Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!

Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it's normal now!

That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There's no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn't one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 month ago

In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.

Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.

In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.

So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago

Maybe you can go the warehouse and pick it up from the boxes, drive down to the farm to het the produce or, even better, grow your own food ALL THE WHILE STILL PAYING FULL VALUE TO THE SUPERMARKET.

"People used to have even more done for them and now they don't and pay the same" is not the powerful argument for us having even less done for us that you think it is.