I still don’t follow. You’ve said a lot of things about regulation and insurance requirements and all that, but I don’t see how any of it is necessary to get to “centralized management.” Let alone goofing up the centralized management.

I’m just a software person, not a supermarket expert, so maybe I’m being a bit simpleminded here, but for the entirety of my career I’ve participated in a constant trend toward centralizing and automating operations. That’s been the case regardless of how highly regulated the industry was. The motivating force has always been making things easier, cheaper and less error prone.

I suppose we could throw a rant about regulation into the mix, but, in the words of Laplace, I have no need of that hypothesis.