Amazon: killing the unskilled laborer

unskilled-laborAnd creating an entirely new cultural, social and business paradigm.

I cannot emphasize this more: our country — nay, the planet — has just been turned upside down. I suspect you think I’m radically overstating the issue. You’ll soon discover that I am not.

Leftist Jeff Bezos is about to not only turn retail business on its head, he is about to gut those persons who vote Demorat and/or Leftist. Because he is about to put them all out of work.

First, what is AmazonGo?

From Amazon.com:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What is Amazon Go?
Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

How does Amazon Go work?
Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.

How big is the store?
Our roughly 1,800 square feet of retail space is conveniently compact so busy customers can get in and out fast.

What do I need to get started?
All you need is an Amazon account, a supported smartphone, and the free Amazon Go app.

Why did you build Amazon Go?
Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout? Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go? Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go and Just Walk Out Shopping.

What can I buy at Amazon Go?
We offer delicious ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made fresh every day by our on-site chefs and favorite local kitchens and bakeries. Our selection of grocery essentials ranges from staples like bread and milk to artisan cheeses and locally made chocolates. You’ll find well-known brands we love, plus special finds we’re excited to introduce to customers. For a quick home-cooked dinner, pick up one of our chef-designed Amazon Meal Kits, with all the ingredients you need to make a meal for two in about 30 minutes.

So I can just shop normally?
Yes! Just browse and shop like you would at any other store. Then you’re on your way. No lines, no checkout.

Perhaps you’re asking, at this point, am I nothing more than a shill for Amazon? Why such a lengthy quotation from Amazon?

I’m not a shill for Amazon. But I want you to understand the basics up front. I want you to understand what Amazon is offering initially and how it will itself morph and change to something else entirely, bringing the rest of the retail industry kicking and screaming along with it.

Trust me, with Amazon this is an experiment. It will expand from simply convenient foodstuffs. And beware: it accomplishes this feat of convenience by completely recording everything there is to know and see about you, storing the information into company databases. If it is digital it can be hacked. If you partake of the experiment any semblance of privacy you thought you once had will be well and truly gone, never to be re-established again.

THE LOGICAL EXTENSION:

This is a time when unskilled workers are demanding and, in many cases and locales, acquiring a $15-per-hour minimum “living” wage. The move is already having unforeseen consequences — but only unforeseen if you are a Leftist or a Demorat. Those of us with a common sense, business and logical bent knew what to expect.

Businesses have no duty whatsoever to lose money no matter what various governments legislate. A wage jump this large means that businesses have to examine all of their costs and — no shock — any business’s greatest costs are in personnel.

People are messy. They are finicky and critical and they get sick, take vacation, offend others, become unproductive, lazy, unhappy, pick fights, expose companies to various forms of societal lawsuits, and come with mandatory workers’ comp, medical and other benefits. In a word, people are expensive.

Some businesses, therefore, are now doing their best to eschew unskilled or minimally-skilled labor and instead replacing people with, in the immediate case of the restaurant industry, ordering kiosks or devices on tables from which to order and pay. In Seattle, for example, one of the first places to embrace a mandatory $15-per-hour wage rate, small businesses began to shutter their doors, close, go bankrupt or physically move outside the city to neighboring Kings County.

This is already happening. It is already a movement within business.

Now comes Amazon.

And businesses have to compete.

Do the logical extension: Amazon will expand these stores. Other retail stores and chains are allowing Amazon to take the step like the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

But what if Amazon is wildly successful?

Businesses have to compete.

This paradigm will expand to other stores and chains and various forms of retail. When the first large chain embraces the technology the others almost have no other choice. They will do so too. The time will come when you’ll enter a Costco or a WalMart or a J.C. Penney’s or a Nordstrom or a Bed Bath & Beyond, pick up what you want, and leave.

Perhaps “great” for the consumer. But what about the unskilled or minimally-skilled laborer? Their services will no longer be, on a major level, needed. How do these people primarily vote? Leftist or Demorat. And who is Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon? A wild Leftist. Schadenfreude.

A note to those who have no motivations, have no aspirations, no skills, no interest in acquiring skills: you are about to be crushed.

