eithic of course plays a part too, but education is key to helping people become more wealthy and keeping our nation as a whole wealthy. Thus I don't think we should strive to put people on welfare, we should strive to get them devices to life themselves out of the lowest income brackets. Quite simply our education system sucks and needs more invested into it and college is way too damn expensive these days. We need to fix those problems more than any income inequality issues. Income inequality is merely a symptom of the problems, not the problem itself.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Why on earth would you need to "free up staff" at a grocery store? They're not highly skilled positions, you keep hiring more people until the marginal value of hiring another person isn't positive. If people moving among the aisles is profitable, people will move among the aisles regardless of the number of people managing the checkout.

Where are you even getting these ideas? I've never been to a grocery store with the staff equivalent of the self-checkout machines just wandering around the aisles.



If shoplifting is as easy as you claim, why would humans be a deterrent in the first place? You can just grab whatever you want and walk out.

With a majority of the store layouts here, you don't even need to go by the tills to get to the exit, so whether the checkouts are staffed by humans or not is completely irrelevant to someone who's shoplifting.

I get my ideas from being a member of the criminal element. Meaning that when you say what is or isn't meaningful to shoplifters I can just ask some shoplifters how close to the mark you are. I also try to make friends everywhere I go. That includes the undercover loss prevention specialists at four different local stores, who I chat up all the time since it fits their 'hang around and look natural' job description, along with other store employees. Where do you get your ideas?

The art of shoplifting is to not get yourself invited to stay the $%^#@ out of the store in future. And yes, shoplifters do know that there are a lot more "courtesy" staff, as well as UCLPs, in stores with self checkout. Being the targets of that staff they do notice the difference.

Humans are a deterrent because they can put two and two together. You walk in, walk around the store, and leave without paying for anything they make a note of it. You spend fifteen minutes browsing in cosmetics and then buy a candy bar, they make a note of it. The next time you come in the store they watch you more closely than usual. They see you slip something down your pants, they meet you as you go out the door. They may or may not demand it back, but they let you know that you are not welcome to come back, ever, and the store is burnt. It takes six months to a year, minimum, to get enough staff turnover to even get in the door again without getting a step by step escort everywhere you go.

 

[Zelig]

I get my ideas from being a member of the criminal element. Meaning that when you say what is or isn't meaningful to shoplifters I can just ask some shoplifters how close to the mark you are. I also try to make friends everywhere I go. That includes the undercover loss prevention specialists at four different local stores, who I chat up all the time since it fits their 'hang around and look natural' job description, along with other store employees. Where do you get your ideas?

The art of shoplifting is to not get yourself invited to stay the $%^#@ out of the store in future. And yes, shoplifters do know that there are a lot more "courtesy" staff, as well as UCLPs, in stores with self checkout. Being the targets of that staff they do notice the difference.

Humans are a deterrent because they can put two and two together. You walk in, walk around the store, and leave without paying for anything they make a note of it. You spend fifteen minutes browsing in cosmetics and then buy a candy bar, they make a note of it. The next time you come in the store they watch you more closely than usual. They see you slip something down your pants, they meet you as you go out the door. They may or may not demand it back, but they let you know that you are not welcome to come back, ever, and the store is burnt. It takes six months to a year, minimum, to get enough staff turnover to even get in the door again without getting a step by step escort everywhere you go.

How is any of this relevant to self checkouts?

 

[Borachio]

No, because there isn't any widespread use of 'sound the alarm' chips in conjunction with self checkout. When you buy something expensive that has a chip in the packaging an attendant has to deactivate the chip, so if there were widespread use you would be right back at needing a bunch of attendants.

What stops people is the off chance that the human attendant will notice. In theory that one attendant monitoring the six lanes is pulling up the read from individual lanes at random and eyeball testing. So when you scan the water and drop the meat in the bag if you happen to be the one being checked you get caught.

Once again, no amount of technology makes any difference because at the end of the day the human is the deterrent.

I don't get the idea of shoplifting though. If I want something, I expect, and want, to pay for it. If I haven't got the money for it, I do without whatever it is.

I know that it costs a store a certain amount to supply me with the goods I want so why wouldn't I want to pay for them?

Stores are obliged to accept a certain shrinkage (is that the word?) due to light-fingered members of the general public. And they recoup that shrinkage from their customers, who do pay, by charging them slightly more. So the thieves, who invariably think they're stealing from the store (like Robin Hood), are in fact stealing from their fellow customers.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I don't get the idea of shoplifting though. If I want something, I expect, and want, to pay for it. If I haven't got the money for it, I do without whatever it is.

I know that it costs a store a certain amount to supply me with the goods I want so why wouldn't I want to pay for them?

Stores are obliged to accept a certain shrinkage (is that the word?) due to light-fingered members of the general public. And they recoup that shrinkage from their customers, who do pay, by charging them slightly more. So the thieves, who invariably think they're stealing from the store (like Robin Hood), are in fact stealing from their fellow customers.

I'm not saying it's a good thing. It is just one of many criminal careers that will see a rise in numbers if you actually get this robotic revolution to unemploy huge hoards of people. Especially since people are the deterrent, so the robo-store, like the robo cab or robo-whatever else provides a better target.

