Comment Re:What was automated? (Score 1) 236
A clerk has zero incentive to get you through the line as quickly as possible.
While I agree with your first line, I disagree with this.
It's been a while since I worked retail, and I never worked registers as a regular thing, but even these days I can see boards hanging on the walls of stores (sometimes back in an employee-only area, sometimes right out in front of the lines) that show rankings of either Customers Per Minute (CPM) or Items Per Minute (IPM). While I have no personal knowledge about these, I would bet they're used for, at worst, some bad management "incentive" like "you get a bag of chips if you're highest at the end of the month!" or, at best, part of promotion and raises.
I love self-checkout lines myself; as long as you only have a few items and they aren't packed with families trying to check out a cart full of groceries, you can zip right though. I get to avoid human interaction most of the time (idle chit-chat severely annoys me), bag groceries my (anal) way, and get out quickly. There's also a space-saving feature: six machines and one clerk can replace three lines that might not all be open at the same time, anyway. But, for all of that, I doubt you will ever completely get rid of cashiers. Maybe once all items have their own RFID tags and a cart can simply be scanned without having to remove stuff, but that is still quite some time off.