What if cashierless stores push human cashiers below half the workforce?
Cashierless retail pushing attended-cashier headcount below 50% is a structural labor-displacement event — disinflationary for retail wages, a slow consumer-spending and credit drag; not an immediate risk asset mover. The cascade's small equity/SOL sell is roughly right in sign. Skeptic's note: Amazon quietly walked back Just-Walk-Out in 2024 (it leaned on offshore reviewers), so the displacement curve is shallower and slower than the headline implies.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Just-Walk-Out and self-checkout push attended cashier headcount below 50% nationally, gutting the largest US occupation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Labor surplus ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.