Have you interacted with retail store clerks?
Over the next ten years robots will replace many of them.
Good luck doubling the minimum wage while this is happening.
In partnership with Lowe’s Innovation Labs, Fellow Robots and Singularity University, Orchard is the first retailer to explore how Autonomous Retail Service Robot (ARSR) technology can improve and enhance in-store service and training. Our San Jose Midtown store will be the home to OSHbot, an associate and customer assistance device designed with a number of ground-breaking features that help customers navigate the store and associates work more effectively.
Unfortunately, the ‘robot’ (which is nothing more than a data base of the store contents) is more appealing to interact with than most of the people who work at bLowes. Most of these people are the product of the government schools.
I went to a bLowes the other day and asked where are the ‘casters’. Nobody in the fuckin’ store knew what a caster was.
hen the unemployment line get so much longer than the employment line…who s going to buy the goods? Or as the story runs with Walter Ruether, who’s going to buy the Fords?
Color me Completely Unimpressed.
For all it’s supposed innovations the damn thing still SOUNDS like a fuckin’ robot. Nice job there, engineering boyz.
Those engineeringfuks can’t even get the Self-Checkout registers working correctly. Half the time you need to call over an “associate”, or whateverthefuk they call themselves.
So it can find a hammer. Big fuckin deal. And even then, I’ll bet they NEVER get the robot to understand Ebonics — “Yo muthafucker where dem hamma things be at?”
The robot will be as useless as tits on a hog as soon as you ask, “What do you recommend ..” or, “How do I …”. In that regard, they will be just as knowledgeable as human clerks.
OK, This one is easy. As a collective Murikans should tell the retailers… DO NOT send that goofy robotic pile of junk to assist me in LIEU of a human OR I will NEVER shop here again , and stick to it.
Failure to do this could mean YOUR JOB one day. Losing yourt job to one of these things would be like having your wife leave you for a lesbian midget.
bb’s wife left him for a lesbian midget.
Go back and read the story of the Luddites.
In a truly free market, this would be seen as “competition” by human laborers, who would then provide better service to customers in order to remain competitive (or at least, relevant). Or work for wages and benefits that make the compensation equation more attractive to their employer.
We all know that we don’t have a free market system, however… government mandates benefits coverage, wages, incentivizes off-shoring through tax policy, and even rewards people for not working.
This is the inevitable by-product of a controlled market system… lower standards of living, decreased product/service quality and a less sustainable system.
@Bea Lever: “DO NOT send that goofy robotic pile of junk to assist me in LIEU of a human OR I will NEVER shop here again , and stick to it.”
I don’t think you get it: The people who work at these big box stores know NOTHING. Not only don’t they know anything, they seem to be content to be stupid.
The Home Depot that I frequent has only one check out line open – everyone would rather go through self serve check out than deal with the clerks.
The other day I bought 6′ of chain for a hanging lamp. 50 cents a foot. I wrote down the item number (on the slips they provide). Told the gal I had 6′. What a big deal – they had to measure the chain – then they didn’t know how to enter the UPC code – had to look it up and scan the bar code printed in the notebook. They are stupid, lack common sense, and have no manners or courtesy.
One is better off using a touch screen to find the products, than interfacing with the morons that work there.
@ DUTCHMAN
I agree that clerks at blowes are useless idiots, but humans MUST stick together. Back in the day the retailer would fire a useless rude employee. We don’t punish bad behavior any more.
DUTCHMAN, what will happen if all the servers in restaurants are replaced by that nifty IPAD thingie that is ALREADY on the table? PHDs’ will be back in the soup line again. Those lovable highly educated hash slingers will suffer. Let us consider how many jobs are at risk. The receptionist at the doctor or dentist’s office, the county clerk that renews you car tag, the tour guides in historical sites/ museums/art galleries, posters on web sites….oh well you see what I mean. Hundreds of thousand of HUMANS will be in the free shit army and YOU will be footing the bill to feed them. Now DO YOU REALLY WANT TO GO THERE?
@Bea Lever: “but humans MUST stick together.”
Problem is that there seems to be a growing divide between semi-intelligent, polite, common sense people and the idiots.
“the country clerk that renews your car tag” – Do away with that! Renew on the internet, don’t waste time or gas on that endeavor.
“the tour guides” – Already been done at many museums.
“servers” – Entering your own order – you know it’s right – want separate checks – you can get that too. And oh yes – no tip required. – Already been done.
“receptionist” – I had minor surgery a year ago. I filled all the paper work on-line – none of that BS where you sit in the Dr’s office and flll out forums. It’s already happened.
Ok DUTCHMAN I’m throwing in the towel…you win. Guess you will be working to feed all those folks, maybe I should get in line too. Be careful what you go looking for…you might get it.
