Would you like to see an example of a badly conceived policy? Here you go:
The bill to require discounts for self-checkout will probably not pass. But what’s notable is that if this bill did pass, it would have exactly the opposite of the effect its creators want. The stated justification is that customers are doing unpaid labor by scanning and bagging their own groceries, and that this discount would compensate them for that effort. But the bill is part of a more general effort to disincentivize automation in the retail industry, in order to protect working-class jobs:
Rhode Island was the first state in the U.S. to enact statewide self-checkout restrictions with its Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, which takes effect January 1, 2027. The act requires grocery stores to have at least one human-operated checkout station for every three self-service stations during peak hours…Similar legislation has either been introduced, enacted or considered in additional states including California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, and Ohio.
The standard objection to this bill, I suppose, would be that self-checkout already gives shoppers a discount, because it allows stores to save money on hiring human labor, and that these savings get passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. That argument is correct as far as it goes, but it means the debate ends up as one of technocracy versus populism — protecting the livelihoods of a few cashiers versus giving a huge number of consumers very slightly lower prices. There’s no simple or easy conclusion to that debate.
But in the case of New York’s proposed self-checkout discount, the problem is that the bill would actually make grocery stores fire human cashiers in favor of more self-checkout.
To understand why this is true, first imagine an incredibly extreme version of the policy. Imagine that instead of 10%, you made a law forcing grocery stores to give a 90% discount for self-checkout. This is exactly the same as forcing stores to charge 10x for using a human cashier. Who would pay 10x for groceries, just to use a human cashier? Basically no one. So everyone would go use the self-checkout machines, and stores would have no need for human cashiers at all.
But wait, you may be thinking. How could any store afford to give a 90% discount on groceries? The same way they give discounts for seniors and students at movie theaters. You just raise the sticker price, so that the price people actually pay after the discount is the same as before. So instead of keeping human-cashier prices the same and cutting prices for self-checkout, what stores would actually do if you made them give 10% discounts for self-checkout is to raise prices across the board — not by 10%, but by enough so that overall revenue is just about the same as it was before.
How do we know this is what will happen? Because the grocery store industry is very competitive. Profit margins are almost always between 1.5% and 2.8%, which is very low compared to the average industry:
