Unions and grocery stores

Yesterday my coworker was talking about how union jobs are good. At first blow my
mind cringed thinking on how ‘great’ unions seem to be for the auto industry here in the
US, which reminds me of something else.  See end of this post.  Her husband works for a union in Kennecott Mine and she said that when they were at the grocery store that he said that cashier’s
shouldn’t encourage people to use the self-checkout in stores like they were cause then that means
they’ll be out of a job.

My logic went like this. Imagine you pay a cashier $10 bucks an hour. And you have
10 cashiers at all times of a store being open. Imagine a store is open 14 hours. That
is 1400 dollars spent per day to hire all the cashiers to check and bag your groceries for
you. Now imagine you open up two self check out lanes, but that that self check out lane
costs $3000 for the fancy touch screen and everything else needed for a regular check
out line like the scale, scanner, printer for your receipt, and the neat cash/coin dispensers
they have. That is $6000 for two. Now to hire a really experienced cashier that can
handle any problems on the two self check out lines you have to pay them $12 an hour
or a 20% increase from $10 an hour, but you don’t have to have two cashiers there and
so you technically save on labor $112 a day. To break even you need to have those two
checkout lanes not completely and utterly break down for…54 days, i.e. $6,000 divided
by the cost savings of having one worker at $12/hr per day versus two at $10/hr. Beyond
that you’re saving on labor costs and not only that. Your customers don’t have to wait
in line for a cashier that is new, smells, talks too much, gives you wrong change, forgets
your receipt, or whatever else you might hate about lines at the checkout stand.

I feel the following questions are then needed. Is the cashier that is getting paid $12 an hour sad
about that versus $10 an hour? Is the store sad that they’re saving money on the labor
side of things in less than 2 months? Is the store sad that they now have two ways of
having their customer’s check out? Is the store sad that they can now invest that money
into other cost saving features in the store? Is the customer sad they’re missing out on
the problems previously described? Is the customer sad that they have to pay LOWER
prices cause now the store doesn’t have to charge as much because they hired additional
workers it doesn’t need? The answers to all these questions are the same: of course not!

With the election it seems Obama won Michigan and much of Ohio because of the auto
bailouts, which gasp…has tons of union workers who have a scarcity mentality and can’t
connect the fact that getting rid of unions would be a good thing as demonstrated by the
above example.