Supermarket Stress and Politics

I have been thinking about my post a week and a half ago about supermarkets and how they can stress me out and cause me all sorts of anxieties. What I have been thinking most about is my reluctance to use self service checkouts because one- they really raise my anxiety levels and two- I want to keep supermarket cashiers in a job. Now with my strange but beautiful mind, (something all with Asperger's Syndrome possess), I am now thinking about it in regards to the socialism vs capitalism debate.

While I have leanings to socialism, I do recognize that pure socialism isn't good and neither is pure capitalism. You need a little of both and I will use my views on self service checkouts to demonstrate this.

Pure capitalism- In pure capitalism, all cashiers would be out of a job and self-service checkouts would be installed in every store. This is because you don't have to pay machines, nor do they take vacations or sick time. You would probably only need one or two staff to monitor the checkouts. However, what about the elderly and those with special needs? What if they are unable to use the self-service? Sure, the shop might have one or two staff there to deal with it but that would also slow things down. Plus, some people actually like dealing with people rather than machines. Then there's the fact that loads more people will be out of work because they have been replaced by machines. So, while it might be profitable to have stores with nothing but self service checkouts, it wouldn't always work and it's not very humanitarian.

Pure Socialism- The government passes a law to ban all self-service checkouts in supermarkets to save jobs. On humanitarian grounds, this is a great idea. However, there are some people who have only bought one item and in a desperate rush to be somewhere. Is it fair to make them go through a manned register? Not all people are people persons. Also, going back to the first sentence in this paragraph, when governments pass laws to force people to do something, they don't always like it, even if they agree with it in principle. I've seen that with mandatory recycling.

My answer to this is to have a good number of manned tills at every supermarket and make sure there's enough people on them. That's one of my conspiracy theories. Sometimes you have long lines because there are less than half the staffed lanes open. I think supermarkets do this to get more people to use self service and that's why I usually wait in line at a staffed till unless I'm have only bought one item and in a rush and all the lines are too long. We need some self-service as well. They can work together.