My local grocery store has a fresh food department, that basically sells the cooked version of the stores prepared foods (so the pizza they sell is their pizza dough, their marinara sauce, their carton of cheese and their packs of pepperoni, all of which you can grab and make the same pizza right at home) and the store brand foods.
The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough.
I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines.
Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that.
I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most.
The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece.
We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.
The thing I find amazing is that they have a couple of kids working barely above minimum wage essentially doing the task of a vending machine. Their most labour intensive task is rolling out the ball of pizza dough.
I won't be surprised to see grocery stores rapidly change to near full automation. We already have automated shipping warehouses, stocking store shelves is essentially the reverse process and with proper inventory monitoring a shelf would never be empty. Checkouts are already becoming self-serve in many places as it allows more "cashiers" to be open thus reducing lines.
Every job in a grocery store is shockingly automatable, from assembling the loads at the distribution warehouses, we're already talking automated tractor trailers for freight, automated fork lifts to load and unload, automated shelf stackers and self-serve cashes. Whose going to be working? Security, at least until we automate that.
I work construction, and its honestly a matter of time before I'm automated out of a job. I'm blessed by the fact that rough terrain is the main limiting factor, that I might actually stay employed longer than most.
The reason I see automation taking over is because we're approaching onsite manufacture of a lot of materials. It used to be just eavestrough, but now every form of steel roofing can be made on site. It's only a matter of time before someone starts mounting them on boom lifts and running them out in place for workers to just screw down. From there its only going to be a short time until the machine makes and screws the piece.
We're starting to see vinyl products that can be bent to make fascia, which means a machine can easily produce vinyl siding and accessories on site. So how long until they get mounted on a scissor lift and parked at one end of the wall and you can have a 50ft wall of seamless siding.