Readit NewsBut sure you cant try and argue that's wage suppression.
It's not really a secret that retail LP generally abuses their role across the board and allows prejudace to run rampant in its ranks, giving that it is almost entirely comprised of people from backgrounds that lack any higher education and recieved a few months training at best to do what they do. Heck, step in any active American mall and you will encounter mostly white men who didn't quite have the chutzpa for the police academy, but still carry the guilty-til-proven-otherwise attitude.
Source: I was LP briefly for TJX companies and left due to the rampant and accepted bigotry I encountered with them. In their case, it was that I was repeatedly told to target black women if I wanted to meet quota each month, since their own numbers said most apprehensions were black women and not one person in the LP heirarchy knew what confirmation bias or survivor bias was. Also, yes, they have quotas. I was put on their equivalent of a PIP the second month I was there for not meeting mine. We can rest assured that Kroger, Walmart, etc, use lots of the same tactics and quiet codes.
IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss. That's the tradeoff for replacing your employees with robots and forcing labor onto the consumer. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
>> IMO, if you want to have self-checkout, you need to accept a higher rate of loss
I agree this is the logical conclusion, but obviously they're not going to accept it when you can throw a fraction of the labour savings to hire some cheap security theatre that reminds the honest people big brother is watching.
The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead.
I am partially joking (they put it on the cloud in a way that's super useful and made collaboration remotely easier, along with other scripting inprovements), but I think it highlights that the main "benefit" to Sheets is that it's a fully featured product created by a mega-corporation that complements other tools they have to offer.
Put another way: how many companies use Microsoft for everything except Excel? How does that compare to companies that use Google Drive for everything except for spreadsheets?
A tool like this one has the upward battle of needing to be so useful, it is worth employing alongside your currently existing office software. It feels like spreadsheet software is a particularly hard arena to compete in, given the quality of the major ones you mentioned.
Things will get real when your orgs problems/needs grow from something that was totally cool to do with spreadsheets to something requiring higher complexity, performance, resilience, testability, coordination, ... — and the point at which you cross over into the latter is not always clearly marked.
It would for example not be advisable to use Excel sheets as a replacement for a distributed database of central importance, unless your org is a lemonade stand with 3 employees.
I would also prefer maintaining a python script with written tests over maintaining an Excel file containing complex business logic, but maybe that is just personal perference.
Don't get me wrong here, Excel is amazing and we should all use it where it shines. But as with all tools we need to be aware of the fact that they heavily color the way we look at problems, as expressed by Maslows famous aphorism: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
Good engineers should not be blinded by their tools, but accutly aware of their limitations and know which to use when. Just like with hand tools you could probably also just hammer a nail in using a shovel or "drill" a hole using a screwdriver and Excel is very versatile in those regards: it can get you very far without being the best solution, a bit like a swiss pocket knife.
To extend your analogy too far, Excel is the 4mm allen key you get with all your Ikea furniture. It's good enough to build all the bog-standard, functional but not particularly nice furniture you need, but sure you'd rather have bespoke custom work. Sometimes you don't have or want the tools, or know how to use them and that's OK.