REPERCUSSIONS:

First, the only persons needed to work those first Amazon stores will be those who prepare the food, stock shelves and clean. Cashiers and/or human interaction will be mostly absent. I suspect for some consumers this will be a blessing. I, for one, patronize a store solely to shop, not to chat, unless I need specific advice regarding, say, technological devices.

When the technology really begins to get legs, there will be pushback from unskilled labor, from, say, California’s SEIU, various unions, Leftist groups, BLM and others. I predict that you will initially see mob runs on these stores where large groups will enter and simply loot a store wholesale.

There will be massive labor, union, budgetary, business, cultural and social implications.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LABOR:

This new paradigm will decimate the unskilled or minimally-skilled labor force. It has to. There is no other option if businesses not only wish to compete with each other nationally but internationally as well.

It will also have a major impact upon immigration. The bulk of illegal immigrants bring no skills with them; they do however bring needs like food, housing, support. Illegal Mexicans, immigrants from other nations will no longer be required to “do the jobs that no one else will do.” There are, already, machines that pick fruit and other vegetables in fields. The need for immigrants will diminish.

This is a game-changer, ladies and gentlemen.

It will not happen overnight.

But it will happen.

BZ

 

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10 thoughts on “Amazon: killing the unskilled laborer

    • Good question. Very good question. I think they’re going to assume that all is well and people won’t do it. Until their loss margins exceed their profits.

      BZ

  1. 1. You won’t see stores like this in the inner cities where people with cultural inclinations to theft are the majority. Just like to don’t see Walmarts there.
    2. This is not a new idea. There were some TV commercials about it about ten years ago.
    3. The other grocery stores have been moving this direction already with self-serve checkouts.
    4. As the technology improves, as it always does, other grocery stores will follow suit.

    • I agree, you will not see this in the hood. The only stores you see in these areas, are highly marked up mini grocery convenience stores, and check cashing stores. These people whine that no real businesses build in their neighborhood, and that they have to pay so much more money just to buy milk and cigarettes and other everyday items. They then scream racism.

      Well, it is not racism, it is not about black or brown, but instead…green. Why would anyone build a nice store, or a supermarket grocery store, when you have several issues against you. First, these people typically do not spend the amount of money a typical customer would in a better neighborhood. Second, the people that live in these areas, have no pride in their neighborhood, and it is a challenge for any business to try and maintain a standard of cleanliness that their stores are typically known for. When you have people who shit in urinals and piss on the floor, and steal the toilet paper, trash the shelves, and mess up the floors, knowing others will have to clean up after them. Graffiti everywhere, and bums hanging out by the doors, scaring people away, and top this all off with not only increased employee theft, as they will have to hire those that live nearby, but overall everyday theft. And I am not talking about simply shoplifting where a customer puts a $5 item in their pocket and walks out, but actual brazen thugs have no issue with simply gathering up hundreds of merchandise and running out, knowing that the employees either will not or are not allowed to stop them, and that the cops will very likely never catch them. No store can maintain a well managed and clean store with all of these elements working against them.

      But nope, it’s racism.

      so, I agree, you will not see AmazonGo in the hood. Civilized society is setup for a moral and honest culture. It will not work for any other type of people. These people complain, without realizing they are the masters of their surroundings. Take pride in your neighborhood and show it, and the good stores will come. If your own home looks like a setting in a turd world shithole, well, that is what your neighborhood will become.

  2. I agree too with the whole shoplifting thing. Shoplifters will be like…”I thought my AmazonGo thingy was charging me for it”. Then the cops be like…”Sir, you don’t have a phone on you”. Criminal be like…”Damn, I left it in my other pants…my bad…you gonna let me go now…right?”

    I guess this is just the next step in the self checkouts like I see in Home Depot and other stores. There is a certain amount of trust. And, the increase in shoplifting may still not be enough to offset not having to pay the salaries of all of them cashiers.

    What I think is truly ironic…or is it Schadenfreud, is that the city that pushed for and made law, a $15 per hour minimum wage, is the same place initiating a system to replace all of those people that would have taken advantage of the new minumum wage.

