US heading towards having 2 dominant occupations - carrying stuff tro people's houses, security

[Liberal_in_LA]

Want a job? Deliver, or protect



(CNN) -- If the trajectory of American daily life keeps heading in its current direction, the country may end up with only two dominant occupations:

-- Carrying stuff in boxes to people's houses.

-- And keeping a watchful eye on those same people so they don't hurt each other or steal things when they do leave their homes.

For all the talk about how e-commerce is outpacing the performance of traditional retail sales in brick-and-mortar stores, the men and women who could gain the most from the boom in online merchandising are not Web designers or those who come up with clever new shopping apps, but workers who perform one of the oldest jobs in the world:

Lugging packages from the curb to someone's front door.

It's one task that can't be accomplished in cyberspace. During the 2013 holiday season, according to the Wall Street Journal, retail stores drew only about half of the foot traffic that they did three years earlier. And during the peak holiday shopping period, online sales increased by more than double the rate of sales at traditional stores.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/30/opinion/greene-two-occupations/

[Frustratedlady]

1. A lot of the "foot traffic" was lighter to area stores

because of the harsh winter weather across much of the country. Also, there weren't the dollars to spend because of high heating bills.

[SheilaT]

2. So I guess there won't be many people in the health care field

or fast food.

This is the sort of dump oversimplistic thing that makes me crazy. Sort of like how a couple of decades back all you ever heard about connected to the future of jobs was how everyone would be working from home. I'd ask how the fast food workers or the city bus drivers or the school teachers or, well you get the idea. Only a small fraction of workers could ever realistically think about working from home.

In a similar vein, because people who write these things work a daytime job with weekends and holidays off, and so even though they themselves go out to eat or take airplanes or maybe get sick and go to a hospital, they think that those are trivial tiny minorities of employees. In reality, I'd guess that easily a quarter of the workforce does shift work, holidays and weekends, but rarely are the realities of those workers' lives noticed.