I'd say it's closer to a character style. Moe is a term that originally referred to the soft warm feeling you get when you view a cute character. Like the feeling of wanting to protect them eg Rosa from Brooklyn 99's reaction to holding a puppy.
Nowadays I'd say it's also a way to get more views for your middling anime. Eg the trope of cute girls doing some random hobby. Popular examples of the trope include lucky star, nichijou, the one about the euphonium that I can't remember the full name of, and plenty more that are terrible that I never bothered to watch or remember their name. The trope isn't necessarily bad, as the named examples above are good shows, but it is often used to try to draw viewers to bad anime by including token, or entirely filled with Moe characters.
Thank you for listening to my Ted talk.
What's fucked is it wasn't even the consumers who caused the trucks to get bigger. It was poorly thought out emissions taxes. The US decided to tax car makers more for high emissions cars, but didn't tax more for large truck emissions... So the car makers decided to make the light trucks bigger instead of trying to make the emissions better. People wanting luxury is a factor, but it's not why they are nearly semi sized these days.
Just look at the first image, the truck on the left is from the Japanese market where they taxed car makers less for cars and trucks under a certain size, those trucks are used in greater abundance than American style trucks as it is more versatile. If they had the option, I'm sure a lot of consumers would choose the smaller truck. Leaving the big trucks for status symbol pricks and people who actually need a big truck for towing.
There are stores trialling exactly your preferred method. One of my local supermarket chains has portable barcode scanners on a wall. You pick one up, scan your groceries as you collect them, then take the scanner to a self checkout that links to the scanner. At that point you pay for your items and leave.
That storyline was painful. It suffered so much from everything bending around the main character. Also, one particular setting had me enraged as someone who works in IT and has previously worked in the medical services.
I don't know the history of the photo, but I know some Kopi Luwak 'producers' force feed the civets coffee cherries to maximise production. So I can't say this is a natural shit for a civet, because it could be human induced.
Leave the tinfoil hat on. There is a precedent for exactly what you are describing. When radios went from valve to transistor, radio manufacturers kept the number of transistors low and only slowly increased radio quality over the years. They were able to make higher quality radios from day 1 but didn't so they could sell more radios.
Card and also New Zealand. I tend to find the cc or EFTPOS fees only get directly added by small businesses like local dairys or restaurants. Otherwise, it's generally considered an operating cost and as such is accounted for in the price, so you pay for it regardless of how you pay.