In the Metro NY and upstate regions, there is a supermarket chain called Shoprite that is unionized. Where I live, none of the other chains are union shops.

The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes. Prices are no different than anywhere else.

> The only visible difference as a consumer is there are less (or no) automated checkout lanes.

...Really? That's a straight detriment in my book, as a customer.

I would generally prefer to support a union shop, but I'm extremely fond of self-checkout—and, in fact, further upstate, Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.

One of the worst things unions can do is try to "protect jobs" at the expense of technological advancement, customer service, or improved product.

> Wegman's has introduced a self-scan app that you can use to tally up your total as you shop, and just scan a code at the self-checkout register with your phone on the way out to pay.

Kroger did that here a few years ago. They pushed it hard. Got very little uptake. It's still an option, but they aren't shoving it in your face when you walk in. There are just a handful of scanners on a rack by the entrance, and I've never seen anyone using them.

Wegman's hasn't been particularly pushing it, and it's not dependent on hardware scanners—it's an app for your phone, that just scans barcodes with the phone camera.

Works great.

My guess is that it reduces sales. If you can see a total dollar amount accumulating as you shop, you're more likely to stick to your budget, maybe select cheaper items or avoid impulse buys. If you don't know the total until you get to the checkout lane, you are more likely to just pay it rather than start setting some items out.

They are phasing them in for express in this area - but the company needed to negotiate with the union.

The point is, retail and warehouse unions don’t translate into retail apocalypse.

Does Wegman's pay you for providing them free labor?

You're subsidizing them at your own cost with self-checkout. After all, you are:

-Updating their inventory tracking system -engaging with the regulatory framework of purchasing on their behalf -being subject to their annoying "loss prevention hot days" where they turn the merchandise scales on.

I've started to take a different view toward these jobs over time. Being an employer is a high bar in the U.S., and if we (the taxpayers proxied through the markets/Federal Reserve) have an objective to have people participating in the workforce, then these "automated" checkouts cost workforce participation.

Which also means fewer training opportunities for low skill workers, fewer jobs of last resort, etc. Not everything is necessarily $$$.

Be a hell of an economics project to really suss out the difference in flow of money in grocers who took different approaches.

I could not care less that doing the scanning myself saves Wegman's money. It saves me mental energy and time because I don't need to deal with a human cashier, and I don't need to spend 10 minutes emptying a full cart, scanning every item, then packing them all back into bags and fitting those back into the cart.

In my experience, Aldi/Walmart/Lidl/Costco prices are much lower than Shop Rite. Also, Shop Rites are sort of like franchises, different ones have different owners and management.

I don’t know about Lidl, the the rest aren’t full service grocers either. I’m a big fan of Aldi in particular, but they don’t have a butcher, bakery, prepared food/deli, staffed produce. Awesome store for what they do though. Aldi also pays a premium hourly rate.

Walmart tries to do everything but they suck imo. The produce is garbage, but the dry goods are cheap due to their economy of scale.

Competition limits how much they could raise prices, automation and efficiency increases are needed to compete.

Who is more efficient than Amazon/Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Staples/Costco/etc?

They set the bottom price, and if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins, then their costs increases will have to end up in either prices increases or them no longer selling the product.

The funny thing is that it is Amazon coming along and greatly increasing demand for labor (in conjunction with reduced supply of that type of labor) that caused all the other warehouse jobs and retailers to increase pay.

And I hope the labor continues making gains in their quality of life at work and pay, but I do not see this happening without an increase in prices for products (like we have already seen).

That’s assuming they keep their margins the same. The thing is Amazon isn’t manufacturing anything so their “thin” margins aren’t as sensitive to increased labor costs as 2-4% suggests.

Paying 18$ for something your selling for 20$ is a 10% margin, taxes and CC processing fees are similarly inflexible. So if 2-4% of the final price is profit then they could raise their internal costs by 10% and still be profitable.

> if they are earning 2%-4% profit margins

They're not (depending on the product).

My wife used to work in Halloween costume design for a wholesaler (and some of her costumes did end up in Target and Walmart, which was cool to see), and the retailers' margins on those were at least 50%.

As I said, the margin does depend heavily on the product, but do not assume that across-the-board average margins are anywhere near that razor-thin.

That's a markup, not a profit margin. A profit margin is after all expenses, which a wholesaler doesn't know about.

Yeah, and I don't think it would be terribly unusual for 50% markups to translate to low-single-digit profit margins in cost-competitive retail sectors - those both seem like about the right ballpark overall. Retail has a lot of costs and wages are one of the big ones.

That is irrelevant because the entire organization’s profit margins are where increased wages would come from.

My point is that the entire organization's profit margins are not likely to be anywhere near 2-4%.

That is what their 10-K filings say.

They are incentivized to hide investments as operating expenses for tax reasons, which muddles the picture.

Source? What are the incentives? Why do the most highly valued companies in the world report much higher profit margins?

I would need a good reason to believe the executives and owners of retail businesses do not want to report higher profit margins.

The incentives are simple, profits are taxed.

To simplify, if you want to say develop new software you can call it a capital investment and pay for it with after tax money or call it operating expense and pay for it in pretax money. Guess which one is a better deal.

Regardless of how the expense is classified, the amount of additional money available for wages is still the net income figure. The owners will still want as much net income as possible. They are not going to want to waste money just so they do not have to pay 20% of it to taxes.

The trick means real net income is larger than what’s on the books/10-K filings. Misclassified investments are not wasted money, simply hiding how much money is available for other expenses.

It’s like the old trick of paying an offshore subsidiary in a tax heaven licensing fees to use your own IP with the added advantage of being able to directly profit from the use of these investments. Nobody looking at the books would think such things are actual expenses, but companies must pretend they are.

Treating workers like shit and churning them limits the workers they can hire and retain.

They even know this - Amazon is running out of eligible workers to hire. But the need to hit quarterly metrics forces the line management to make strategically bad decisions.