8 ms·

Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress

Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.

ekianjo 4y ago
"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Their profit is your opportunity then: open a competing company, pay people better while still making a decent profit and enjoy! Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance. But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      With what capital? Those that own the monopolies already have most of it.
      - nickpp 4y ago
        Lots of VCs willing to give you money to try, if you have an idea. This very forum belongs to one of them.
        jacooper 4y ago
        VCs won't pay you to give better wages thats for sure.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Have you tried? VCs beg you to spend the money they give you as long as that increases your chances of success. That is how IT workers got to enjoy the tremendous salaries and benefits we currently have.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. It is simply unviable to try and open up an alternative to Amazon or Walmart - network effects, exclusivity deals, credit history, officials letting it slide to pay your workers pittances because they don't want to battle with the lawyers a billion dollar company can put up against you... and especially, if you do try it, then the mega corporations can and will price-dump you out of business. Subsidising losses for one location for a year or two is nothing for Wal-Mart, especially not if every other store around them is closed afterwards and you are the only player left. Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Thank god for SoftBank, funding competition at scale and making the world a better place!
      - refurb 4y ago
        The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. I mean, clearly that’s not true or else we’d live in a world where old companies don’t die and no new companies come about.
        mschuster91 4y ago
        Just take supermarkets as an example. In Germany, 3/4 of the market has been taken by the four largest chains [1], which poses an immense competition problem for vendors like farms, or for small corner stores which have vanished in large parts of the country because they can't compete with the big-box store 20km away. [1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/marktanteile-der-5-groessten-lebensmitteleinzelhaendler/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/...
    - kdmccormick 4y ago
      That level of profit oppptunity doesn't occur until the company is massive. Small business owners, in contrast, mostly run on tight margins and have to live with a high likelihood of their business failing. Effectively, you're asking us to solve the income gap by becoming billionaires ourselves. Can you see the irony in that?
      - nickpp 4y ago
        Jeff Bezos managed to. I wish more people would try, instead of saying "can't be done". Of course very few would succeed or become billionaires but in the process they will create jobs and companies and tremendous value for a society that needs that much more than it needs the current wailing and gnashing of teeth against the "evil billionaires" that tried and succeeded.
        mschuster91 4y ago
        Just look at how long it took Amazon to get as big as it did - and Amazon didn't have much competition in its first few years ffs, they were the pioneers of e-commerce. The survivors from the first dot-com boom are so entrenched by now they are literally impossible to ever unseat unless government regulation intervenes - either in the form of marketplace regulation, anti-trust action or, like the EU is trying to break PayPal, forcing banks to offer fast payments.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        You mean "how fast" ? GAF(AM)s didn't even exist a quarter of a century ago ! P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
        mschuster91 4y ago
        > GAF(AM)s didn't even exist a quarter of a century ago ! Yes, and look how entrenched they have become. Search engines, for example, are dominated by Google holding 80%+ for well over a decade. Even Bing, with Microsoft's deep cash coffers, can't get above 9% [1]. Facebook just went ahead and bought the biggest threats (Whatsapp, Instagram) or copied the features of competitors to destroy them (Snapchat). The only threat in the social media marketplace comes from TikTok, who are backed by the Chinese government. Twitter is tiny and Musk is driving it to the ground. Amazon, while "only" at 38% market share in e-commerce, still leaves everyone else including Wal-Mart in the dust [2]. Microsoft utterly dominates the PC and laptop market [3] as well as the office suite market [4]. Even with these multi-billion companies fighting against each other, they can't manage to land any kind of significant blows - so how should a small startup stand a chance? > P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ? Amazon had no competition online, mostly because the competition was asleep at the wheel. And by the time the competition woke up, it was too late - and now "classic" book stores are dying out left and right, not to mention other kinds of specialized stores. Here in Munich, all the small electronics specialty stores closed down, even famous chain Conrad closed down because they couldn't compete any more. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-the-leading-retailers-in-us-e-commerce/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide [4] https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share-for-office-productivity-published/ https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...
  - bombcar 4y ago
    An example: Walmart’s yearly profit divided by the number of employees: $4k per employee.
  - buggythebug 4y ago
    People forget that a lot of these companies are small businesses that are not raking in millions and billions....
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Being a small business does not entitle them to exist at the cost of exploiting underpaid labor.
      - buggythebug 4y ago
        "Exploit" is a strong as word. No one is forcing anyone to work for the ABC company.
- mantas 4y ago
  If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yes, but these don't happen in a vacuum. Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
    - mantas 4y ago
      Yes. Products and services would get more expensive. Overall reducing consumption in volume. Which may be negative for the „growth“ in neoliberal sense. But positive in crapload of other metrics.
  - CraigJPerry 4y ago
    It can be more complex than that. My town has a lot of hairdresser salons. It’s hard to make the argument that there’s too many, but that would be my feeling. It’s a small town and the most popular business type on the high street is a food venue followed in 2nd place by hair salons. I’d have expected convenience stores or pubs. However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment. But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past. So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened! According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Unless the owners of the new shop are more skilled than average, the shop will be marginal and probably go out of business, as the debts pile up. What about a coop shop?
- dotluis 4y ago
  But people pay for goods using the "some bucks" they earned as salaries.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    You guys are missing the point. If we take X percent of the workers out of the market due to retirement (and age discrimination?) there will simply not be enough people to do all the work. Paying more at any or all levels will not create more workers. Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
    - CraigJPerry 4y ago
      The article claims people are not coming out of retirement and are unlikely to do so as the early retirees are comparatively well off.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        If there isn't enough labor to pay for their retirement then inflation will eat up all their retirement until there is enough labor.
        vaidhy 4y ago
        They do not have to retire in UK either, right? You can take your nest egg and move to SE Asia?
        wrycoder 4y ago
        Most people don’t have a nest egg these days.
        CraigJPerry 4y ago
        >> enough labor to pay for their retirement Labour doesn't pay for their retirement. >> inflation will eat up all their retirement Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23). >> until there is enough labor Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case? Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
  - buggythebug 4y ago
    Eh from a superficial view no, but there will be a cascade event. The after effects are more complex For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices. OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
    - AdrianB1 4y ago
      Mom and pop places are supposed to be run by mom and pop, with no other labor, so they should not be affected too much.
      - buggythebug 4y ago
        That's not the definition of a "mom and pop" place. lol
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      I agree that this isn't a black and white thing; and that wasn't the point I was making. It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out. As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
- danaris 4y ago
  I don't know if it's as true in the UK, but in the US, companies have been reporting record profits over the past year or so. This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on. For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future. However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.
- sunshinerag 4y ago
  "redistribute, redistribute" ... note to self. never should start a company that is profitable if it is to be redistributed.
  - tellmelies 4y ago
    great, redistribute it to your employees instead. It will still go to taxes (income).
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Why not? Surely a period of profits and the knowledge of having improved society are enough personal reward.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Definitely heading towards neofeudalism.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though. Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3]. There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4]. FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ [2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... [4] https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
notacoward 4y ago
Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.
- mehphp 4y ago
  As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.
karmakaze 4y ago
This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.