Pandora’s box…just sayin.
Those programmers are obviously gay. Any heterosexual robot creator would make the robot hot as hell. Otherwise what’s the point?
Doctor house calls.
Gas station attendants.
Newspaper boys.
All doubling the minimum wage does is add to the list of extinct occupations or services.
Rich, politically powerful people will pay for their dogs’ leashes to be held while flower strewers lay rose petals ahead and poop scoopers follow.
The rest of us will be “insourcing” everything.
Wait til self-service includes abdominal surgery.
BOT 2016- GO BOT
DUTCHMAN, you’re a friggin genius…I take it all back. Some jobs should be replaced with a bot. President Bot, has a nice ring to it and anything would be better than OZERO. Barry can’t even spell bot without a teleprompter. A bot CONgress too, we don’t have to pay them either and they would have no need for payoffs from special interests. No more human CEO’s making 60 million a year. My mind is racing in a thousand directions. I’m almost giddy. I WAS WRONG.
@ BEA LEVER,
Look up Charles Murray’s recent comments about it being 20 years since he coauthored “The Bell Curve.” His thesis may be likeable to you.
The problem is that this is an economic revolution no less large than that of the Industrial Revolution. Automation is eliminating human inputs and leveraging those of others, rendering much of the “old economy” doable with a lot fewer people.
Unlike 120 years ago, however, when that happened to agriculture, there is no other “industry” now beckoning all those abruptly unnecessary people.
Murray and other assorted collectivists think we need to preserve the old order via the Omnipotent Political State and its redistribution of wealth (which is a guaranteed trip to Idiocracy.)
The solution lies in trusting the spontaneous organization of the market, which will (with some considerable pain) let us discover what new ways people can interact and survive in a new, as yet uncharted economy.
It is my belief that people will NOT accept this, and vast misery will be spread to every corner of the globe in a fruitless attempt to stop time.
Bea – protecting jobs by forcing employers to be inefficient is the definition of stupid. That will never work. It is effectively communism. And we all know how that turns out. Anything similar to those type initiatives always result in a bucket of shit – price and wage freezes, socialism, income redistribution, etc.
Capitalism is based on competition. It works great if left alone. If one company goes robotic, and has lower cost, and another does not and has higher cost but human workers, the consumer will sort it out. But guess what – lower prices almost always win.
Here is an example. I remember when you would drive into a gas station, an attendant would run over, pump your gas, clean your windscreen, and check your oil. What a great thing. Then some bright spark thought, hey, I will give them a penny a gallon off if the customer pumps his own gas and so I do not have to pay little Johnny to do it.
Well, guess what. Customers took the penny, and all the little Johnnies got to go fuck themselves.
You are dumber than a barrel of rocks thinking it will work any other way.
Humans inevitable choose their own self interest – ie cheaper products. Sticking together is a pipe dream.
Tell me, Bea, you got any Jap or Chinese stuff in your home? Betcha you do. So much for people sticking together. By buying imported crap you drive jobs overseas.
Come back and preach when you have purged all the imported crap and replaced it with good old American made.
I won’t hold my breath.
I’m with Dutchman on this one, it has been my experience that most of the time if the ‘associates’ at Blowes or the Home Dump sense you are about to ask them something they will do an about face and walk the other way.
I would rather pay a bit more and shop at the local hardware store where they make there living on customer service.
Blowes obviously understand the capacity of their work force and that is why they are doing robot research in the first place.
Peaceout – you are in the minority. About the only folks who do as you describe are the rich. They happily pay a huge premium for service. Companies that try to charge “a bit more” usually go broke.
I sell some of my goods to auto companies. They make a huge commotion publicly that quality is job 1, etc.
It is total bullshit. They are interested only in price. There are few if any companies on earth in my field that can currently match the quality and service I provide. My prices reflect that. A company in China cannot provide the delivery, customer service, engineering response time that I can and do.
Every year I lose work to China.
It is all about money. Consumers do not care about quality nearly as much as they do about price.
That is just how it is.
I think part of this replacement is being sped up by the decrease in overall respect and manners in our society, coupled with other economic factors that are a consequence of industrial or technological advance.
I used to work at a grocery store while going to school about 10 yrs ago. I was a cashier and at some point a low level manager. I remember going to the companies training for one week to be trained on costumer service, proper checkout procedures, counting money, cashing checks, checking for counterfeit bills, sale of alcohol, tobacco, over 160 produce codes, etc. They tested you and you had to pass it all. It was a big deal being nice to your costumers as they taught you they had a choice of where to go. You were expected to know how to use most functions of the register, except for a few for management. There’s been many times when I know they didn’t really know how to do some things. You were expected to always acknowledge them going through your check stand. None of this happens going through most grocery stores, except trader joe’s and maybe whole foods nowadays. That’s where I enjoy shopping the most. Most act as if they themselves would rather avoid you, they are helping dig their own grave a little faster.
