I think the article is bad because it’s not actually written to convince someone who likes self checkout, it’s written for people who already agree with the author that self checkout is bad. But the problems aren’t with the self checkout, it’s corporate greed. I think there’s a compelling argument that all three points can be true at the same time (due to the staffing cuts that self checkout was used as an excuse for but were actually across all departments), but the author doesn’t make a compelling argument for any of them.

Regrettably, I work big box retail. What you don’t see is the stock rooms. There’s stuff piling up back there that’s out of stock on the sales floor but the store hours have been cut so severely that there’s nobody to pull them from the stock room and get them on shelves, and the too few people who are actually scheduled to do that are instead working on the check lanes because corporate has cut staffing there too and that’s an immediate fire to put out rather than a slow burn. And that causes the store to have empty shelves which ultimately leads to less sales because you can’t find what you’re looking for - and good luck finding someone to go check the back that’s not running around like a chicken on fire because they’re on a stupid short time limit grabbing an order for pick up (and that person is probably also supposed to be stocking the floor, and they’re slower than someone who does it all the time, not to mention the wasted labor hours of management calling for backup that either doesn’t exist or isn’t on walkie). And understaffing is an awful experience for employees too, so our wages are higher than fast food because when the store does want to replace someone they can’t because the job sucks, which leads to more understaffing… if someone brought in a blank stack of union cards tomorrow with the promise of adequate staffing, my store would be unionized by next week (and probably closed by next month…). And if you could figure out where I work, that chain would probably go out of business because of how awful it ultimately is for the end consumer, but you can’t because basically all of retail in the US is in this same death spiral that ends either with unionization or another company being formed that doesn’t actively suck this bad. None of this actually has anything to do with self checkout, however, that was just one of the excuses these companies used to cut way too much staff, and an excuse the writer can use to weasel his way out of saying the actual reasons why retail sucks - decades of anti labor practices and unfettered capitalist greed.