Labour that wont be filled by anybody as they try to find people working for "some bucks" an hour. Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on.

ekianjo 4y ago

"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.

mschuster91 4y ago
> "some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
- nickpp 4y ago
  Their profit is your opportunity then: open a competing company, pay people better while still making a decent profit and enjoy! Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance. But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    With what capital? Those that own the monopolies already have most of it.
    - nickpp 4y ago
      Lots of VCs willing to give you money to try, if you have an idea. This very forum belongs to one of them.
      - jacooper 4y ago
        VCs won't pay you to give better wages thats for sure.
        nickpp 4y ago
        Have you tried? VCs beg you to spend the money they give you as long as that increases your chances of success. That is how IT workers got to enjoy the tremendous salaries and benefits we currently have.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. It is simply unviable to try and open up an alternative to Amazon or Walmart - network effects, exclusivity deals, credit history, officials letting it slide to pay your workers pittances because they don't want to battle with the lawyers a billion dollar company can put up against you... and especially, if you do try it, then the mega corporations can and will price-dump you out of business. Subsidising losses for one location for a year or two is nothing for Wal-Mart, especially not if every other store around them is closed afterwards and you are the only player left. Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Thank god for SoftBank, funding competition at scale and making the world a better place!
    - refurb 4y ago
      The problem is: you can't compete with the scale of these mega-corporations unless you have something like a sovereign wealth fund backing you. I mean, clearly that’s not true or else we’d live in a world where old companies don’t die and no new companies come about.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Just take supermarkets as an example. In Germany, 3/4 of the market has been taken by the four largest chains [1], which poses an immense competition problem for vendors like farms, or for small corner stores which have vanished in large parts of the country because they can't compete with the big-box store 20km away. [1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/marktanteile-der-5-groessten-lebensmitteleinzelhaendler/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/...
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    That level of profit oppptunity doesn't occur until the company is massive. Small business owners, in contrast, mostly run on tight margins and have to live with a high likelihood of their business failing. Effectively, you're asking us to solve the income gap by becoming billionaires ourselves. Can you see the irony in that?
    - nickpp 4y ago
      Jeff Bezos managed to. I wish more people would try, instead of saying "can't be done". Of course very few would succeed or become billionaires but in the process they will create jobs and companies and tremendous value for a society that needs that much more than it needs the current wailing and gnashing of teeth against the "evil billionaires" that tried and succeeded.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Just look at how long it took Amazon to get as big as it did - and Amazon didn't have much competition in its first few years ffs, they were the pioneers of e-commerce. The survivors from the first dot-com boom are so entrenched by now they are literally impossible to ever unseat unless government regulation intervenes - either in the form of marketplace regulation, anti-trust action or, like the EU is trying to break PayPal, forcing banks to offer fast payments.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        You mean "how fast" ? GAF(AM)s didn't even exist a quarter of a century ago ! P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
        mschuster91 4y ago
        > GAF(AM)s didn't even exist a quarter of a century ago ! Yes, and look how entrenched they have become. Search engines, for example, are dominated by Google holding 80%+ for well over a decade. Even Bing, with Microsoft's deep cash coffers, can't get above 9% [1]. Facebook just went ahead and bought the biggest threats (Whatsapp, Instagram) or copied the features of competitors to destroy them (Snapchat). The only threat in the social media marketplace comes from TikTok, who are backed by the Chinese government. Twitter is tiny and Musk is driving it to the ground. Amazon, while "only" at 38% market share in e-commerce, still leaves everyone else including Wal-Mart in the dust [2]. Microsoft utterly dominates the PC and laptop market [3] as well as the office suite market [4]. Even with these multi-billion companies fighting against each other, they can't manage to land any kind of significant blows - so how should a small startup stand a chance? > P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ? Amazon had no competition online, mostly because the competition was asleep at the wheel. And by the time the competition woke up, it was too late - and now "classic" book stores are dying out left and right, not to mention other kinds of specialized stores. Here in Munich, all the small electronics specialty stores closed down, even famous chain Conrad closed down because they couldn't compete any more. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-the-leading-retailers-in-us-e-commerce/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide [4] https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share-for-office-productivity-published/ https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...
