We will attempt to look at an entire job class today, so there are going to be some unavoidable generalizations. Even so, certain truths do apply across the board, whether we like admitting to them or not.
Some of us love the self checkout line at the grocery store. We don’t slow down the other people in line; we can pack our own bags the way we want to, and as long as we can get the discount programs to work and the pricing is right, it can be a nice change to brighten our day.
But most of us prefer a real live cashier, and maybe a dedicated bagger too. They know the codes for the produce by heart; they’ll remember to pack the frozen things together and to keep the raw meat completely separate, and to put bread and eggs on top and to double-bag the heavy canned goods. They are professionals, after all, and they want your purchases to make it home in one piece.
But there’s a problem nowadays, at least here in the blue states:
In store after store, community after community, the stores can’t find staff to operate those cash registers, making the self checkout a necessity rather than a choice.
Why?
Armchair economists remember their econ classes from high school and college, and can readily recall logical reasons for such labor shortages:
- Changes in demographics, population declines. The community might have fewer young people to be baggers, fewer older people to be cashiers.
- Increased employment opportunities – more desirable options for the local jobseeker. The appearance of a new mall, a new theatre, a new factory, might be attracting the usual pool of employees.
- A salary disparity – suddenly the other local options that were already there now pay much more, leaving the grocery store uncompetitive.
When we old timers were in school, it didn’t take a master’s degree in economics to figure it out.
But that’s not it at all, nowadays, is it?
The grocery stores of today have new problems that were never envisioned in those econ classes of a generation ago:
- The pool of families from which the grocery store used to hire is shrinking, because families are moving away – out of blue states into red ones, out of tax hells into tax havens. Executives, entrepreneurs, and retirees are moving away, taking their spouses and kids with them.
- The city, the county, or even the state, conned by the ludicrous progressive trope that “every wage must be a living wage,” has mandated new, higher minimum wages, double what it was before when things worked, requiring the stores to cut their staff in half in order to pay the required salaries to those they employ. This makes jobs evaporate and makes life much harder for those who remain. The self checkout lines are there because you voted half the cashiers out of a job.
- The city, state, and even federal governments got in the habit of putting everyone on the dole. Again and again, a $300 stimulus check, or a $500 stimulus check, or a $1200 stimulus check. More and more of the people who used to need entry level jobs now receive more in WIC and SNAP cards than they’d earn at an entry level job. So naturally, the entry level jobs go unfilled.
- The intentional destructions of the American petroleum and auto industries have made it harder to attract workers from miles away. With gasoline, car prices, and car repair costs doubling in just three years, the math for a cashier or bagger to drive to work from two towns away just doesn’t work anymore. If you’re not local, you can’t afford to take the job.
Perhaps worst of all is the combined effect of all of the above. The cashiers who know neighbors who just fled to Texas, the baggers whose best friends just moved to Florida. And here they are, left behind, trying to pleasantly wait on shoppers who are buying more expensive things than they can afford, only to watch the shopper pay for it all with a SNAP card.
How often must the cashier mutter under his or her breath, “I’m working minimum wage and I’m paying for this joker’s groceries with my tax dollars?”
If the cashier quit on the spot and went to work at the factory instead, or the mall across town or the logistics park down the road, the pay might be the same, but at least he wouldn’t be constantly assaulted by that particular, painful reminder. Every fourth person, even every third person, probably in some communities every other person, paying for groceries with a welfare card, often while carrying a designer purse and wearing designer clothes, or covered in expensive tattoos and flashing garish jewelry.
You can’t blame anyone for quitting when this convoluted, government-twisted economy is so hostile to the working man, hit in the face with reminders of it at every turn.
Mandated wage hikes have raised prices, driving inflation so that the cost of living has skyrocketed. Property taxes, income taxes and crime have driven other employers out of state. Sanctuary cities and open borders have flooded the area with illegals who don’t have the work ethic of legal immigrants. Declining public education has left the employment pool lacking the math skills to operate a cash register. And nobody knows how to cook anymore, so people spend all their money on prepared foods, further wrecking their own longterm financial states.
The grocery store brings all these issues together. We see and feel the problems of our economy more deeply in the grocery store than anywhere else.
Is it any wonder why the cashiers are disappearing, and more and more of us find ourselves learning the self checkout lane, whether we want to or not?
Copyright 2023 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon
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