Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

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IDK man. "Free market will decide" is great, but the issue is becoming that the free market has decided that low wage, non-skilled jobs are low hanging fruit to cut. Replace someone with a kiosk or a robot or just outsource the whole store to an online location and a warehouse/shipping department.

The biggest issue with these sort of stories are that there are these Neo-Luddites who think that we can keep/make jobs in the face of online retailers killing many types of work. Giant corporations don't hire the same number of people that they used to, and the people they do hire don't tend to be low skill positions.

Retail is dying by inches, but it's dying. People can make "customer service" a rallying cry, but "customer convenience" seems to be the actual metric that matters. We're getting rid of these jobs, and too often we're either not replacing them or we're dealing with people who were in JOB X for 10+ years and are unwilling/unable to change to a new field.

I'm not saying any of this is "bad", just that "soft landing and help finding new work" is a cute dream, but not likely. This is what disruption does. It ruins the current paradigm.

I have to completely agree. I remember hearing once that "convenience beats quality", but I also remember reading that "a restaurant with great food never goes out of business".

I think the only avenue for some of these places is to make up for the loss of convenience with high margin, high quality products and services for those who care. But many of these smaller communities just don't have the populations to support many, if any, of these businesses.

But a goods distribution network may just be the paradigm that's being disrupted, and what may happen is a far more services oriented set of business, until that gets displaced by new innovations.

Ultimately, I think we have the population globally, and the needs to support most of us having fulfilling work. But it may just require a lot of creative relocation individually.

So it turns out that "customer service" is actually a good in and of itself that has a price and needs customers willing to pay that price. A Walmart shopper is typically not willing or able to trade some of their disposable income for a more knowledgable/helpful employee. There is a reason that Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and Walmart pick the inventory mix they have, where they locate, and who they hire. They are all different business models with different customer groups.

People with less disposable income have increasingly prioritized physical products over paying for any meaningful interaction with employees which is fine. It is their choice to do so. If people actually value having meaningful interactions on main street in small town America they will still have them. But I suspect that most people don't value that, which one could argue I suppose is bad, but it should ultimately be left up to the individuals that live in small town Vermont, not me.

I rely on a couple of small businesses near me, one of which is my butcher. One might say well the butcher is an unskilled job, but he is selling me two things. First is better meat than Whole Foods. Secondly he is quite a good cook so he can recommend cooking techniques or I can say "I want to do the brisket sous vide" and he will trim it so just the right amount of fat is on it. Obviously this works better with organic products rather than something made of plastic where everything in the same box is a perfect substitute.

Not to disagree with anything else you wrote, but anyone who says butchery is an unskilled job has definitely never tried it. What other C21st job has a legitimate need for chain mail?

I don't think butchers are unskilled, but I have run across people who do. Having an actual butcher has made me a better book :-)

>People can make "customer service" a rallying cry, but "customer convenience" seems to be the actual metric that matters.

Exactly. Don't make it hard for me to give you my money.

Home depot and Autozone aren't going to be killed by online retail because a large fraction of their customers need drain snakes and replacement car parts today, not two days from today.

But if amazon can get urban delivery times down to 2 hours, this equation changes again!

The discussion is about a small town that kept Walmart out but can't do anything about Amazon, not a place like San Francisco.

How many hours away by drone flight do you think that town is from an Amazon distribution center?

3yr and 22min. 3yr to pay off the right people and jump through the right hoops to prevent MA from bothering you while you conduct business. 22min for the drone flight

> the free market

'the free market' here is actually more like an oligopoly than a free market, yet is being legislated as if it is a free market.. that's the problem..

That's because there is no such thing as a "free market" outside of text books and libertarian fantasies.

The rock bottom retail Walmart style prices kinds proves otherwise, though right?

If oligopoly pricing is what happens, how come things are so awesome for consumers right now with these razor thin margins and low prices?

If it was an oligopoly we'd see high prices and the consumer being screwed. Do you think this is happening?

Oligopolies can still be "good" for the customer, but bad for everyone else (i.e. every small business shuttered by Walmart/Amazon).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

replace 'foreign market' with 'big box' and 'domestic' with 'small guy' and there you have it..

the 'consumer' here also can't realistically open up a factory to compete with any of the products being sold... and so is not really a full market participant

Why would I care what happens to some rando for profit company, even if it is small?

All I care about is the consumer. And consumers benefit when prices are low.

People keep predicting that price dumping will cause prices to rise later or something but those predictions have never come true.

IE, people keep saying that Walmart will do this, but how long have they been around? A long time, and prices are still low. Same with Amazon. Prices are still low.

How many decades from now will those inevitable price increases happen?

Well, presumably that’s why we have a social safety net.

By the scale of the developed world, the US barely has a social safety net, and the current governing party at the national level is actively pursuing dismantling what little there is.

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