Efficiency

[platypus_herder]

Given the cost of labour around here, it's worth investing quite a lot in worker productivity. Two notable examples:

• Cashier stations at grocery stores are thoughtfully pipelined and parallelised so that one (fast, expensive) cashier doesn't waste all his or her time waiting for (slow, cheap) customers to pack their bags or fumble with change.
• The

Comments

[krayfishy]

Whereas the guy going around checking trash bins for recyclable cans and bottles in China looks like he lives solely on the 5 cents per bottle one might get in the US and will frequently follow tourists carrying water bottles in the hopes that he'll get that one without digging through the trash.

[w1ldc47]

I would like a more detailed description of the cashier setup, if it's not too much trouble.

[platypus_herder]

The big change I see relative to American groceries is that after the cashier come two separate bagging areas separated by a moving bar. At each customer the cashier can flip the bar and route all the scanned goods to one area while the previous customer is bagging in the other. This makes a big difference, because now the customers pay attention to the cashier until (s)he is done with them rather than trying to bag and pay simultaneously. I remember seeing this in some Canadian stores when growing up, but haven't in ages. There are a bunch of other small details: a designated little tray where change and receipt go so there's no fumbling/waiting to deposit them in someone's hand, keypad integrated into the scanner so the cashier can just punch in the code on unscannable items without turning to a separate register, cash drawers organised to keep the coins stacked so that grabbing the right number of them to make change is trivial, even automatic change dispensers in some stores. It's all incremental Adam Smithian optimisation.