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Amazon Go opens first Chicago location of its cashierless convenience store
Amazon is considering opening as many as 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021
I've walked past this store yesterday on my lunch break. (There was too long of a queue of curious tourists to enter the store.) Though Amazon explicitly denies this above, I can absolutely see this technology as well as self-service kiosks as paths to severely reduce or eliminate cashiers. What's not mentioned is that cashiers are the second most common job in the United States, after sales clerks, coming in at around 3.5 million Americans.
The Chicago Amazon Go store is also a couple blocks from a completely un-staffed Bank of America location. Should you require the services of a banker – say to open a checking account – there are three video conferencing rooms that immediately connect you to a remote banker. I'm not a BoA customer so I have no idea of those bankers are USA-based, or say located in a lower cost region like Mexico or South America.
Number of American tellers: 500,000
Or have you seen the autonomous car technology that is currently in it's infancy?
Number of American taxi drivers: 250,000
Number of American truckers: 3.5 million
It definitely makes you think of the severe challenges we'll be faced with over the next few decades in keeping people employed at livable wages. In previous iterations of technological advances, the improvements made existing human workers more effective at their jobs and the markets compensated by finding new outlets for unskilled labor. Here ... I'm not that confident. There's a stark difference between an employee become more productive, and therefore letting her colleague go; and the situation where both employees are being outright replaced.
I, for one, hope that economists and policy makers make economic experimenting a priority over the next few decades. Ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) sound promising to me. Ideas like 'make work' jobs or government programs like FDR's CCC less so.
Edit: Drat wrong forum -- Mods: Can this be moved to the General Political Discussion?
Amazon is considering opening as many as 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021
I've walked past this store yesterday on my lunch break. (There was too long of a queue of curious tourists to enter the store.) Though Amazon explicitly denies this above, I can absolutely see this technology as well as self-service kiosks as paths to severely reduce or eliminate cashiers. What's not mentioned is that cashiers are the second most common job in the United States, after sales clerks, coming in at around 3.5 million Americans.
The Chicago Amazon Go store is also a couple blocks from a completely un-staffed Bank of America location. Should you require the services of a banker – say to open a checking account – there are three video conferencing rooms that immediately connect you to a remote banker. I'm not a BoA customer so I have no idea of those bankers are USA-based, or say located in a lower cost region like Mexico or South America.
Number of American tellers: 500,000
Or have you seen the autonomous car technology that is currently in it's infancy?
Number of American taxi drivers: 250,000
Number of American truckers: 3.5 million
It definitely makes you think of the severe challenges we'll be faced with over the next few decades in keeping people employed at livable wages. In previous iterations of technological advances, the improvements made existing human workers more effective at their jobs and the markets compensated by finding new outlets for unskilled labor. Here ... I'm not that confident. There's a stark difference between an employee become more productive, and therefore letting her colleague go; and the situation where both employees are being outright replaced.
I, for one, hope that economists and policy makers make economic experimenting a priority over the next few decades. Ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) sound promising to me. Ideas like 'make work' jobs or government programs like FDR's CCC less so.
Edit: Drat wrong forum -- Mods: Can this be moved to the General Political Discussion?
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