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Strategies & Market Trends : Universal basic income (UBI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (95)	7/31/2017 9:47:16 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	1 Recommendation Recommended By i-node Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 455

The push has already started: Robots Are Replacing Workers Where You Shop Last August, a 55-year-old Wal-Mart employee found out her job would now be done by a robot. Her task was to count cash and track the accuracy of the store's books from a desk in a windowless back room. She earned $13 an hour. Instead, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. started using a hulking gray machine that counts eight bills per second and 3,000 coins a minute. The Cash360 machine digitally deposits money at the bank, earning interest for Wal-Mart faster than sending an armored car. And it uses software to predict how much cash is needed on a given day to reduce excess. "They think it will be a more efficient way to process the money," said the employee, who has worked with Wal-Mart for a decade. Now almost all of Wal-Mart's 4,700 U.S. stores have a Cash360 machine, turning thousands of positions obsolete. foxbusiness.com About ten years ago, Wal-Mart initiated a program that would have eventually tracked all of their inventory with RFID tags. The experiment failed, primarily because the cost of the RFID tags was too high. The cost of an RFID tag is now considerably cheaper and it would not surprise me if Wal-Mart started tagging again. Amazon's warehouse's are highly automated. If Wal-Mart wants to remain competitive with Amazon, they will have to accelerate their trend towards automation. That will cost jobs.