To all those complaining - do you use grocery self check out, ATM machines, Amazon, or never read a newspaper?
If so, you need to STFU and realize you are no better for the working man than McDonalds. This is progress. People will lose jobs. We as a culture need to find ways of creating new jobs for low skilled workers, but bitching about old days gone by is not the way to do it.
It would have been cool for the people who pull the economic levers and shape public policy to give a fuck about this impending nightmare. Good luck retraining people to perform jobs that will be automated 15 years from today. It's like moving from one dying profession or source of income to another.
All the people caught in the middle are basically fucked. Poor people are screwed while Wall Street cheers efficiency and cost reduction. Retail jobs don't just support young people from middle-class families to get their feet wet, many people rely on these jobs as a major source of income. Retired people who either didn't save or whose lives were turned upside-down by the Great Recession need these jobs.
We all have to accept that phyical retailers are on the way out. Soon transportation as well. What is going to replace it? And when people lash out when they are handed a shitty hand that will be shit for decades to come impacting their children and grandchildren, re-training and telling people to go to college isn't going to feed their children today. That logic only makes sense from a cushy office seat.
What is most efficient and productive can cause human suffering? Let's not act as if shame and self-worth are not part of this. Hard work isn't worth shit. Your life is determined by what family you were born into, what yuppie private school you went to, and who your community was willing to wall out along the way.
All of the things you mention contribute to this. Only proving the point that this has been a problem in need of a solution for too long. There hasn't been a solution for the loss of factory jobs. Look at Detroit, Camden, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.
The answer accepted by our government is to build high-tech, highly skilled industries over the remains of what used to exist. All the poor, uneducated, different people are ignored and discarded to slums on the outside of town. This wasn't a solution to a problem. It was a re-prioritization of government without care for anyone else.
The same thing will happen with this situation. It's already happening. Private industry will write our public policy to serve their interests. I don't know how much longer you can continue to discard people without a care or social safety net.