By the way, no shoplifter I know considers themselves a "Robin Hood". They are plain and simple thieves with no particular illusions about it.

@Zelig...the relevance is that since people are what deters crime taking people out of stores is not going to work out well. Self checkouts are a good thing when they allow the staff to not spend time scanning items for customers, but if you are looking for self checkouts to vastly reduce overall staffing they aren't going to work out for you.

 

[Borachio]

By the way, no shoplifter I know considers themselves a "Robin Hood". They are plain and simple thieves with no particular illusions about it.

All the thieves I've ever known, and I've known a few, have always rationalized their hobby one way or another. Mostly they think of themselves as stealing from some faceless organization rather than their fellow man.

A minority of thieves, if they happen to be drug addicts for instance, will think nothing of stealing even from people they do know, since they "know" that their need trumps anyone else's. But these are the minority, I feel. At least, I hope so.

I've known not a few thieves who've said that stealing from a friend, or relative, is beyond the pale.

In actual fact, when it comes down to it, we all of us are thieves in one way or another. Mostly without really realizing it. I knew a guy who waited till he was at work before going for a dump. Citing the considerable saving in time, toilet paper, and water as a reason. Twas still theft though. And I myself have made off with various odd pens from work, and I can spy a lever arch file on my bookshelf even now.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, you hit my own justification squarely enough. Everyone takes by force one way or another, so the fact I was a bit more direct about it did not present a moral issue for me. That seems to work for the majority of criminals I know.

I routinely tell people that I was a car salesman before I became a criminal, and consider the transition to have been an ethical step in the right direction.

 

[Borachio]

Oh, but that's the old "Well everyone's a thief so that's OK", line.

"We're all of us thieves but some of us try not to be when we remember", might be a better one.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The one that always cracks me up is "I'm a good, non violent person, so I call the police to ruin your life because your music is loud." Dude, just punch me in the face. Please.

 

[schlaufuchs]

The one that always cracks me up is "I'm a good, non violent person, so I call the police to ruin your life because your music is loud." Dude, just punch me in the face. Please.

Oh man. That's definitely how we should start handling disturbing the peace complaints.

 

[Zelig]

@Zelig...the relevance is that since people are what deters crime taking people out of stores is not going to work out well. Self checkouts are a good thing when they allow the staff to not spend time scanning items for customers, but if you are looking for self checkouts to vastly reduce overall staffing they aren't going to work out for you.

They already do work out:

Why on earth would you need to "free up staff" at a grocery store? They're not highly skilled positions, you keep hiring more people until the marginal value of hiring another person isn't positive. If people moving among the aisles is profitable, people will move among the aisles regardless of the number of people managing the checkout.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

They already do work out:

They do work out...because they don't actually decrease total staffing. You can take people who were checkers and have them doing other stuff, leading to a cleaner, better organized, friendlier store and even reduce shrink at the same time (by having staff more uniformly distributed in the store). But if you try to use self checkout to allow a significant reduction in staff you get an increase in shrink that makes it not worth it.

Because total staffing directly affects losses to inventory shrinkage. Places that went to self checkout in an effort to reduce staffing have mostly turned around and hired a comparable number of people right back. UCLP staff, outright security guard staff, extra courtesy clerks, whatever.

 

[Zelig]

They do work out...because they don't actually decrease total staffing. You can take people who were checkers and have them doing other stuff, leading to a cleaner, better organized, friendlier store and even reduce shrink at the same time (by having staff more uniformly distributed in the store). But if you try to use self checkout to allow a significant reduction in staff you get an increase in shrink that makes it not worth it.

Because total staffing directly affects losses to inventory shrinkage. Places that went to self checkout in an effort to reduce staffing have mostly turned around and hired a comparable number of people right back. UCLP staff, outright security guard staff, extra courtesy clerks, whatever.

Again:

Why on earth would you need to "free up staff" at a grocery store? They're not highly skilled positions, you keep hiring more people until the marginal value of hiring another person isn't positive. If people moving among the aisles is profitable, people will move among the aisles regardless of the number of people managing the checkout.

And again:

With a majority of the store layouts here, you don't even need to go by the tills to get to the exit, so whether the checkouts are staffed by humans or not is completely irrelevant to someone who's shoplifting.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Again:



And again:

Yes, you certainly are repetitive.

Total staffing affects shrink. You don't "need to free up staff to walk the aisles". You need a certain amount of staff, total, to keep shrink within an acceptable limit. Self checkout allows you to have staff performing different functions (and if you can't think of anything better for them to do, then yes they just walk the aisles), but it doesn't allow you to significantly reduce staffing, because total staffing is connected to shrink.

 

[Traitorfish]

I've got to agree with Zelig. Speaking as somebody who works in a heavily-automated checkouts department, jobs are only shifted elsewhere if the employers are willing to shift them. Our department is I'd say about 50% automated at this point, averaged across the day, but there hasn't been any noticeable shift in the staffing of other departments. At the budget end of the retail business, especially, automation is about keeping prices lower than competitors, rather than freeing up income to reinvest in the business.