Yes It’s True: Who will buy when we’ve lost many jobs?

“But nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.” — The late great comedian George Carlin

“There ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.” — The Supremes in 1967 with “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

One of my greatest personal fears for a long time has been the nagging feeling that some kind of unpleasantness out there is hanging around our lives, and we we overlook its existence. The most sinister of these is climate change,  followed closely by bullying, availability of assault weapons and the ever-widening gap in income inequality.

The worst offenders in ignoring these problems are politicians, many of whom have been bought by rich folks who just want things to remain as they are.

One unpleasant possibility that crept up on me last week was the longtime threat of automation. It showed up at Home Depot last Thursday when my wife was buying a certain material for remodeling.

We paid for the item at an automated checkout station, which at first glance is touted as a more fast and convenient way to buy things in big box stores. But whenever I’m encouraged to use that self-checkout process, I respond with, “No thanks, I don’t work here.”

That’s a losing position. The threat of automation taking away human jobs has been right in front of us for more than a half century. I can even remember Mad Magazine bringing it up in the early 1960s.

What Home Depot was doing last Thursday is becoming more common in the market place. While some may welcome the streamlining of the purchase processes, I wonder what will become of us obsolete humans when we lose these jobs.

As our economic system continues its race to the bottom for the last 40 years, the system eventually will collapse when the everyday formerly working stiffs no longer are able to buy the goods and services taken over by automation.

I was reminded again this morning when I stumbled onto a broadcast story about a fully automated McDonald’s restaurant, which has been threatened in the business sector now for long time. It’s being proven that selling fast food no longer requires human beings to perform the tasks. And these replacement machines don’t take bathroom breaks, they don’t call in sick and they don’t take vacations. 

One of the first signs of this creeping process was the disappearance of the milk man and then the gas station attendant. We instead went to grocery stores to get milk and we somehow dutifully obeyed orders to pump our own gas, wipe our own windshields, check our own oil and put air in our tires.

Fast food joints like McDonald’s were pioneers almost 70 years ago in getting us to bus our own tables and order our food without waiters and waitresses. The result perhaps was cheaper prices and fewer human jobs.

And now retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Target are getting us to replace clerks by using automated checkout lanes. Even rural customer friendly stores such as Harding’s have joined the modern now a-go-go practice of automatic clerking and checkout. It may not be long for grocery baggers and takeout boys and girls, when customers instead take their own carts to the parking lots, just as is done at Meijer.

Too many working people are losing jobs to automation and to customers snookered into doing the work themselves. If very few are working, who will have the money to purchase goods and services? Henry Ford figured that out a long time ago when he decided to pay his employees good wages so they could afford to buy his cars.

But most of us have failed to notice, failed to care, and our feeble, docile response to corporate greed may bring economic ruin.

“But there’s nothing you and I can do. You and I are only two. What’s right or wrong is hard to say…” — Steppenwolf, “The Ostrich.”