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by manquer 814 days ago
The wages of the scanning staff is a cost to be considered on the side .

At even 10c a tag , it is equivalent to one person scanning 200 items a hour (assuming $20/hour wages) .

Factoring in time to bag and do a cash/card/coupon transaction etc a retail employee is not doing more than 500 or maybe 1000 items a hour .

A cost of 2c is definitely close to economic feasibility if 10c is not

1 comments

Retail employees do more than checkout. You’ll still need them to stock, do customer support, clean, and more.
I obviously didn’t mean all employees ,only the employees who are doing the check out .

I am not saying RFID will eliminate employees in retail , just that there is cost to not having RFID too, we should only see the diff as the cost of the tech not absolute numbers

I understand, and what I am saying is that it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout. Nearly everyone performs multiple roles. Eliminating checkout will reduce the overall workload, but won't necessarily reduce headcount, or enough headcount to offset the cost of RFID tags.
> it is rare to have retail employees that _only_ do checkout

Why is that relevant?

If 5 employees spend 20% of their combined time on checkout, and you get rid of checkout, you can go down to 4 employees, can't you? Why does the exact distribution matter? You'll still have a healthy variety of tasks to spread among those employees.