robots are coming for your job: amazon, mcdonald\'s and the next wave of dangerous capitalist \"disruption\"

In the United States and other developed economies, the main disruption will be the service sector.
After all, this is where the vast majority of workers are now employed.
This trend is already evident in areas such as ATMs and ATMs.
Service checkout channels, but there may be a surge in new forms of service sector automation over the next decade, which may result in millions of relatively low
Wage work at risk.
San Francisco-
Power Machine Co. , Ltd.
Fully automated food production has begun
Quality Burger.
Although the fast food worker may throw the frozen pie into the grill, the equipment of the Momentum machine will make the burger with fresh minced meat, and then the grill will be ordered --
Includes the ability to add a proper amount of char while retaining all juices.
This machine is able to produce about 360 burgers per hour, also bake bread, then slice and add fresh ingredients such as tomatoes, onions and pickles only after placing an order.
The burger is assembled and ready to be supplied on the conveyor belt.
While most robotics companies are very careful about the potential employment impact, Momentum Machines
Founder Alexander Vada Kostas is very blunt about the company\'s goals: \"Our equipment is not designed to make our employees more efficient,\" he said.
\"This is to avoid them altogether.
\"The company estimates that fast food restaurants spend an average of about $135,000 a year on the wages of employees producing hamburgers, and that the total labor cost of hamburger production to the US economy is about $9 billion a year.
Momentum Machines believes its equipment will pay for itself in less than a year, and plans to target not only restaurants, but convenience stores, food trucks, and possibly even vending Machines.
The Company believes that eliminating labor costs and reducing the space needed for the kitchen will enable restaurants
The quality ingredients enable them to serve delicious hamburgers at fast food prices.
These burgers sound tempting, but they cost a lot of money.
Keep millions low
Wages, usually part.
Time, working in the fast food and beverage industry.
McDonald\'s alone employs about one employee.
8 million employees in 34,000 restaurants around the world.
Historically, low wages, low benefits, and high churn rates have helped make fast food jobs relatively easy to find, and fast food jobs work with other low-income jobs
Skills positions in the retail industry provide a private sector safety net for workers who do not have other options: Traditionally, these jobs provide final income when there are no better options.
In December 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics listed \"food preparation and service workers combined\" as a category excluding waiters
Serving restaurants as one of the most anticipated employment sectors in the first decade of 2022 --
There are nearly one new job and millions of vacancies to replace workers leaving the industry.
However, rules for fast food employment are changing rapidly after the Great Recession.
McDonald\'s launched high in 2011.
Profile plans to hire 50,000 new workers in one day and receive more than millions of applications
This proportion makes it more statistically significant to get McJob than to be admitted to Harvard.
Although the fast food industry was once dominated by young people looking for part-time jobs --
At school, the industry employs more mature workers who make work their main income.
Nearly 90% of fast food workers are over 20 years old, with an average age of under 30. five.
Many of these older workers have to support their families.
A task that is almost impossible to complete, the median salary is only $8. 69 per hour.
The industry\'s low wages and almost complete absence of benefits have drawn strong criticism.
On October 2013, an employee called McDonald\'s financial help hotline and was told to apply for food stamps and Medicaid, which was severely criticized.
In fact, an analysis by the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that more than half of the fast-food worker families had taken part in some type of public aid program, the resulting American taxpayer costs nearly $7 billion a year.
In the fall of 2013, when a series of protests and temporary strikes against fast food restaurants broke out in New York and then spread to more than 50 cities in the United States, the Institute of employment policy, A conservative think tank that has a close relationship with the restaurant and hotel industry has placed a complete
The Wall Street Journal\'s page ad warned that \"robots will soon replace fast-food workers who demand a minimum wage increase.
While advertising is certainly a strategy of intimidation, the reality is --
As the momentum machine shows
It is almost certain that the improvement of automation in the fast food industry is inevitable.
Given that companies like Foxconn are introducing robots to improve their performance
In China, there is little reason to believe that machines will eventually not serve hamburgers, tacos and lattes in the fast food industry.
The Kura sushi chain in Japan has successfully pioneered an automation strategy.
In the chain\'s 262 restaurants, robots help make sushi when conveyor belts replace waiters.
To ensure freshness, the system tracks the circulation time of a single sushi board and automatically removes those that have reached their expiration time.
Customers order using the touch screen and when they finish their meal, they place the empty plates in a slot near the table.
The system will automatically list the bill into a table, then clean up the plate and bring the plate back to the kitchen.
