If you put your blinders on and only look at that one line on the spreadsheet, it was probably “successful” in that regard. They pay fewer employees, full stop.
But that doesn’t take into account the fact that the machines themselves are extremely expensive up front, have a nontrival setup cost, require ongoing maintenance, assuredly these days come with some manner of mandatory service contract attached, and the monetary losses from theft on the machines are huge. So whether or not any large businesses actually came out ahead on the proposition as a whole is questionable, and I don’t have the data to support a conclusion there either way.
The article talks about time savings but it was always about labor costs and I have a hard time believing it didn’t deliver on that front.
If you put your blinders on and only look at that one line on the spreadsheet, it was probably “successful” in that regard. They pay fewer employees, full stop.
But that doesn’t take into account the fact that the machines themselves are extremely expensive up front, have a nontrival setup cost, require ongoing maintenance, assuredly these days come with some manner of mandatory service contract attached, and the monetary losses from theft on the machines are huge. So whether or not any large businesses actually came out ahead on the proposition as a whole is questionable, and I don’t have the data to support a conclusion there either way.