I don’t think you can in good faith compare…

Ooh, that’s just one of my pet peeves. Such a stupid fucking phrase. The only way to know if you “can’t compare” two things is to do a comparison between them and come to the conclusion that the two things are very different. I can compare self checkout to a kumquat if I want to.

Now for some actually useful conversation, let’s compare number of steps for vending machine vs self checkout (since that’s the closer of my two examples).

Vending machine:

• insert payment
• push button to select items
• pick up item
• repeat all steps until you have the number of items desired

Self checkout:

• scan item or place item on scanner/scale and push buttons for item type. This only counts as one step, because you are never doing both to the same item
• repeat first step until you have all items desired
• insert payment
• pick up items

It’s the same steps in a different order.