- bombcar 4y ago
  An example: Walmart’s yearly profit divided by the number of employees: $4k per employee.
- buggythebug 4y ago
  People forget that a lot of these companies are small businesses that are not raking in millions and billions....
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Being a small business does not entitle them to exist at the cost of exploiting underpaid labor.
    - buggythebug 4y ago
      "Exploit" is a strong as word. No one is forcing anyone to work for the ABC company.
mantas 4y ago
If clients ain't willing to pay enough to pay salary workers are willing to work for... Maybe there's no product-market fit and/or business model just does not work?
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yes, but these don't happen in a vacuum. Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
  - mantas 4y ago
    Yes. Products and services would get more expensive. Overall reducing consumption in volume. Which may be negative for the „growth“ in neoliberal sense. But positive in crapload of other metrics.
- CraigJPerry 4y ago
  It can be more complex than that. My town has a lot of hairdresser salons. It’s hard to make the argument that there’s too many, but that would be my feeling. It’s a small town and the most popular business type on the high street is a food venue followed in 2nd place by hair salons. I’d have expected convenience stores or pubs. However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment. But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past. So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened! According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Unless the owners of the new shop are more skilled than average, the shop will be marginal and probably go out of business, as the debts pile up. What about a coop shop?
dotluis 4y ago
But people pay for goods using the "some bucks" they earned as salaries.
- phkahler 4y ago
  You guys are missing the point. If we take X percent of the workers out of the market due to retirement (and age discrimination?) there will simply not be enough people to do all the work. Paying more at any or all levels will not create more workers. Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
  - CraigJPerry 4y ago
    The article claims people are not coming out of retirement and are unlikely to do so as the early retirees are comparatively well off.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      If there isn't enough labor to pay for their retirement then inflation will eat up all their retirement until there is enough labor.
      - vaidhy 4y ago
        They do not have to retire in UK either, right? You can take your nest egg and move to SE Asia?
        wrycoder 4y ago
        Most people don’t have a nest egg these days.
      - CraigJPerry 4y ago
        >> enough labor to pay for their retirement Labour doesn't pay for their retirement. >> inflation will eat up all their retirement Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23). >> until there is enough labor Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
If demand is so low that under-paid staff is needed to keep things afloat, is the business even worth the effort from a societal view-point? Or even as a business case? Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
- buggythebug 4y ago
  Eh from a superficial view no, but there will be a cascade event. The after effects are more complex For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices. OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
  - AdrianB1 4y ago
    Mom and pop places are supposed to be run by mom and pop, with no other labor, so they should not be affected too much.
    - buggythebug 4y ago
      That's not the definition of a "mom and pop" place. lol
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
    I agree that this isn't a black and white thing; and that wasn't the point I was making. It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out. As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
danaris 4y ago
I don't know if it's as true in the UK, but in the US, companies have been reporting record profits over the past year or so. This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Expect more automated systems, robotic cookers, less waitress and more "self service" from now on. For what it's worth: it would be a good goal on its own to reduce the weekly workload for everyone. 2x40h plus commute? That's not sustainable nor healthy and is a major reason why young people push having children to the future. However, societies must tax the profits that companies generate by replacing people with machines and redistribute these profits - otherwise we just end up with neo-feudalism, with a tiny caste of extremely wealthy people controlling all the machines.