Well Llpoh when you are the small town Hardware store and the big box bullies from Home Dump move into the edge of town and start undercutting the local boys with their bulk pricing and etc. then you need to do something to set yourself apart to survive and these guys do it with Knowledge of their products and service. I would rather pay a little extra to get in and out of the store and back to whatever project I’m working on then wander around around a Home Dump trying to find somebody that has the knowledge to help me. So if that makes me and the rest of the people that gladly give the hometown hardware store their business rich, then I guess we’re rich.
Peace out – read for comprehension. Evidence of what I said us everywhere. There may be some few exceptions, but those small stores have failed BT the tens of thousands. The vast majority of folks but on price.
Tell me, do you own any imported goods? Of course you mist likely do. And if you do, thus you have done to American jobs the same thing you howl about Home Depot doing, albeit in a small way. Multiply that small way by 300 million and you get an exodus of jobs from the US.
So take your hypocrisy and jam it. You feel good buying from the local store. Good for you. Just make sure it us American made.
BTW almost anything you want can be found American made. But it us going to cost you.
I hate auto corrects. Mis-spellings are better than changed words.
The tit-for-tat has gone on all day over this whole bot thing. By next week I’ll probably be looking to buy one of those little bastards for my business. Can one of these things deliver cocktails and horsedovers on a tray? Hell I may get one for home.
Some people actually think that businesses would do better by paying higher wages, since their employees would have more money to spend on the employer’s product. I have a logic-challenged libtard coworker who truly believes the myth that Henry Ford paid his factory workers extra well so that they could afford Model T’s. It was just fucking PR by Henry Ford, and dumbshits believe it to this day. Even if every cent in supposed “extra” wages paid by ol’ Henry to his employees had been spent on a Ford automobile, the net effect on the bottom line would have been negative.
Llpoh – No hypocrisy and no howling, just sharing a personal experience about my own preference and a local business that is bucking all odds and has managed to find away to stay in business, that’s all. Oh yeah, and maybe taking exception to being categorized as being rich when that is hardly the case.
The points you make about pricing are all correct, of course, nothing to really argue about there. Buy American, of course, even if it only assembled in America, using foreign parts at least that’s something. In my business as a government industrial contractor each project used to have a buy American clause associated with the contract. You do not see that clause much anymore because it is almost impossible to achieve, because we as a country do not manufacture raw materials and finished goods the way we used to.
Some of the things blow my mind, such as how is cheaper to log trees in the US ship the logs to the far east, mill the trees into dimensional lumber, ship them back to the US and sell them for cheaper than if you did the whole process right here in the US.
You obviously deal with this kind of thing every day in your business on a far larger scale than probably anybody else on this site. As a country how do we stem the tide and turn things around and create new manufacturing opportunities in the US, how do we keep from outsourcing to foreign countries to keep pricing down so we can compete for the price driven consumer dollar?
A general commitment by the populace to buy American because it’s our civic duty and the right thing to do, that would be a start, but how many of those 300 million consumers would it take to commit to that philosophy to turn the pattern around?
This is a huge problem, agreed, and one that does not have simple solutions to correct in a positive way. It may take total financial collapse in this country and overall reset, as has been expressed over and over again on these posts, to start over again. Scary stuff to think about, the kind of thing that keeps a guy up at night, and reading the subject matter on the TBP posts every day, it is a lot closer than we probably want to believe.
Dammit Peaceout – nice comment. Ii was looking forward to a small fight. But you took the high ground! Well done.
I did not mean to imply you are rich – though you may be for all I know. What I meant was rich folks are happy to buy Prada and Louis Vitton etc. for the service and so as to not have to be around the likes of us.
Peaceout – unfortunately we cannot fully stem the tide. INDividuals can tho. But not the collective. You and yours can – education, hard work, thrift, preparation.
But the US middle class is doomed.
Greetings,
One item overlooked in this conversation is Guilds. People seem to think that the only choices are Ayn Rand Capitalism or boot on your head/redistribution of wealth Communism.
Guilds were put in place in order to stop specialization and mass production and preserve the trade of the craftsman. It worked fairly well for hundreds of years.
We all know that the elites are worthless/talentless parasites and I could easily imagine a “knowledge” guild bringing everything to a complete halt.
There is a point where automation leads to increased profits, then a later point where it leads to diminishing returns because of not enough customers being able to afford the products.
The problem is caused by artifical inflation purposefully caused by central banks. You would need rising purchasing power & a free market to nullify the problems.
Econman,
Feel free to overpay your employees so that they have enough money to buy other companies’ products. You do understand the prisoner’s dilemma, right?