Airlines are like "instead of all those agents, we'll make a sort of assembly line manned by customers. Check in with one machine, drop your baggage off with another."

Then literally anything happens with the computer network requiring an elevated number of customers to need manual intervention, and suddenly you have an enormous immobile line while every single customer lines up before the two (2) remaining agents.

Corporations don't care about "efficiency" they just wanna fire people

I really believe this. We were told capitalist entities will act to minimize costs and maximize profit. But what corporations actually seek to do, for whatever reason, is minimize *labor* cost. They prefer to bear any other kind of cost. They will minimize labor costs even if it increases overall costs and/or hurts profits
All the airlines in Toronto now use this system where the machine prints you out a sticker tag you loop over your luggage handle, and then when you put it on the belt to be sorted a machine reads the tag. But it appears it only works if you put the tag on one way but not the other, chirality matters, or there's something the user can do wrong that makes the tag unscannable. So every airline has to inject a human into the process there to make sure you get the tag right, at the most awkward place
@mcc I’ve had to deal with this idiotic system twice in one year now, and both times, I’ve yelled out loud in frustration about how stupidly inefficient the system was. Sure, the one benefit is not having to talk to people, but a major downside is being forced to talk to people anyway because the tag won’t scan no matter how you orient the luggage.