I worked in a store in the early 90s with the registers set up that way. It is so much more efficient to pick directly from a cart so you can plan the best sequence of items for bagging. The IBM scanners of the era were much faster and more reliable than today's garbage. You could blast through, pulling items out with the right hand, tossing into the left, and blind scanning while reaching for the next item.

Seems to be a common thread in the past 20 years. The ergonomics of the product is garbage now. Partly because more compute is put into them, and with it comes bloated software that seems to be written by people who don't understand that their avoidance of "premature optimization" is just stealing people's lives by making the work go slower.

Where I live we are behind that point now, as in everything is OK and working fast again. Though sometimes it happens that when a cashier opens a new line, and the POS-thing boots for the first time that day, showing some update process running under Windows and makes my day, because I can't stop giggling.

Anyways, it's good for the cashier too, because time for smalltalk, maybe sipping some drink, or such.

To be up to date, it's your fate...to wait!

I met my wife through smalltalk at the cash register, so I can attest that some slack in these jobs serves an important function in society!

Lack of interest for speed is the problem, not premature optimization.

Maybe independent grocery stores are the wrong model for a globally connected world? It's not that they are the producers of anything they offer, even if branded as such.

I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.

Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.

This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.

Some technologies would be better off not existing, but I think the root problem is just unrestricted market competition. Without something to keep the bottom from falling out (<cough> <cough> regulations), a competitive market is a fearsome optimization force. It will suck out all joy and happiness from any activity, as everyone gets increasingly more creative and willing to sacrifice to squeeze out just a little more marginal profit, for however brief a moment before the competitors catch up.

You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

Those optimizations make it possible for prices to keep dropping, for food to be very cheap and plentiful. Global hunger has dropped to an all time low, since 1950 or so, because of that.

Yes, squeeze that marginal profit, please. I was born in communism, and guess what, we did not have 20 flavors of yogurt to choose from, or supermarkets for that matter. In Eastern Europe we counted ourselves very lucky to have plain yogurt, which was rationed.

Joy and happiness aren't the point, those are just nice to have. Putting food on the table is the point.

And having a flavor of yogurt discontinued, out of dozens, due to profit margins, is a first world problem and it affects only the rich.

There is more than one factor to consider. Food is already way past being cheap and plentiful. Further optimizations go into enabling variety. Meanwhile, some prices are way too low, which is a serious problem in the climate crisis. What's the point of dining on a dirt cheap meat and 15 different flavors of the same yogurt today, only for our grandchildren to starve on a devastated planet?

I was born at the tail end of communism in my region so I haven't experienced the worst parts, but the 20+ years of market optimization in the food space that I actually remember went primarily into variety. There was no point in those 20 years where quality food was scarce or even too expensive for most.

I have people in my family who worked in grocery stores some years ago, when the market managed to optimize these jobs to the point there were a step away from modern slavery. Fortunately, a few large scandals over events like a pregnant employee losing child due to workload made the regulators clean the space up. Today, a chain store employee in Poland earns a reasonable salary and has hard, but not backbreaking work conditions.

There is a point past which things get too optimized, and there is no loss in preventing or reversing that.

What if one brand of yogurt in some variety makes you sneeze and cough, while another brand of the same variety doesn't and that is discontinued?