The Coming Obamacare Shock for 170 Million Americans

[Mr Khan]

Kasz216 said:

Mr Khan said:

thranx said:

Mr Khan said:

 

 

 

But people also have more money in their pockets to spend on goods and services. Why do we always neglect that part of the equation? You can't just assume that inflation is going to zero all of it out, especially since we've been in a *very* low inflation environment (QE is the only thing keeping deflation from happening. The market right now wants deflation to happen. Inflation is a boogeyman in Western societies)

Automation is going to happen anyway. That's just an inevitability, because businesses will always root around to try to figure out how to minimize labor costs, just as they'll root around to figure out how to minimize costs of all their other inputs (even I as an advocate for labor will admit that it's not some conspiracy against the working man, but neither is it a process that is kept at bay only because of low minimum wages). Companies will always be working to figure out what the bare minimum number of employees is to get the job done, and guess what: if they have to pay more, they still can't get rid of people without making the quality of the work suffer, because they've likely already cut back to only what is needed.

Note that the chili's article talked more about improving speed of service through automation, rather than about labor costs. That's why you automate.

Eh, i find that's not actually true.

If you'll note, the GFC caused a huge loss of jobs in a lot of sectors with minimal productivity loss.  Jobs that never really came back.

Companies, tned to increase employees when they need help, but only decrease employees when something forces them to or they are buisnesses with sharp seasonal curves.

I imagine this is at least partly because nobody actually likes to fire other people, partly because reducing workforce is generally seen as a negative that will hurt your stock and nobody wants to be blamed for overdownsizing their workforce when things are working great.

This is espiecally true when it requires hefty upfront costs as required with automation.

 

For example note how self checkout aisles aren't nearly as prevelent as you would expect.

Many Hospitals etc, still have paper records despite computerizing them would save a ton of time and manpower.

Jack in the Box is the only fast food place that really messes with self ordering machines.   You see them pop up in new gas stations with sandwhich shops but the old ones don't really get upgraded.

GM factories very rarely ever update their machinary... hell the GM plant i worked at STILL uses button presses for half the shop despite automatic presses have been standard for 20+ years.  

 

At the risk of falling into the anecdotal evidence trap, the store i'm working at is one of the busiest and most profitable for the company across the board, and yet my boss is currently grappling with corporate who keeps trying to tighten the purse strings on wage allowances for the store (so not cutting jobs, but cutting hours). I think it's just a perpetual war.

We're talking about the low end of the market, remember. Further into "white collar job" territory, there are a lot of jobs that a company can "create" for the right person (which is why networking is so important), but the point being that companies' demands for work are far more flexible the higher up the ladder you go. Lower down, it's more fixed in that regard.