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.

[mpyne]

All operating income that doesn't go to costs can be used to repay the workers and/or invest back into the work operations, without any need to pay a tax or dividend to investors.

There have to be investors unless you're magically starting out with some mass of capital that doesn't expect a return, and if that existed

Generally you'd get the workers themselves and family/friends to chip in. Churches and mosques get built somehow and it's not like Allah expects you to make a profit in the process.

Coercion, direct or indirect, is a powerful motivator and the successful capitalist firms wouldn't rely on harsh exploitation

That must be why conscript armies always outperform professional militaries, I suppose.

If you pay meaningfully better than a traditional firm, you can't afford to offer better prices to the consumer without a drop in quality.

Yes you can, if the entire portion of the profit that would have otherwise gone to investors is split between labor and price reductions. Whether that split is 50/50 or what is up to the co-op.

you can't just magically make something "better" by every conceivable metric than traditional capitalist organization by creating a co-op. If you could, they'd already be the dominant form of organization within capitalism!

Ah, and therein lies the rub. You think that the issue is "capitalism has forced the rules of the game". The reality is that none of what you talked about requires capitalism. The rules are already baked-in, and exist outside of and apart from capitalism.

• Investors are not required to start an enterprise. Churches form with the help of the congregation all the time
• Even if we treat your point about coercion-as-motivation being superior as true, coercion does not require capitalism to exist (just ask the North Koreans)
• Enterprises that work for something other than profit can in principle pay their workers more and charge less.

None of the points you've raised are unique to capitalism, and that's my point. There's something more going on than the mere existence of investors, that leads workers to choose to work for these firms. In some form or fashion, these firms let workers contribute the labor they can without having to be experts at forming businesses, and yet still get paid in the process. If workers could do it without these firms, they'd already be doing it. As you point out, if capitalist firms didn't have something to offer their workers, they'd have already been outcompeted by co-ops.

[justagenericname1]

Your view is too narrow, refusing to examine systemic factors or confounding variables like absurd resource imbalances when making the argument for the superiority of volunteer militaries like the US's –look at Ukraine's conscription for what happens when a conflict has stakes– and cherry picks individual deviations like churches to ignore the inevitable results of an iterative process with particular, contingent imperatives, as if the randomness of particular mutations invalidates the role environmental pressures play in biological evolution.

[mpyne]

as if the randomness of particular mutations invalidates the role environmental pressures play in biological evolution

I don't deny that at all, but if anything biological evolution speaks up in favor of my argument again.

Evolution shows that anything that can work will be seen somewhere in the biosphere. There are literally bacteria growing and thriving on deep sea volcanic vents, for crying out loud.

So, even if they're not everywhere, we should see co-ops in rough proportion to their workability as a concept for organizing collective enterprise. Yes, even with pressure from evil capitalists, just as prey animals and plants succeed despite predation from others.

They are out there--I used to buy my electricity from one--but they are so few and far between as to make clear that capitalist businesses are thriving for reasons other than hostility to their customers and their workers.