The government that says it is working to reduce inequality eliminates low-skill low-wage cashier jobs via touch-screen ordering kiosks… (Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex cafeteria):
I posted this on Facebook and it attracted the following comment from a New York City resident:
I don’t see a problem with eliminating jobs. Most jobs are going to be eliminated over the coming years including high paying white collar jobs. Eliminating jobs is simply accelerating a society with a guaranteed minimum income.
So it is okay if folks who want to work as cashiers can’t get jobs and/or must accept lower wages (due to lower demand) for a period of some years because it will usher in the glorious future of guaranteed minimum income. (See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/11/30/long-term-effects-of-short-term-free-cash-guaranteed-minimum-income-experiments/ for how we actually did have guaranteed minimum income in the U.S. for a few years)
At the Costcos now, a nice pleasant, social, orderly, swiftly moving line to get your hot dog, or pizza slice has been turned into a generally confused, isolated, mob of people difficult to move through all listening to hear the poor Costco employee have to yell out numbers so they can be heard by people 15 feet back who ordered via the kiosk.
Perhaps there’s been some improvement in throughput, but it’s a far worse experience.
Here in Oregon, the line is shorter, and both times I used the Costco food court kiosk, my food was ready when I reached the counter.
If your respondent is correct (and assume they’re not being facetious) and the white collar jobs get slashdotted into the ether along with the menial, degrading, low skill, low wage jobs, it raises at least one big question. Will the government’s guaranteed income program support defenestrated white-collar workers at their previous level of compensation because they have to keep living “in the manner to which they had become accustomed?”
If not, it sure sounds like everyone is going to be equally poor.
Jobs will certainly go away at many compensation levels – but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for UBI. Your specific example is amusing because some job elimination is a result of other liberal experiments (like raising minimum wage in some states to $15). Suddenly, it’s cost-effective for McDonalds and others to push out kiosk technology, wiping out those gains. We’d all do well to understand unintended consequences a bit better.