Trying to make it tougher on state retailers

Some Californians will recall a time in the dusty past when there was no such thing as self-service at gasoline stations.

Motorists pulled up to the pump, a friendly lad in uniform and peaked cap appeared at your window, asked if you wanted ethyl or regular, and he checked your oil and washed your windshield while he filled your tank.

Those days are gone. Some may regret that. But the fact is fuel in our state would be even more expensive than it already is if drivers had to pay the salaries of pump jockeys.

We are at such a tipping point in retail and grocery stores just now. For several years,  shoppers have been given the option of self-service checkout in stores across the state. Some still balk at all that barcode scanning. Others enjoy the speed and convenience. But we would wager that few Californians would feel the need for a law making it much harder for stores to offer a choice.

But you can unfortunately almost always count on our California Legislature to  craft a bill anyway in attempts to thwart customer convenience and good business practices.

In this case the proposed law is SB 1446 by Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, D-Los Angeles. It’s yet another attempt by state politicians to try to tell businesses how to staff their own stores and would cost California retailers almost $500 million a year, according to one economic analysis.

The poorly conceived proposal would try to strip grocery and drugstore retailers of the right to offer customers self-service checkout options unless complex new regulations are followed, including having no more than two self-service checkout stations monitored by any one employee and requiring that employee to have no other duties but that oversight.

What makes the Legislature imagine it knows how to run a store in the fraught, expensive retail environment of 2024?

The California Chamber of Commerce hired Encina Advisors to do the economic impact analysis, and that group estimates that over 10,000 additional cashiers could be needed statewide to comply with the mandate. Sacramento simply has no business meddling in private companies’ hiring practices in such a manner.

SB 1446 also absurdly deigns to limit the kinds of items and the number of them that can go through self-service checkout, as if the state Senate had any expertise in that.

“While it is important to consider the potential effects of new technologies on employees and consumers, overly burdensome regulations, such as those proposed in this bill, may stifle business growth, innovation, and competitiveness in an increasingly digital economy,” the Chamber said.

The Assembly’s Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection has already expressed other reservations about the bill, noting that “It included as ‘consequential’ any type of technology that might ‘significantly impact’ a worker’s core job function. Arguably, any new technology, including changes to refrigeration systems that do not need to be monitored as often or motorized shopping cart movers that make it less physically demanding for workers to collect and return carts to the stores, could require a 60-day notification before being implemented.”

This bill is co-sponsored by the California Labor Federation and the United Food and Commercial Workers. It is opposed by the California Grocers Association and the California Retailers Association.

You’d oppose it, too, as do we, if you had to efficiently run a brick-and-mortar business in the face of so much online competition.