Instead of hiring store managers in each location, Kura uses centralized facilities where managers can remotely monitor almost every aspect of restaurant operations.
Automation in Culla
Based on the business model, the price of sushi board is only 100 yen (about $1)
The competition was greatly weakened.
It is easy to imagine many of Kura\'s strategies, especially automated food production and off-site management, which were eventually adopted in the fast food industry.
Some important steps have been taken in this regard;
McDonald\'s, for example, announced in 2011 that it would install a touch screen ordering system in 7,000 European restaurants.
Once one of the industry\'s major players starts to gain a significant advantage from the increased level of automation, others have no choice but to follow suit.
Automation will also provide competitive power beyond labor costs.
With fewer and fewer workers exposed to food, robot production may be seen as more hygienic.
Convenience, speed and order accuracy will increase, as will the ability to customize orders.
Once the customer\'s preferences are recorded in a restaurant, automation will make it simple to consistently produce the same results elsewhere.
With all this in mind, I think it\'s easy to imagine that a typical fast food restaurant could eventually lay off 50% people or even more.
At least in the United States, the fast food market is so saturated that it seems unlikely that new restaurants will make up for a significant reduction in the number of workers needed in each place.
Of course, this means that many of the job vacancies predicted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics may never be realized.
The others are mainly low.
Wage services in general retail.
Economists from the Bureau of Labor Statistics rank \"retail sales staff\" second only to \"Registered Nurses\", a specific occupation that has increased the most employment opportunities in the decade ended 2020, more than 700,000 new job creation opportunities are expected.
Yet again, technology is likely to make the government\'s predictions optimistic.
We can expect that employment in the retail industry will be determined by three forces in the future.
First, online retailers such as Amazon, eBay and Netflix will continue to disrupt the industry.
Of course, the competitive advantage of online suppliers over physical stores has been evident with the demise of major retail chains such as Circuit City, Borders and Blockbuster.
Amazon and eBay are trying the same thing.
In some cities in the United States, daily delivery is aimed at destroying one of the last major advantages that local retail stores still enjoy: the ability to provide satisfaction immediately after purchase.
In theory, the intrusion of online retailers does not necessarily destroy jobs, but rather transitions them from a traditional retail environment to warehouses and distribution centers used by online companies.
However, the reality is that automation becomes much easier once the work is moved to the warehouse.
Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics company, in 2012.
Kiva\'s robot looks a bit like a huge touring ice hockey designed to move materials inside the warehouse.
Instead of having workers pick items in the aisle, the Kiva robot simply zips down the entire tray or shelf unit, lifts it up, and then takes it directly to the workers who pack the order.
The robot uses a grid of bar codes arranged on the floor for autonomous navigation and is used to automate warehouse operations for various major retailers outside Amazon, including Toy \"R\" Us, clearance, Walgreens, staple food.
A year after the acquisition, Amazon had about 1,400 Kiva robots in operation, but the company began to integrate them into its vast warehouse.
A Wall Street analyst estimates the robots will eventually reduce the company\'s order fulfillment costs by 40%.
As one of the largest grocery retailers in the United States, Kroger also launched a highly automated distribution center.
Kroger\'s systems are able to receive pallets from suppliers that contain a large supply of single products, then disassemble them and create new pallets containing a wide range of different products ready for shipment to the store.
It is also able to organize the way products are stacked on mixed pallets in order to optimize shelf inventory after the products arrive at the store.
In addition to loading and unloading pallets onto trucks, the automated warehouse completely eliminates the need for manual intervention.
The apparent impact of these automated systems on work has not caused losses to organized labor, and the truck driver union has repeatedly clashed with Kroger and other grocery retailers when introducing these systems.
Kiva robots and Kroger\'s automation systems have left some work for people, mainly in areas such as packaging mixed items for final shipments to customers, which requires visual identification and dexterity.
Of course, these are areas of innovation like Industrial Perception boxes --
Mobile robots are rapidly advancing the technological frontier.
The second force of change may be the explosive growth of fully automated self.
Service retail-
Or, in other words, smart vending machines and kiosks.
A study predicts that the value of products and services sold in this market will grow from about $740 billion in 2010 to more than $1.
1 trillion to 2015.
The development of vending machines is far beyond the distribution of soda, snacks and bad instant coffee, and now in airports and high-end hotels, precision machines that sell consumer electronics such as Apple\'s iPod and iPad are alsoAVT, Inc.
