One of the largest supermarket chains in the southwest is close to experiencing a labor strike over the normal issue - cuts to benefits, loss of hours, etc. However, another factor in the discussion is the increased utilization of automated checkers replacing employees.

Reducing jobs, hours, benefits. What do you think? A good thing or a bad thing? What do we do about the lost jobs? How much profit is too much? Is there such a thing as "too much profit"? What if it is at the expense of people?

How do you feel if cost cutting by eliminating positions results in big bonuses to the executives who made the cuts? Should it matter?

I am not 100% up to speed on this issue, but my feelings are as follows: If the company is laying people off and moving to machines strictly to increase profits and increase bonuses of the executives then they should be stopped. However if this chain is in danger of not making profits and their business is performing poorly and this decision can help bring them out of that, then I say yes automate these processes at the cost of employees.

In addition when I visit chain retailers I rarely see all of the registers occupied, generally there are 2-3 open. If it were an all automated joint I would be able to go to whatever register I wanted to check out and could quickly complete the process. I am not quite sure I see the continued benefit of having checkers ring my groceries up for me when I am perfectly capable and probably faster than some of them. It seems like this is a good example of something that needs to be automated.

I have a choice at the supermarket I frequent to check it myself or use a live person. I have only used the self check out once and did not like it. I prefer a real person. Also my supermarket offers a service where they "send out" your groceries on a conveyor belt and a real person loads it into your car. I don't know how they'll replace the live person loading the stuff into my car. They don't allow the shopping carts out of the store so you have your choice of schleping it out yourself or sending it out.

I know that supermarkets don't make a huge profit off groceries but to cut hours of checkers and cut benefits all in the name of the almighty profit gain is ridiculous. Those places need to go out of business.

I used to stay in my car when I needed gasoline. (That was nice when it was raining or snowing.) An attendant would come running out of the service station to pump gas for me, clean my windows and outside mirrors, and check my oil. Now I have to do all that myself and pay at the pump with my credit card. Grocery stores used to have friendly cashiers who would chat with me as they rang up my purchases and then wish me a nice day; now I can check out my own purchases and never have to talk with anyone.

Over the past fifty years, jobs have gradually disappeared, supposedly in favor of "convenience" and "speed" for the customer. As I was retiring from my library job two years ago, the director was making plans to bar code materials differently so patrons could check out their own stuff, thus "freeing up" time for the library employees (and eliminating jobs).

What have we done about all of this so far? Nothing.

There used to be a lucrative business making horse shoes . Those jobs isn't there anymore. Whaling ships used to crowd the NE ports so they could extract whale oil for the lighting of lamps... then ole Thomas Edison ruined it.
People used to make a career out of drafting with graph paper and a #2 Ticonderoga pencil . Then computers made their job obsolete.

Sic semper.

People want both cheaper prices and enough jobs. Who decides? Most of what you buy is much more automated than when you were born, and most prices of manufactured goods ARE cheaper than they were, especially when inflation is counted (housing and gas products are the big killers).

The supermarket problem is not one of something you have no other choices to use, so there won't be much regulation any time soon, and executives will continue to pay themselves a lot. If you managed to get that job, you might too. It takes years of education and 80 hour weeks to get there, and you might feel justified.

The profit margin on an antique needs to be ~ 400%, on a quickly outmoded TV 200%, on food competition forces it to be closer to 1%. If a grocer can't sell food constantly, he goes out of business. You the consumer drive his business by shopping there or elsewhere.

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Originally Posted by CliffARobinson

Is there such a thing as "too much profit"? What if it is at the expense of people?

How do you feel if cost cutting by eliminating positions results in big bonuses to the executives who made the cuts? Should it matter?

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Hello Cliff:

When a country increases productivity, it raises the standard of living for EVERYBODY... Giving people jobs, just for the sake of GIVING them jobs, lowers productivity and LOWERS the standard of living for EVERYBODY...

Let me ask you this.. If you were an administrator of a website, and you could increase productivity by replacing some paid workers with a fantastic bot you invented, would you? How long do you think you'd keep YOUR job if you did that? What if the site were yours, and you weren't a paid employee?

Let me also ask you this.. Let's say that your fantastic bots increased productivity SOOOO MUCH, that the site was sold for several billions of $$'s. Would you think that SOME of that wealth should be yours?

excon

It's really just part of life; current processes and technologies are analyzed, streamlined and eventually replaced altogether.

More jobs will be created for installing and maintaining the self checkout units.

We are becoming so lazy we will soon require someone to eat our food for us.

When all the jobs are gone we will have employment for maybe 2 billion, then the capitalist system will die to be replaced by something better. Computers don't eat they just need electricity. We are continually inventing better ways to do things and putting ourselves out of work in the process. Are we happier, No!

Automation is part of progress. It is one of the cogs on which industry runs. Its up to the public to decide as to which automation is allowed. In a grocery store setting you will be removing the personal bubble that exists today. Its almost like going to an automated barber and when the bowl is on your head presto your out of there.

Some things will never change completely. And some ideas are too far ahead for acceptance. I remember when mabell introduced the video phone. The public freaked. Now in today's world cameras are everywhere.

In grocery stores of tomorrow with rfid's and smart refridgerators your going to have shopping lists generated for you which will travel over the net when your ready to purchase and you just get in line like at a fast food place and your groceries are boxed and paid for already. Its going to happen. Just not right now. When is the last time you bought a Farrari? That is about the same price you could expect to pay for your family car if it weren't for automation. Keep that in mind. There is a price to be paid for a hand built car.

