The next jobs set to disappear may be ones that are a bigger part of people’s daily lives: retail workers and cashiers in stores and restaurants.
Claire Cain Miller lays out what is likely to happen in retail, and Amazon has become the prime mover with the Whole Foods buy:
Imagine this scene from the future: You walk into a store and are greeted by name, by a computer with facial recognition that directs you to the items you need. You peruse a small area — no chance of getting lost or wasting time searching for things — because the store stocks only sample items. You wave your phone in front of anything you want to buy, then walk out. In the back, robots retrieve your items from a warehouse and deliver them to your home via driverless car or drone.
Amazon’s $13.4 billion purchase of Whole Foods, announced Friday, could speed that vision along. Amazon has already made shopping for almost everything involve spending less time waiting, doing work or interacting with people, and now it could do the same for groceries. It’s already trying with a store in Seattle, Amazon Go, that has no salespeople or checkout lines.
Our mental image of job-killing automation is robots in factories or warehouses. But the next jobs to disappear are probably ones that are a much bigger part of most people’s daily lives: retail workers and cashiers in stores and restaurants.
For a long time, economists argued that routine jobs like factory and clerical work were vulnerable to automation but that jobs in both the service and knowledge sectors were safer. They require human skills that are hard for machines to imitate, like judgment and adaptability. These skills are useful when an executive makes strategic business decisions or when a chef fries one customer’s egg and scrambles another’s.
But it has become increasingly clear that parts of every job will be automated — and that the service sector is next. Although certain service jobs like health aide or preschool teacher still seem safe, others, like those in retail and food service, are already being displaced. It’s not hard to teach a machine to do routine tasks like scanning bar codes, stocking shelves or dunking fries in oil.
Eight million people, 6 percent of American workers, are retail salespeople and cashiers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Cashier jobs are expected to grow 2 percent by 2024, significantly slower than 7 percent job growth over all, and technology is the main reason, according to the bureau.
Half the time worked by salespeople and cashiers is spent on tasks that can be automated by technology that’s currently in use, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report. Two-thirds of the time on tasks done by grocery store workers can be automated, it said. Another report, by Forrester, estimated that a quarter of the tasks salespeople do would be automated this year, and 58 percent by 2020.
Estimates like these are guesses at best, because imagining the future is an act of science fiction.
Reading the comments on the story gives a taste of the fear these scenarios are causing:
Jeffrey Texas
1 day ago
So where do those workers go who are going to be increasingly replaced by technological advances? At what cost to society is this exponential rate of ever newer technological efficiencies? At what point are Amazon and similar behemoths the great societal destabilizers? Not every efficiency is responsible.
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S
1 day ago
When so many jobs are replaced by automation, who do the capitalists imagine will be able to afford to buy any of the goods and products and services being offered and delivered via robots? Other robots?
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Bill Lance Ridgefield, CT
1 day ago
But why would we want any of this? If the only consideration is maximizing profit for the investor class, we’re going to end up in a very sad world. Rather than cutting taxes on the rich people and corporations, it seems to me that the taxes should be super-progressive, so that it doesn’t necessarily make economic sense to automate away jobs, or send jobs overseas, or cut product quality to the bone, just to make a few more bucks profit. We’ve got six billion people in the world. Let’s leave something for us all to do.
