Popular or not, it is a legitimate view and worth discussing.

As I see it, there are two separable things in your view and separating them can be good for everyone.

One the one hand there are the people who facilitate your shopping experience. They help you with this task that is part of your daily life and they provide a social connection between you and your neighbors as you gather in a common space.

On the other hand they are the 'mechanism' behind moving money you've earned back toward the farms and factories that have produced the goods you use.

Both functions are important, and through history have been inextricably tied together and the basis for a rich history of the 'merchant' class. But it is important to note that the merchants are not necessarily aligned financially with you their customer. The merchant is in the position of choosing how much money to take out of the flow for themselves.

As a process, the merchant tries to get the lowest possible prices from the suppliers for goods and charge the highest possible price to the customers who are buying the goods. The cost sold must remain higher than the cost paid for the merchant to exist, and the merchant incurs costs while being a merchant (from venue maintenance to employee salaries to shoplifting and theft) and so the total cost of the goods has to remain below the price it is sold for in order for the merchant to remain solvent. The cost of goods sold must remain materially lower than the revenue they generate so that the merchant can accumulate some savings in order to offset unforseen expenses as well.

Now all of that mechanical operating of a grocery store has nothing to do with the social and service aspects of going to the store, sharing gossip with employees, and meeting and chatting with neighbors.

And now we have the set up to understand the actual problem and the cost of the actual solution.

You mention that there are 5 medium sized markets within a 5 minute walk. Why do you walk to one or not the other? I don't know for your case but in my case I will go to a market that I know is likely to have something I need, or one that has a good price on something I'm buying, or one that is near my travel route too and from the office because it is then not too far out of the way.

Historically, if one market has generally lower prices than nearby markets, people shop at it preferentially and the other markets suffer (sometimes failing completely). Using WalMart as an example, it has gone into regions and decimated the local retail outlets by offering lower overall prices in essentially unlimited quantities.

But the mechanism that allows Walmart or Target to do this is that the profits from other stores in the chain can cover the losses of individual stores. So a Walmart in a small town can still offer lower prices than the local grocers and merchants because they do not depend strictly on local profits to keep their store there open.

You could legislate that all shops had to be locally profitable rather than depending on outside of market help. However, that has the down side of specialty shops like hardware stores may become impossible to operate because they don't have enough regular customers to stay in business.

Then there is the local staff. For the merchant they are technically only necessary for collecting the money and protecting the shop from theft. But for the customers, as you mention, they are an important aspect.

We could imagine a scenario (we may not believe it to be possible but can imagine it) that through video surveillance and facial recognition that a computer can ascertain where every piece of stock that has been put into a store has been removed. Further, that surveillance would take care of charging the person acquiring the stock regardless of how surreptitiously they did so. This would be a big improvement in the shops economic model if everything they brought in was "sold" and charged for. Shops today have complained of losses from employee theft and shoplifting reaching 3.23% of sales at grocers[1] and that cuts into their profits significantly. Take that loss away and the grocer gets to keep more money from its revenue.

What to do with that extra money? The biggest job category at risk is cashier, but what if those people became roaming store customer assistance agents? For the same amount of pay they would now spend their days helping the customers find the groceries in the store, reaching high shelves for people who are short or disabled, restocking shelves from the larger stock in the storage area. Baggers would still be useful as people with many groceries would still want help going out to their car. Butchers and bakers, and counterstaff for lunch counters would still be needed.

But then here is the rub, the prices for the groceries wouldn't change at all. The cost savings of automated checkout are going into the salaries of former cashiers.

Now if at another Grocery they instead simply lower their prices. You the consumer get to decide if the former cashier has a place in the store or not. You decide by paying a price for your groceries that lets the merchant pay the former cashier to be there as service personnel.

My experience suggests that the bulk of the customers will go to the 'cheap' grocer and end up taking away the cashier's jobs because they are unwilling to pay a bit extra to support that person. People will rationalize it and blame other factors but the bottom line will be that by patronizing the less expensive store with no cashiers, they will cut off revenue to the store that had found alternate employment for their cashiers. And that shift will result in either the re-employed cashiers losing their jobs or that other store going out of business, or both.

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/shoplifting-worker-theft-cost-...