Wednesday, October 12, 2011

What does AB 183 mean for consumers and Fresh & Easy?

What does the passage of AB 183 mean to customers of Fresh & Easy, the British chain of supermarkets taking over California? Simply put? More service and more jobs! F&E will have to hire more employees to cashier at the legally required manned checkouts needed to purchase alcohol. Californians will have more service and more jobs and the potential for alcohol abuse will be reduced as well.

F&E has worked very hard to create the image in the consumers mind that self serve cash registers are somehow preferable. The one who benefits most from self serve anything is the business who forces the consumer to do for free what the business once had to pay an employee to do for them. Consumers don’t realize the price of goods includes the expense of selling them to the consumer. When the service disappears entirely but the goods only go down in price moderately, who profits? Not the consumer.

The one who benefits most from self serve anything is the business who forces the consumer to do for free what the business once had to pay an employee to do for them.
Studies show customers prefer to use manned checkout stands. Given a choice (which Fresh & Easy does not) the customer will go to the cashier and bagger, not the self serve register. (At Albertsons lines often stretch from manned registers while self serve registers are unused.) Fresh & Easy will need to provide more cashiers to serve those waiting in line and you can see F&E’s bottom dollar shrink in profits vs. overhead. No wonder they fought AB 183

Opponents have staged elaborate scenarios where they tried to purchase alcohol from a self serve register and photograph the act then when they were caught (as if their suspicious behavior weren’t a red flag) they report the system works. It does not. Intoxicated adults have used the self serve registers without effort and teen sites detail how to overwhelm the self serve register to their advantage. Nothing compares to a human being looking them in the eye and asking for ID.

Besides, after all the work it takes to make a cartful of purchases I want the few moments to catch my breath at the register while a cashiers expertise and a baggers skill rewards me as a consumer for choosing a full serve market.  

1 comment:

Duh! said...

Makes perfect sense to me.