    If you think about it, stores have only two jobs aside from management. Stock people unloading the trucks and filling the aisles, and checkout. This AmazonGo thing is going to wipe out half the staff needed to run a store. If a store requires their vendors to stock the shelves themselves, and implements this technology, you could run a huge store with like two people.

    And I am sure that someone, maybe Amazon, is working on something to get merchandise to the stores and on the shelves without any human intervention as well. Add a few drones and droids, and you have just made obsolete anyone without a 4 year degree or trade.

    And when you ask liberals about this phasing out of jobs, they say nonsense such as the people whose jobs were made gone, better get over it, and learn to do the new and exciting jobs that will be created by this new technology…your old job is not coming back. Well that is all great and stuff. But they fail to take into consideration (or are completely ignoring it by choice) two things. First, only one person will be required to maintain the system that did away with ten people. I mean, how stupid would it be to create a setup that does away with ten low-skill jobs, but requires ten highly skilled people to maintain it? So what about the other nine? Even if they do learn the skills to work the new system, they still cannot find work? And second, does anyone really see the majority of the people who work the register at Walmart or McDonalds, going back to school to learn a necessary skill? I mean, that is why they are in the job they are to begin with, because they were either too stupid or lazy to get an education to begin with. Much easier for them to go on welfare.

    And that is why you cannot lift people out of poverty. Liberals think there are poor people because these highly motivated people could not find a job or get a proper education despite their best efforts to do so. That it must have been some type of racism or discrimination or misogyny or whatever keeping these wonderful people from gainful employment. Whereas, conservatives, who live in reality, know the real reason poverty exists, is because these poor people are lazy or stupid, and have made some really horrible choices in life. Despite every advantage given them, they still chose to be poor. And that is why no one will ever fix poverty. Poverty is not an issue of needing money, more affordable schools, more opportunity, etc. Nope, poverty is a mindset. Until people choose to get off their ass and choose to better themselves, there is nothing you or I, or any well-intentioned liberal can ever do to solve the poverty issue.

    And here we have, the best schadenfreud ever. The devout liberal, jeff bezos, who was behind the increase in minimum wage, and pushes constantly for ending poverty, is the same person behind all of these incredible programs that will replace human interaction, and will ensure that a vast majority of them will never find work again. Maybe the big greedy capitalist disguised as a caring liberal will cut his pay and bonuses to the point where he can pay his fair share and support all of those people that he sent to the un-employment and welfare line. Of course, we all know that when liberals spout off about everyone paying their fair share, they don’t mean themselves. But that’s a topic of another discussion.

    I say great idea. I have had many occasions where I wanted to go shopping at a store, saw the checkout lines, and walked out. And does it surprise anyone that something like this was NOT created by govt, but by an individual in pursuit of the almighty dollar, with a darn good chance of overtaking it. Does anyone think technology like this would happen in a communist country? I mean, look at all of the wonderful modern conveniences and advancements in technology and medicine that as happened in Cuba over the last 60 years, since they decided to leave capitalism behind and embrace communism. And you can bet that China and Russia are working on similar projects as well. Awwww, who am I kidding? We all know that the only way communist countries get ahead, is by stealing our ideas and technology….stealing the results of great ideas and hard work from free men who are actually allowed to do what they want, without govt intervention.

    I do like Amazon, and becoming a prime member is awesome. And this new idea is terrific. You can count me in when they get it up and running.

  3. dekare: “And second, does anyone really see the majority of the people who work the register at Walmart or McDonalds, going back to school to learn a necessary skill?”

    Correct. Otherwise they’d already be there; that is, looking for other jobs or enrolled in courses or trade schools or techno education.

    That is what I mean by gutting the unskilled worker who, for the most part, is going to remain unskilled unless they begin displaying MASSIVE motivation right NOW.

    BZ

  4. Walmart is our favorite store here.
    Groceries are kept stocked and fresh.
    The lowest price available is always charged.
    All returns are graciously accepted.
    Our Bank is inside with a high level ATM right there 24/7.
    They carry my clothes and sneakers.
    My car is kept in top shape.
    The cheapest gasoline price anywhere.
    It is always clean and safe.
    No wonder the store is popular for others like me.

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