Your Dream of Working at a Grocery Store in Rhode Island Is Still Alive!

Huzzah for bureaucratic overreach!

Photo by Brian Aslak.

You know how when you were a kid, when someone asked what you want to do when you grow up, you’d say “I want to scan groceries at a Sam’s Club in Warwick, Rhode Island”? Well, awesome news: Rhode Island has passed a law requiring grocery stores to have one traditional check out lane operating for every three self-checkout machines, and also someone has to staff the self-checkout machines at all times. The law was backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, and its goals is to protect Space Age scanning-stuff-while-making-idle-chit-chat-because-you’re-bored-out-of-your-fucking-mind jobs.

One downside of the law is that food will probably get more expensive; voters once cared about that so much that they elected a retarded criminal in a Hail Mary attempt to bring prices down. Another downside is that people will spend more time standing in line at the grocery store. Those effects will surely be small, but so will any positive effect on employment. When measured in dollars, minutes, or jobs, the impact is tiny; the law only becomes noteworthy when you quantify its stupidity.

Grocery stores need customers. Stores attract customers by doing things like having sales, remodeling their stores, and hiring the least-weird high school kids they can find. One such innovation is self-checkout machines, which reduce time spent waiting in line and minimize the amount that customers have to interact with the still-pretty-weird high school kids who work at the store.

The ubiquity of self-checkout machines proves that customers like them. But Rhode Island lawmakers seem to believe that the rich fat cats who run grocery stores became rich fat cats by being total idiots, and that the stores could be run better by small-town lawmakers in a state that’s basically a series of mafia-run lighthouses. Instead of saying “The union wanted this bill, so we passed it,” lawmakers argued that these changes benefit the masses, even though businesses whose livelihoods depend on appealing to the masses could have made these changes but didn’t.

“This law is about preserving choice and keeping people at the center of the shopping experience,” said Rhode Island governor Dan McKee. Of course, the law limits choice; if you’d like to choose to use self-checkout, then this law makes it harder for you to do that. You’re also not allowed to choose to let the grocery store operate as efficiently as possible in order to keep prices low. At a time when the the low-overhead-low-price model of grocery stores is growing — Aldi, for example, is less of a “store” and more of a “warehouse that allows public access” — Rhode Island is bravely limiting your options in the name of “choice”.

One of the bill’s sponsors argued that it would “[improve] the store environment for workers and consumers.” The part about workers might be true — or might not! — but the part about consumers is almost certainly not true. Again: The grocery store’s business is to give customers what they want. If people wanted a better human-to-robot ratio, a store would give it to them, and that store’s owner would get rich. Incredibly, some advocates proclaimed the bill to be an anti-theft measure, even though grocery stores obviously don’t like stealing! Especially in a famously-mobbed-up place like Rhode Island! The people behind this bill have an extremely odd view of grocery store owners: They’re seen as rapacious capitalists feverishly optimizing their operation, but they’re also total morons who don’t know what their customers want and are being robbed blind.

All of this is being done to preserve a few checkout jobs. Maybe — a similar law in Long Beach, California resulted in stores simply ending self-checkout, so the effect on employment was unclear. Longer lines and a less customer-friendly experience could also push more people towards delivery, which is good if you’re a driver, but bad if you’re a cashier. As always, it’s far from clear that trying to save a specific job saves jobs on the whole, and we’ve known about this dynamic for about 200 years, but lawmakers always seem to think “Maybe this time.”

At any rate: If you live in the Newport-Providence corridor, and your dream is to have a low-paying job where you stand all day and make the same motion five jillion times in a row, you may keep hope alive. The state legislature has your back. And you’re extra lucky if you also don’t eat food, value your time, or exist in the broader economy — if that’s you, then this law is unambiguously good! Unfortunately, that’s much less true for everyone else, as Rhode Islanders are about to find out.

---