I don’t know to what extent this is “Get off my lawn” but a bookstore with cashierless checkout just feels to me like Amazon But We Made Everything Worse.

Even as someone who keeps chatting with cashiers to the social minimum it’s importance that there be at least a pretense that the store is by readers for readers, right.

(The Sort #47194: if you still read books, after we’ve spent a few generations concentrating that hobby, you don’t sell books for a living.)

And on a more uplifting note, also from the mall close to my wife’s hometown, the bakery has this printed on the Yamaha piano they put out front.

Somebody needed to sell an awful lot of croissants but it was important to them that kids in a mall in the countryside were reminded that they, too, were inheritors of culture. I appreciate that.

(I didn’t think the text needed translation given the concept of “bakery provides free piano” but FWIW it emphasizes that it is a *free* piano for *anyone* to play.)