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Originally Posted by DailyJournalist
Has the price of groceries gone down because there are now self checkout lanes?
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I don't carefully track the price of groceries, so I don't know. But that's not really the right question anyway. There are many factors that affect the price of groceries. These include the raw commodity prices, the cost of transporting these goods, the operating costs of the supermarket including rent, theft of stock, aging of non-durable goods, electricity and wages, financing costs, and the profitability of the supermarket (which depends on consumer spending).
To so much as begin to answer the question about what kind of impact self-checkout has on consumer prices, one would need to carefully analyze and compare the efficiency of businesses who used them, and those who didn't (there are costs to implementing such an infrastructure, and it may impact other costs)
If it is more cost effective for supermarkets to implement self-checkout lanes, the savings have to go somewhere. Now you appear to assume that it automatically goes to "profits" for the "greedy supermarkets", but if that really happened, then supermarkets would all of a sudden become an exceptionally profitable investment, leading to more investment dollars chasing the supermarket industry, leading to expansion of the industry to the point of diminishing returns on those investment dollars.
One thing I can say for self-checkout is that I have found that it often results in substantially faster service, which means that as a customer, I save time when I purchase from supermarkets that offer self-service. So even if it provided no cost savings, it is a good value proposition.