No staff , no cash, shopping

[alanjjohnstone]

“Help yourself” – It works under capitalism, it will work much better with socialism

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/06/unstaffed-digital-supermarkets-transform-rural-sweden

[alanjjohnstone]

Who needs cash?

Self-checkout machine (SCO) are points of sale where customers scan their own products and pay themselves, without the need for a human cashier. As of late 2019, there were 117,000 SCOs in Europe.

In the UK, self-checkouts account for one out of every six points of sale in the grocery sector as a whole, with an even higher ratio in major supermarkets.

https://www.dw.com/en/will-german-supermarkets-ever-embrace-self-checkouts/a-54873539

[rodshaw]

I’ll be much happier when people start saying “Who needs money?”.

[alanjjohnstone]

With wages going straight into a bank account, with standing orders and direct debits paying the utility bills and mortgage, and now mobile telephones paying for daily expenses in shops, i wonder if the more abstract the concept of cash becomes, the easier it will become to convince people of the redundancy of money. UBI would be another perspective, that there in no longer any need to earn an income. Money become simply figures on a print-out, and we begin to query why other peoples figures are higher than our own…just musing

[rodshaw]

Just imagine – workers in a shop decide not to take payment (actually, it happened to me recently, but it was just a paltry sum for a tyre valve replacement).

Then the shop’s supplier decides not to charge the shop – the employees refuse to put the invoices through and their bosses can’t make them. The word spreads.

Eventually someone gets sued, but the court admin clerks decide not to process the lawsuit. Eventually the whole supply chain is moneyless because the workers have decided not to ask for money or pay, and the people implementing the enforcement machinery on a daily basis have decided not to do anything about it. Likewise the police and the army. So the world is running without money and the owners can only look on speechless.

Back door socialism? Can the state just melt away?

[ALB]

If there was that degree of socialist consciousness amongst the general population wouldn’t it also manifest itself politically by sending to parliament mandated socialist delegates not pro-capitalist politicians? That way the change to socialism could be properly co-ordinated and the socialist majority have the power and legitimacy to deal with any possible attempt by any minority to try to hold up the establishment of socialism.

Having said that, I think you could be right that something like what you say could be expected to happen in the last days of capitalism. More likely than the alternative of people rushing to spend all their money before socialism was established.

 

[rodshaw]

I wonder how long all that money lying around in bank accounts would stay there? Maybe all computers holding financial details would be ceremonially wiped.

Or perhaps one or two which held billionaires’ accounts would be put in a museum.

[Author]

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