As far as too much profit. No there is no such thing in a freestanding market. Profit comes from demand. Should profit be held above people? Depends on the industry. When automation occurs there should be available a pool of money to draw from (initial profit) to re-educate the persons displaced in a manner they see fit. But it shouldn't hold back technology from applying itself to a given situation.

The only time there is too much profit is when you have a monopoly and no means test by the maketplace. Having a captive audience doesn't mean you can exploit them.

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Originally Posted by Wondergirl

Over the past fifty years, jobs have gradually disappeared,

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Not fifty years, but 300 years. The Industrial Revolution, beginning with steam power, enabled machines to do repetitive jobs enormously more efficiently than human beings.

Today, the computer machine is replacing humans in ways never dreamed of even a few decades ago.

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Originally Posted by Athos

Not fifty years, but 300 years. The Industrial Revolution, beginning with steam power, enabled machines to do repetitive jobs enormously more efficiently than human beings.

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Not every change is an improvement, just a few decades ago atomic power was thought to be good, the way of the future, but many countries are pulling back from this now. It was a very efficient system, removing many jobs in the power industry, the coal industry, transport, etc. but what will replace it? It seems you can have acid rain or radio active rain, what will be the fall our of our next innovation?

It seems we think productivity means removing people from the process, but what is more important giving human beings the dignity of earning a living or producing cheap goods which ultimately only a few will be able to buy. In pursuit of cheap goods the western world has dismantled its industries and shipped them to China. This is somehow thought to be more productive because big retailers can sell goods cheaply. It might make goods more accessible but it does so at the expense of the population

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Originally Posted by paraclete

This is somehow thought to be more productive because big retailers can sell goods cheaply.

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When your country's sense of self-worth is tied to consumerism/materialism this is seen as a plus.

It's the way it is .Technology creates opportunity and displaces. Clete laments the cheap goods ;but automation makes the goods affordable for the masses.

I prefer using ATM and autoscanners ;it is less time consuming and most often eliminates human error.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

Clete laments the cheap goods ;but automation makes the goods affordable for the masses.

I prefer using ATM and autoscanners ;it is less time consuming and most often eliminates human error.

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Tom I don't lament "cheap" goods but the means by which we have obtained them, we have done so without responsibility or consideration of our fellow countrymen. An ATM is both a way of protecting your account and a way of access for a scammer, convience swapped for risk yet you live most of the time without knowledge of the risk. Often cheapness has been swapped for quality. Would you buy a Chinese car? Or perhaps a KIA? They are cheap and look much the same as the local model. Remember the Belaris, they make great paddock ornaments.

The masses are often duped by the lure of cheap goods, it is not desirable and fills our tips with trash. It isn't so much automation that makes cheap good available but labour working in near slave conditions, so stop being niaive

No Clete . Automation is the antidote to slave labor sweat shops .You can't have it both ways. You can't complain about automation displacing low skilled cheap labor and at the same time complain that low skill workers are underpaid.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

No Clete . Automation is the antidote to slave labor sweat shops .You can't have it both ways. You can't complain about automation displacing low skilled cheap labor and at the same time complain that low skill workers are underpaid.

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A ridiculous proposition Tom of course I can object to both, fair wages should be paid irrespective of whether automation will eventually replace labour or not. But you know it is not automation that has been objected to here but the outsourcing of production to cheap labour countries often without benefit of automation. I would say retain the industry and automate rather than outsourse to cheap labour, that is the responsible decision. I know that such a decision doesn't appeal to a died-in-the -wool capitalist like yourself who relishes the exploitation of labour whether offshore or local. I am not against reconstruction of industry and retraining of labour but I am against exploitation.

Civil engineers who study coastlines say that the job of 2050 will be sandbagging the edges of all the continents that aren't already under water.
We have tons more importing/exporting. That means more ship and dock workers.
We still build houses and raise food, and still have oil and gas and coal and mineral mining. Even new energy sources require manual labor, like solar and wind and water power.
Workers have to ADAPT. No time to complain about it. And unions have to stop being such dinosaurs.

Joy... exactly... I can tell Clete that the cost of labor is a major motivation to make efficiency innovations . It doesn't displace the workforce permanently... it just means the workforce needs to retrain.

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Originally Posted by tomder55

joy ....exactly ....I can tell Clete that the cost of labor is a major motivation to make efficiency innovations . It doesn't displace the workforce permanently ....it just means the workforce needs to retrain.

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Tom the workforce needs direction to retrain properly but government has no idea of what skills will be needed. I think your country is a little new to this restructuring of industry where as mine is post reconstruction with many industries gone and the workforce either retrained or idle. We were told the service industries are what we should train for but that has replaced permanent full time employment with part time casual employment and so we have full employment by slight of hand because statistics don't measure hours employed but whether a person worked or not. Now we dig holes in the ground and you need to be skilled to do that. Where do we get that skilled labour, we import it, because the training schemes were targeted elsewhere in what the trade schools and universities could provide and not in what might be needed.

Tom I have, during my career, been a catalyst for change and innovation so don't think I don't understand this. I understand automation and computerisation and how it has displaced labour, but I also know we are being sold a pup when people talk of new industries and retraining. The jobs might exist but the number of today's workers employed in these industries will be few