Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee (D) has signed legislation making his state the first to mandate staffing ratios for grocery store checkout areas, evidently believing the government can manage retail businesses better than their owners.
The law requires stores to maintain a minimum of one staffed manual checkout station for every three self-service machines. It also forces employers to relieve workers who monitor automated counters of all their other duties. Businesses that fail to comply will be subject to daily fines matching the wages of a four-hour shift of a retail clerk, capped at $500.
The primary advocate behind the legislation was a local union representing grocery workers. It argued that automated machines are more prone to theft and frustrate shoppers, especially older individuals. The union contended that this creates stressful workloads for its employees tasked with babysitting the self-checkout area.
State Rep. Megan Cotter (D), a co-sponsor, described the bill as essential to improving the customer experience, arguing that it “ensures that those who want to check out with a human can do so.” Left unexplained, however, is why it’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that a private business is properly staffed or that a customer has a pleasant shopping experience.
What’s stopping customers from taking their business elsewhere if a grocery store has bad customer service?
Most shoppers would agree that glitchy self-checkout machines are annoying. But grocery stores can judge for themselves whether such technology is useful to shoppers without the need for government diktats.
It’s easy to understand why the union wants this: This will probably increase the rolls of dues-paying members.
But almost all grocery stores already offer both automated and human-assisted checkouts. Rhode Island’s law merely adds arbitrary staffing requirements that will increase labor costs, which will get passed along to customers in the form of higher prices.
Whole Foods, which has three locations in Rhode Island, is owned by Amazon, whose executive chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Post.
Some grocery stores might simply eliminate self-checkout options entirely, resulting in longer lines. That’s what happened in Long Beach, California, after the city adopted similar restrictions last year.
Progressives often depict grocery stores as greedy companies that put profits ahead of customers or workers. But these businesses are highly competitive and typically subsist on razor-thin margins of between 1 and 3 percent. That means costly regulations don’t just raise prices for shoppers but threaten their operations.
Unfortunately, Rhode Island is not the only state looking to micromanage these private enterprises. Lawmakers in a handful of states including California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Ohio are considering similar bills. Why do so many politicians keep trying to make life less affordable?