My university still has people count by hand twice a shift, a dozen floors of tables. It's hard to beat the benefits of how cheap it is to hand a minimum wage undergrad a $5 mechanical counter and have them get a more precise count in the 20 minutes it takes to do a lap of the building, especially when said undergrad would just be idling at the front desk, on their phone, and still on the clock for those 20 minutes anyway.