trucking and selling
8th May 2017 – Trucking and Selling
My daughter has a somewhat unusual friend. In his early twenties his aim was to win the US Masters Golf Tournament within two years. He even bought a green jacket to make sure it suited him. When that didn’t come off, he became the only person I know to take a holiday in North Korea. More recently he devoted himself to driving one of those huge truck trains that roar across the Australian outback.
Rick is the nearest I have got to meeting a real live truck driver. Mind you, according to the American Trucking Association, there are more than three and a half million truck drivers in the USA. Europe evidently has even more. While I enjoy going on road trips, I don’t think I’d enjoy being a truck driver hell bent on getting to their destination day in and day out. I like to sample small town sights or venture off on a side road to see what’s over the hill. The idea of being away from home and family for so many nights, often spent in a cramped bunk behind the driver’s seat, also doesn’t appeal. About the only positive thing is that they don’t have to waste three years doing tertiary education; all they need to do is pass the advanced truck driver’s course.
I’m also not friends with any checkout cashiers even though they give me a friendly hello and a smile before they start spinning my purchases past their scanning machines. I’m not sure I’d like their jobs either, sitting or standing all day monotonously waving items from right to left then processing the payment before starting with the next customer. Like the truckies, they also don’t need tertiary qualifications. According to the census records there are four million of them in each of America and Europe.
Now truck driving and checking out are two occupations which are predicted to be completely automated in the next decade. Assuming each worker is paid, on average, ten Eurodollars an hour, then commercial enterprises will save a whopping two hundred and fifty billion Eurodollars a year. Shareholders will be ecstatic at the thought. They might even be tempted to give customers discounts. Of course they could go even further and follow the Amazon example and close their physical stores. Robots in a warehouse would package the goods we order online and load them into self driving trucks or drones for automatic delivery. I just hope they remember to include a robot arm in the design to press my doorbell otherwise they might have to hang around till the late afternoon when I take my dog for a walk and find them lurking with intent outside my gate.
Of course there are some problems in this scenario. Most of the retrenched fifteen million or more workers won’t find another job so they won’t have the wherewithal to go online and buy goods from the warehouse. In fact, that’s two hundred and fifty billion Eurodollars that won’t be spent in the economy because it hasn’t been earned. I hope the store owners factor that in when justifying their automation projects.
The displaced workers will have to live somehow. Liberal governments are already looking at paying a universal income grant. For the sake of an example, let’s assume that the American and European governments are generous and set the grant at the equivalent of eight Eurodollars an hour. Then the stores would only need to pay their workers two Eurodollars an hour to give them their pre-income grant salary. This, of course, in turn cuts the savings they achieve from their automation projects by eighty percent and, on top of that, the government is going to need to tax the company and its owners more in order to afford the basic income grant. Maybe at the end of it all there won’t be any savings at all.
The big problem with all of this is that, by and large, companies don’t care all that much about the workers they retrench. They just want to make more profits. Many governments also don’t care; they think people are unemployed because they are lazy and don’t want to work. So companies are going to be able to profit handsomely until the politicians wake up to the fact they could be swept out of office by a swarm of voters who have a vote but little else. Then there will be a scramble to close the stable door after the horse has long bolted with the loot.
Sometimes I just wish we could start with a blank sheet of paper and design the perfect life system for us all.
My daughter has a somewhat unusual friend. In his early twenties his aim was to win the US Masters Golf Tournament within two years. He even bought a green jacket to make sure it suited him. When that didn’t come off, he became the only person I know to take a holiday in North Korea. More recently he devoted himself to driving one of those huge truck trains that roar across the Australian outback.
Rick is the nearest I have got to meeting a real live truck driver. Mind you, according to the American Trucking Association, there are more than three and a half million truck drivers in the USA. Europe evidently has even more. While I enjoy going on road trips, I don’t think I’d enjoy being a truck driver hell bent on getting to their destination day in and day out. I like to sample small town sights or venture off on a side road to see what’s over the hill. The idea of being away from home and family for so many nights, often spent in a cramped bunk behind the driver’s seat, also doesn’t appeal. About the only positive thing is that they don’t have to waste three years doing tertiary education; all they need to do is pass the advanced truck driver’s course.
I’m also not friends with any checkout cashiers even though they give me a friendly hello and a smile before they start spinning my purchases past their scanning machines. I’m not sure I’d like their jobs either, sitting or standing all day monotonously waving items from right to left then processing the payment before starting with the next customer. Like the truckies, they also don’t need tertiary qualifications. According to the census records there are four million of them in each of America and Europe.
Now truck driving and checking out are two occupations which are predicted to be completely automated in the next decade. Assuming each worker is paid, on average, ten Eurodollars an hour, then commercial enterprises will save a whopping two hundred and fifty billion Eurodollars a year. Shareholders will be ecstatic at the thought. They might even be tempted to give customers discounts. Of course they could go even further and follow the Amazon example and close their physical stores. Robots in a warehouse would package the goods we order online and load them into self driving trucks or drones for automatic delivery. I just hope they remember to include a robot arm in the design to press my doorbell otherwise they might have to hang around till the late afternoon when I take my dog for a walk and find them lurking with intent outside my gate.
Of course there are some problems in this scenario. Most of the retrenched fifteen million or more workers won’t find another job so they won’t have the wherewithal to go online and buy goods from the warehouse. In fact, that’s two hundred and fifty billion Eurodollars that won’t be spent in the economy because it hasn’t been earned. I hope the store owners factor that in when justifying their automation projects.
The displaced workers will have to live somehow. Liberal governments are already looking at paying a universal income grant. For the sake of an example, let’s assume that the American and European governments are generous and set the grant at the equivalent of eight Eurodollars an hour. Then the stores would only need to pay their workers two Eurodollars an hour to give them their pre-income grant salary. This, of course, in turn cuts the savings they achieve from their automation projects by eighty percent and, on top of that, the government is going to need to tax the company and its owners more in order to afford the basic income grant. Maybe at the end of it all there won’t be any savings at all.
The big problem with all of this is that, by and large, companies don’t care all that much about the workers they retrench. They just want to make more profits. Many governments also don’t care; they think people are unemployed because they are lazy and don’t want to work. So companies are going to be able to profit handsomely until the politicians wake up to the fact they could be swept out of office by a swarm of voters who have a vote but little else. Then there will be a scramble to close the stable door after the horse has long bolted with the loot.
Sometimes I just wish we could start with a blank sheet of paper and design the perfect life system for us all.
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