After Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods Market, many wondered what it would mean for the workers in the 450 location of Whole Foods stores. What has been unique about Whole Foods, outside of their well-known high prices, is their uniquely human method of running a grocery store. Each department from produce to the bakery is staffed with knowledgeable and trained experts to help customers with every purchase or decision.
On the hand in Amazon’s brick-and-mortar stores, their approach has been technology heavy. No longer to customers need to stand in lines or wait for assistance, they can grab what they want for the shelves and walk out the door. They don’t even need a cashier! Amazon sensors track the purchases and charges the customer’s account electronically.
One of the largest concerns after the acquisition is for the Whole Foods cashiers. According to the Department of Labor, there are currently 3.5 million Americans working as cashiers in retail establishments and about a third of them work in grocery stores. In addition, another 4.5 million people work in retail sales positions. Will Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods be the death knell for cashier and sales positions?
While Amazon, at the moment, says they have no plans to automate any part of Whole Foods, this may not, in fact, be the right question to be asking. It is less about the purchase of Whole Foods and more about Amazon’s impact on the retail industry in general.
Instead, it may be Amazon’s technology that could make grocery stores completely obsolete, devastating not just cashier jobs but also management and back office positions. “Every grocer will remember this day as the beginning of a new era,” Phil Lempert, a longtime grocery analyst, told Quartz.
Since the 1950s only one position, that of elevator operator has disappeared completely due to automation, according to the U.S. Census. Instead, the real job killer is obsolescence due to changes in that particular business is conducted. Nobody invented automated telegraph operators, instead of the job no longer exists because telegraphs have been obsolete by short wave radios, telephones, and text messages.
As Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy, said to the New York Times: “The bigger and more profound way that technology affects jobs is by completely reinventing the business model.”
Therefore, if Amazon reinvents the business models of the supermarket then what should really fear is the exchange of the human expertise of Whole Foods staff to be traded for data and software, not simply automating the checkout progress.
A recent McKinsey report discovered that a great deal of retail roles could be automated, more than 50%, and that doing so would save businesses money. On the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it notes that “advances in technology, such as self-service checkout stands in retail stores and increasing online sales, will continue to limit the need for cashiers.”
But in Amazon experiments, it’s not just the cashier role being eliminated but the very idea of leaving home to go to the store in the first. As Brynjolfosson said to the Times, “the idea of a cashier won’t be so much automated as just made irrelevant—you’ll just tell your Echo what you need, or perhaps it will anticipate what you need, and stuff will get delivered to you.” The freshest summer peaches could be delivered to your door before you realize you even need them at all because your digital assistant, the speaker in your hallway or the software on your cell phone knew you were low.
This isn’t the first time there have been changes to they way we get are groceries. Supermarkets themselves eliminated stores and jobs by putting specialty butchers and bakers under one roof, eliminating the need to visit a variety of small stores. And in the past, when old employment roles are eliminated by new processes and technologies, other positions arise in their wake. Yet, with this latest sweep of technological advance, many fear that the software will not be creating as many job positions as other advances in the past.
Overall, this most recent Amazon acquisition, the Whole Foods Markets, leave a lot of questions about the state of said locations. At the same, there are many questions about the future of store workers in general. With the rise of automation how many jobs will last the sands of time? What new jobs will arise and will they be better, just as good, or worse than the ones before them? Will there be enough of these jobs to go around for those put out of work in the retail sectors or will those new jobs require a skill set that the retail workers won’t have? There is so much we don’t know about the job future ahead but concentrating on the automation of cashiers is missing out on the big picture for the future of supermarkets.
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