Having worked there for several years, I can say that is actually very likely. One of Walmart's major problems is their experimentation with "self-checkout" machines. I had a manager say to us once that our store lost $1.4 million in customers "under ringing" themselves that year. $1.4 million in one year is enough to pay hundreds of real cashiers their sh*tty minimum wage. Despite this, they continue to not only use them, but replace real registers with more rows of self-checkout machines.
Expect to see more of it. It saves billions. Your anecdotal story is lovely, but lacks the counter-factual data about shrinkage from human cashier error, which is MASSIVE. The machines are going to get better at finding it, the people, well, aren't. So the choice for retailers is to either continue hiring cashiers, in general a high turnover, low skill, low enthusiasm population who steal things, sure, form unions, etc, and work 40 hours per week....or....buy a robot that can work 24 hours a day forever with minimal maintenance and will continue become more sophisticated and cheaper and progressively better at it's job. Eventually, NFC and RFID being what they already are, it'll be commonplace to walk into a walmart, fill a cart, then walk through an automated cashier, press "ok" and leave in about 4 seconds.
There is the downside that my wife won't spend 20 minutes talking to the human cashier and learn about how hard it is for her to pay for her kids braces, or whatever it is those people talk to her about. It'll be a shame to see that crazy ******** go away, but there will probably be more homeless people to walk across streets in traffic to have a conversation with her.
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