> Where I see self-checkouts, I see customers choosing them voluntarily

Yeah there are confounding factors at play here, such as there being many automated checkouts but only one with a person.

> staff ... "training" less-savvy customers to use them.

Training the customers is one of the things I find most depressing. From the supermarket's perspective, customers have apparently accepted that they must do unpaid work that used to be done by paid staff. Scanning items, typing in product codes when the scanner doesn't work, looking up loose goods in a catalogue and weighing them, responding to beeps and prompts, etc. And even better, watching advertising. Sure, these are all 'first world problems', but societies should be improving their citizens' lives rather than whittling away their autonomy. It might be just a papercut, but it's death by a billion papercuts.

> I'd much rather minimize my interactions with strangers while shopping.

Social isolation is a major and growing problem in western societies (see my other comment). People choose the path of least resistance even if it's long-term suboptimal, and minimising interactions with strangers seems like an unfortunate choice. Obviously, I'm making a bunch of assumptions that might not be fair, and you have my sympathies if your neighbourhood is full of arseholes :)

To be clear, every place I have seen self-checkouts in my area, they have been optional. There's no "forcing customers to do unpaid work". Everyone who uses them is choosing to use them over the regular checkouts, which are staffed at roughly the same level they were a decade ago. They are also in one big bank, with between 1 and 3 (though usually 1) employees standing at an "operator" stand nearby, not "only 1 with an employee".

I am not saying there are no stores deliberately offloading work onto customers, but a) it's clearly not all stores, and b) I, at least, actively prefer using self-checkout, and do not care that it puts a negligible amount of work onto my shoulders.

And gee, thanks for moralizing at me about causing the downfall of society by (checks notes) not wanting to add to my introverted self's overall burden of stress by interacting pointlessly with strangers just in order to get the food I need to survive. Maybe (as I suggested in my first post here) don't assume that your experiences are universal?

Oh well, it seems we're talking past each other. I had no intention of moralizing at you, and no intention to suggest my experience is universal. Not at all, it's a grumpy interpretation. We see the same things and interpret them differently. I may be an introvert too, but still see automated checkouts as alienating and exacerbating social ills.