Retail bust is male boon
In the retailing world, demand for people-pleasing sales clerks is down. Even shoppers who buy in person prefer to do their own research online and get in and out quickly, rather than deal with solicitous sales people.
So the “retail apocalypse” means fewer jobs for women. Retail trade employment barely budged over the past year, with an increase of less than 0.4 percent, or about 58,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For general merchandise retailers, where women predominate, employment fell by about 50,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, demand for merchandise- moving warehouse workers and, at least until self-driving trucks and drones show up, delivery drivers is rising. That’s good news for less-educated men.
In the past year, the number of Americans working transportation and warehouse jobs rose by 47,000, or 5.2 percent, to 945,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For production and non-supervisory employees, the increase was even sharper, 6.4 percent. Men hold more than three-quarters of all transportation and warehouse jobs.
Like capital-intensive factories, warehouses with robot assistants make workers more productive and hence
more valuable. In Amazon’s cutting- edge facilities, they complement human skills. “We like to think of it as a symphony of software, machine learning, computer algorithms, and people,” a spokeswoman told MIT Technology Review.
Wages, while low, are rising as retailers expand online offerings. Fulfillment centers tend to cluster in places like northeastern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, and the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. So they draw from the same talent pool. And competition for workers is getting fierce.
Logistics staffing firm ProLogistix reports that starting pay is up 6 percent over last year. Fulfillment company Radial similarly boosted wages in December.
“Last year was really the tipping point for us,” Robyn Jordan, senior director of human resources for Radial’s global operations, told The Wall Street Journal.
That tipping point is otherwise known as the retail meltdown.
It’s easy to see empty storefronts and dying malls. But out of sight warehouses are buzzing with orders and the workers who fill them. Delivery services like UPS and FedEx are expanding their facilities, creating jobs not only for their own employees but for construction crews. Retail evolution is a change, not a disaster. And it’s too soon to write regular guys out of the economic future. Virginia Postrel, Bloomberg View