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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (562432)	4/22/2010 6:23:42 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577843

Probably. Look at a supermarket now and in 1980. The first thing you would see is far fewer employees. 30 years ago, everything had a price stamped on it. Now, nothing does. That greatly speeds stocking of shelves. In addition, the cash register systems tracks what is sold, greatly simplifying inventory control and reordering. In addition, there are fewer cashiers. In 1980, barcode scanners were rare, now they are ubiquitous. And there wasn't anything like self-checkout. Now they are pretty common. The whole system is a lot more efficient than it was back then. While I wouldn't disagree with your analysis, it totally misses the point of the previous post -- which is that minimum wage employees are NOT "worth" twice what they were. It is the addition of new technologies and the willingness of customers to tolerate lousy (or at least, lesser) service which is making these employees "more productive". Not anything the employees are actually doing differently. When Walmart invests in new technologies, they do it because it will save them money and allow them to reduce prices, NOT so they can fork over more money to their unskilled labor force.