Italian Grocer Deploys ‘Scan and Bag’-Style Technology

[haele]

66. As usual, the employment issue comes to bear.

In my working experience, there are only so many jobs that go into supervisory or management. There are only so many administrative jobs. There are only so many medical or legal jobs, and only so many professional jobs requiring engineering, certified technical or mechanical that can be supported by any economy. There are an decreasing number of jobs in the public arena - from janitors and clerks to professionals.
There are only so many small entrepreneurial businesses that will succeed - if there are 55 different types of contractor businesses(working out of their homes or local storefronts), 42 "home" and/or "ethnic" restaurants, 30 private tutor/instructor/coach businesses, 25 sitter and personal caretaker businesses, 20 coffee and baked goods shops, 17 property management/real estate storefronts, 15 consignment, craft, or thrift stores, 14 florists, 12 beauty shops, 10 specialty breweries/pubs, 9 pet-based stores, 7 spas, 6 mechanic, 5 computer/IT, and 4 local produce or specialty food stores that are started by smart, talented and driven "unemployed" residents in a two mile radius, only a maybe quarter of those businesses will survive the first year. This is approximately the ratio of small businesses that started up and subsequently ended over a period of 6 years in the neighborhood that had just finished a cycle of "gentrification" that I was living in up to last year.
The cycle started out with professionals who had been hit with "downsizing" and the tanking economy. Now, that neighborhood is filled with families of engineers, lawyers, and administrative people who are struggling to find any work to keep their houses - and they are now competing with the lower income families in the neighborhood who had been eaking out a living working multiple jobs at places like Hooters, Home Depot and local union grocery stores.

And of course, there are really only so many people who are so "perfect" that they are easily employable at any job - most people are around average, not significantly above so they stand out for the fewer and fewer jobs available. And people have a nasty tendency of not staying disposed of when their jobs are disposed of - they don't just disappear.

It's not just a matter of technology in business, it's also the limiting of available work for people who are being displaced, of what you do with people who are left with increasingly less resources to survive on. There is no frontier for them to go to to start over. There is no place to "homestead" and create new communities where everyone can be pretty much gainfully employed.
If we can't get a handle on healthy communities in the pursuit of profits and increased technology, we will have a permanent underclass and a lower standard of living for anyone who has to work for a living.
The only people who will have a decent standard of living are those who will be able to figuratively "pay cash" for it, or those that they choose to patronize.
The self-fulfilling prophecy - as society becomes more and more enamored with "the ownership society" Plutocrats who are calling themselves "job creators" will actually become "job creators" as that "socialist" idea of being part of a healthy community disappears; they will be the only ones with enough cash to own the means to get a job - thus they will own the rest of us.

Haele