This would still undercount the other hidden part of inflation, which is loss of quality of services. It's sometimes subtle, but once you see it, you'll keep spotting it - the main service itself may not get worse, but everything around it does. Worse seating in the waiting rooms, magazines replaced with first-party ads, worse decor or lack of it, less complimentary items, dark patterns aimed at reducing usage of side offerings without eliminating them, adding complicated online processes, etc.
My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.
(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)
> My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.
Based on what I’ve heard, it may be wasting time somewhere like Germany where the staff are scanning your items at lightning speed. However, here in Poland self-checkout is where you go to save time. Human-staffed checkouts are and have always been slow like an iceberg. Now and before self-checkout was ever a thing. I was relieved when they were introduced, precisely thanks to the time saved. I hate waiting in queues.
I live in Poland. The experience you attribute to Germany, is what I experienced in Poland. Still experience, on the off chance there's a human behind the register.
All self-checkout machines are moody and lock up if you so much as look at it funny. It would be somewhat acceptable if there was always a dedicated employee delegated solely to assist and unlock the machines, but stores cheap out even on that.
In America it always greatly depended in the store. Wal-mart, for instance, would get the worst workers, and checking out was insufferable. Target was better.
Now, you just need to deal with individual people being slow partially because it’s not their job and partially because it’s a lot less efficient to have a little kiosk vs a conveyer belt. Not to mention if you want to buy something that a store locks up you need to wait for them to go get it. Progress?
My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.
(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)