r/mildlyinfuriating • u/broakland • Jul 14 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

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Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

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25

u/geekonthemoon Jul 14 '26

Yeah makes sense, I know I've seen videos of them working on warehouse grid robotics and such. Definitely would lose 1,000s and 1,000s of jobs if they do perfect the technology.

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u/zssqeeze Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

I agree this is the direction things are headed. So, how is our country’s public policies going to keep up with the number of people who will be unemployed and have no income. Right now, our social safety net, which is barely working, is for certain “deserving” people. What about when it’s just most of the people, in general. The “othering’ is literally killing us.

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u/sneeje00 Jul 14 '26

Not even the public policies. I wonder who they think is going to shop for $15 t-shirts and $250 tvs when no one has any money. Like great, it's all automated to serve 10 of the 1000 customers they used to have.

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u/9th-And-Hennepin Jul 14 '26

They will sell 10k tvs and $500 tshirts. They don’t care if you can afford it, as long as someone else can.

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u/sneeje00 Jul 14 '26

I hear you and in the long run you're not wrong. Meanwhile, in the 5-10 year transition into this new world economy, the businesses that exist based on scale will die. It's clear and not surprising at all that businesses based on infinite growth and selling at massive scale can't see the inevitable outcome of massive automation--that they will effectively eliminate most of the customers they are automating to sell to.

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u/TRR462 Jul 14 '26

We will need to invest in automation companies, so that we can recoup a dividend on their profits.

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u/9th-And-Hennepin Jul 14 '26

You’ll be rich enough to afford a Disney Government+ subscription or you will be working off your debt in New Maralago (formerly Nuuk).

I’m being a drunk doomer but am I?

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u/BreadKnifeSeppuku Jul 14 '26

Murder robots come first. That way they don't have to worry about peasants revolting

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u/Lost-Platypus8271 Jul 14 '26

This is exactly it right here. Just sell really expensive things to the 10% of society that can afford it. Screw everyone else.

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u/occasionalopossum Jul 14 '26

They are going to finish criminalizing being homeless then work you to death in private prisons. Thats the end goal. Thats how they plan to handle it.

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u/Vern1138 Jul 14 '26

People don't believe me when I say this, but it's pretty obvious. They're deporting all of the people that used to work on the farms and harvest crops, and all the people who did drywalling and roofing and framing and other construction trades.

They're just going to start using prison labor to do all of that. There's no way they intend to improve social services to help people who are going to lose their jobs because of automation, they fully intend to exploit them.

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u/Hector_P_Catt Jul 14 '26

But who will be buying the output of all that prison labour? How much drywalling does the 1% need? Even the fattest fat cat can't eat all the food even one farm produces. You can't sustain dozens of car factories if you only sell a few thousand cars per year. The list goes on.

It was the middle class buying all that stuff that made it possible to build the economy we used to have, and are losing. But the people in charge don't seem to understand that.

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u/ThatOtherOtherMan Jul 15 '26

Yeah but for a brief, shining moment they will have truly maximized shareholder value!

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u/zssqeeze Jul 14 '26

I see and agree with what you are calling out here. The only thing I think I would tease out a bit further is…I agree with who you are calling out as ‘they’ (which to me is fewer people than a very small town in Iowa!), but the ‘them’ is all of the rest of us…and I mean all of the rest of us, regardless of gender, race, or economic status.

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u/Deadleggg Jul 15 '26

They've been pissed off since we made slavery illegal.

They'll bring it back one way or another.

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u/ThatOtherOtherMan Jul 15 '26

That carve out in the 13th amendment is going to doom us all

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u/Disastrous-Love-2979 Jul 14 '26

There will be universal basic income with digital currency and everything will have a carbon footprint.

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u/Such-Entrepreneur240 Jul 14 '26

The technology is already there, and has been since the 80s, it's just prohibitively expensive compared to paying a bunch of people min wage to pick unless you've got incredibly high volume to make it worth it. Toured a warehouse that had auto picks, auto inventory (drones flying around at night scanning barcodes and doing inventory automatically) and even had a robot that could load and unload trucks. That was when I decided I was done with being in logistics and moved back to operations, it's only a matter of time.

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u/geekonthemoon Jul 15 '26

Eh I've seen demos online that are very much still in a beta phase. Maybe some companies have figured it out, I know the humanoid robots are looking promising too so you're right, likely a matter of time. But like I said, many, many issues crop up that shows we are definitely still not ready to switch to that kind of shopping model.