Ugbad Abdi is next. Finally. Her nerves are swollen like shaken carbonation behind a jammed cork. For 20 minutes, she’s watched from the back of this long line as the women at the front ...

In 1986, a company named CheckRobot invented self-checkouts. They claimed to reduce long lines, human interaction, make ...

Just a few months earlier, she was working a checkout lane at Target after graduating high school in Des Moines, Iowa, thousands of miles away from the heart of haute couture — not just in ...