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A minor point, but "...because of things like online shopping, which has put hundreds of thousands of retail workers out of a job." Makes me wonder... the meth

A minor point, but "...because of things like online shopping, which has put hundreds of thousands of retail workers out of a job." Makes me wonder... the method of product selection and delivery have changed from in store browsing and carry out, to online browsing and delivery. Instead of sales personnel and cashiers, it involves warehousing (to a larger degree) and delivery vehicles. Employment in sales/cashiers therefore would drop, while employment in warehouses and delivery companies would have increased. What are the relative ratios? For every x retail jobs lost, how many y 'logistics' jobs are created? Once automatic warehouses and autonomous vehicles are pervasive, is it a 100% loss?

Dolores12 9y ago
Employment in warehouses stays unchanged, because people are not buying more. They don't have more money to spend just by switching to online browsing.
- richardwhiuk 9y ago
  Deliveries surely require more people though? Delivering to a store is less efficient than delivering to 100 houses.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    You are cutting out the requirement to build/lease a store and operate it - I suspect you could buy/lease and operate a lot of vans for the costs of a store.
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. Online prices tend to be lower than in store. So the cost of goods overall is lower and consumers effectively can buy more items. Also, when considering retail, the shipments from warehouse to store are in bulk, whereas shipments direct to consumer are small numbers of discrete items, which requires more handling for picking, packing and shipping.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
richardwhiuk 9y ago
I suspect it's really difficult to an exhaustive analysis required to see the full implications. It's easy to say 'this shop has seen foot count fall and when we interview people this is why they say they come less' (though with all of the problems such surveys entail), but it's less easy to see the magnitudes involved in the full pipeline - e.g. delivery workers who now deliver to customers instead of shops. It ends up being more productive to look at much broader economic data, but that allows you less ability to drill into the specifics because you are looking at a much larger population, and have less ability to derive why something occurred.
- netcan 9y ago
  You could do a relatively dumb back-of-the-envelope by looking at employees/revenue for Amazon and other retailers. This would give you a basic estimate for how many jobs get optimised out by first order effects, counting only employees directly employed. 2nd order effects are harder.

Dolores12 9y ago

Employment in warehouses stays unchanged, because people are not buying more. They don't have more money to spend just by switching to online browsing.

richardwhiuk 9y ago
Deliveries surely require more people though? Delivering to a store is less efficient than delivering to 100 houses.
- arethuza 9y ago
  You are cutting out the requirement to build/lease a store and operate it - I suspect you could buy/lease and operate a lot of vans for the costs of a store.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Online prices tend to be lower than in store. So the cost of goods overall is lower and consumers effectively can buy more items. Also, when considering retail, the shipments from warehouse to store are in bulk, whereas shipments direct to consumer are small numbers of discrete items, which requires more handling for picking, packing and shipping.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

richardwhiuk 9y ago

I suspect it's really difficult to an exhaustive analysis required to see the full implications. It's easy to say 'this shop has seen foot count fall and when we interview people this is why they say they come less' (though with all of the problems such surveys entail), but it's less easy to see the magnitudes involved in the full pipeline - e.g. delivery workers who now deliver to customers instead of shops. It ends up being more productive to look at much broader economic data, but that allows you less ability to drill into the specifics because you are looking at a much larger population, and have less ability to derive why something occurred.

netcan 9y ago
You could do a relatively dumb back-of-the-envelope by looking at employees/revenue for Amazon and other retailers. This would give you a basic estimate for how many jobs get optimised out by first order effects, counting only employees directly employed. 2nd order effects are harder.