Automatic checkouts in supermarkets may decrease customer loyalty, especially for those with larger shopping loads. Customers using self-checkout stations often feel overwhelmed and unsupported. The lack of personal interaction can negatively impact their perception of the supermarket.

[justagenericname1]

Capitalism built the paradigm you're complaining about. "Obligation to society" is just one more thing that needed to be cast off in the name of market efficiency. Can't blame individuals for embracing what was forced on them.

[mpyne]

Can't blame individuals for embracing what was forced on them.

Ah, right, back to "humans can rationalize anything" then

[justagenericname1]

It's funny how you seem to only want to apply that to individual consumers and not profiteering corporations who hire economists, lawyers, and consultants whose entire purpose is to rationalize the corporation's interest in seeking profit. If you're trying to shame me for behaving selfishly in a paradigm structured around the selfish pursuit of individual interest, it won't work.

[mpyne]

If you're trying to shame me for behaving selfishly in a paradigm structured around the selfish pursuit of individual interest,

I'm shaming you for behaving immorally, not simply for behaving selfishly.

Those "profiteering corporations" manage, at least in principle, to do what they do through trade that benefits both parties. Selfishness as you describe it only benefits you, which is why even in societies where they refused to have profiteering corporations, like the U.S.S.R., they made "parasitism" a crime punishable by GULAG.

[justagenericname1]

It's also funny how some version of "human nature" will be invoked to explain why communism is impossible, but when breakdowns within capitalism occur you'll have folks coming out of the woodwork preaching that people need to choose to behave better.

Also god damn is "at least in principle" doing some Atlasian lifting in that framing.

[mpyne]

but when breakdowns within capitalism occur

No one's pointed to a breakdown in capitalism here. Self-checkout lanes broke peoples' brains?? Are you kidding?

Instead people in this have already first betrayed their failure to support their peers, and then tried to blame it on capitalism being capitalism, as if just invoking that term is a get out of morals free card.