sunshinerag 4y ago
"redistribute, redistribute" ... note to self. never should start a company that is profitable if it is to be redistributed.
- tellmelies 4y ago
  great, redistribute it to your employees instead. It will still go to taxes (income).
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Why not? Surely a period of profits and the knowledge of having improved society are enough personal reward.
tartoran 4y ago
Definitely heading towards neofeudalism.
trashtester 4y ago
I expect it to get easier to tax capital in the current climate where globalization is being reversed by a few notches. Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Both trends are likely to contribute to higher inflation, though. Not if governments don't sleep at the wheel. In the 80s, CEO compensation was a fraction of what it is today [1], and there were only a couple dozen billionaires or billionaire families [2]. Today, we're at at least 735 billionaires in the US, and at least 2668 worldwide [3]. There is nothing preventing governments from seizing all that excessive wealth gain and redistributing it, or to limit corporate hoarding of cash and assets, corporate payouts like dividends or stock buybacks - the latter, most egregious practice, was only legalized in 1982 [4]. FFS - what happened to the Ford-era tradition of paying people enough cash for their work so that they could actually live on these wages and buy all the products?! That was the key for the post-WW2 economic success wave, after all. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/ [2] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleLee.shtml [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_billionaires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of... [4] https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity

notacoward 4y ago

Yep. One thing I noticed on a recent plane trip (my first since the pandemic began) was that practically all of the food options involved ordering and paying via tablet or online (assisted by QR code). Front staff just had to bring the food, no time spent taking orders or doing the payment dance. I've seen this trend increasing in non-airport settings too, but it seems to have reached an apex there. Also saw a delivery bot trundling along the sidewalk in Madison, so that's a thing too.

mehphp 4y ago
As a customer, I have preferred this when it's an option. My order is wrong less often and I'm not sitting around waiting for a check when I'm ready to leave.

karmakaze 4y ago

This and the other news that jobs will be lost to robotics, ML/AI doesn't add up--which is it? It's not like automation was to make up for retirees, it's to reduce costs so if anything we should be glad for retirees not taking jobs.