One of the leading manufacturers of automated retail machines, claiming that it can be designed to customize
Service solutions for almost any product.
Vending machines can significantly reduce the three most important costs that occur in the retail business: real estate, labor and theft of customers and employees.
In addition to 24-
Hours of service, many machines include video screens and are able to provide targeted pointsof-
Sales ads designed to attract customers to buy related products, as human salespeople may do.
They can also collect the customer\'s email address and send a receipt.
Essentially, these machines offer many of the benefits of ordering online and bring the added benefits of instant delivery.
While the proliferation of vending machines and kiosks will certainly eliminate traditional retail sales, these machines will certainly create jobs in areas such as maintenance, stocking and maintenance.
However, the number of these new jobs may be limited than you think. The latest-
Connect directly to the Internet and provide continuous sales and diagnostic data streams;
They are also specifically designed to minimize labor costs associated with their operations.
On 2010, David Dunning was the regional operations director responsible for overseeing the maintenance and restocking of Redbox movie rental kiosks in the Chicago area.
Redbox has more than 42,000 kiosks in the United States and Canada, usually located in convenience stores and supermarkets, and rents about 2 million videos per day.
Dunning Chicago-
A regional kiosk with only 7 employees.
High automation of machine purchase;
In fact, most of the labor force
The intensive aspect of this work is the exchange of semi-transparent movie ads displayed on the kiosk
It usually takes less than two minutes for each machine.
Dunning and his staff allocate time between the warehouse where the new movie arrives and their cars and homes, where they can access and manage the machines over the Internet.
These kiosks are designed from scratch for remote maintenance.
For example, if the machine is blocked, it will report immediately, and the technician can log in with his or her laptop, shake the machine, and solve the problem without needing to access the website.
New films are usually released on Tuesday, but can be restocked at any time before that;
The Kiosk Pavilion will automatically provide movie rental services at the right time.
This allows technicians to arrange restocking to avoid traffic.
While Dunning and his staff do have jobs that are interesting and desirable, in numbers they are just a fraction of what traditional retail chains can create. The now-
For example, the already-closed baishida has dozens of stores in big Chicago, each with its own sales staff.
At its peak, the company had about 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees.
There are about seven jobs in each store.
Roughly the same number used by Redbox throughout the region served by the Dunning team.
The third major force that could undermine employment in the retail industry will be to bring more automation and robots into the store in the event that physical retailers strive to remain competitive.
The same innovation enables manufacturing robots to advance the frontier in areas such as physical flexibility and visual recognition, and will eventually allow retail automation to start moving from warehouses to more challenging and diverse environments such as stores.
In fact, as early as 2005, Wal-Mart is already investigating the possibility of using robots, which can patrol the store aisles at night and automatically scan barcodes to track product inventory.
At the same time, self-
Service Checkout Channel and internal
Store kiosks will certainly become easier to use and more common.
Mobile devices will also become an increasingly important self. service tool.
Future Shoppers will increasingly rely on mobile phones to shop, pay, and get help and information about products in a traditional retail environment.
Mobile disruption in retail is already underway.
Wal-Mart, for example, is testing an experimental project that allows shoppers to scan barcodes and then check out and pay with their phones
Avoid long checkout lines altogether.
Silver car at the beginning
The Up car rental company provides the ability to book and pick Up without interacting with the car rental clerk;
Customers simply scan the barcode to unlock the car and drive away.
With natural language technologies like Apple\'s Siri, or more powerful systems like IBM\'s Watson, improving and becoming more affordable, it is easy to imagine that shoppers will soon be able to ask for help from their mobile devices, as they ask shop staff.
The difference, of course, is that customers never have to wait or look for employees;
Virtual assistants will be available at any time and, if any, rarely give inaccurate answers.
While many retailers may choose to introduce automation in traditional retail configurations, other retailers may choose to completely redesign the store --
And maybe, essentially, turn them into scale.
Vending machines.
This type of store may include an automated warehouse and an attached showroom where customers can check product samples and place orders.
The order may then be delivered directly to the customer or even automatically loaded into the vehicle.
Regardless of the specific technical route the retail industry ultimately follows, it is difficult to imagine that the final result will not be more robots and machines --
And there is a significant decrease in people\'s jobs.
Excerpts from Martin Ford\'s rise of robots: the threat of technology and future unemployment.
Published by a division of the Perseus Book Group-Basic Books.
Copyright 2015 for Martin Ford.
Re-printing with publisher\'s permission.
All rights reserved.