Jennifer Smith
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2019
last heard Oct 2019
Jennifer Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · 'Tis the Season for Robots to Take Holiday Seasonal Jobs · 29 Oct 2019
podcast
What they're actually doing is parts of jobs, primarily walking.
So they're moving materials from one place to another.
Robotics, still pretty tough to actually replicate a human hand picking an item out of a bin, which is what happens with most of your holiday e-commerce picking.
But what they can really do is help shuttle products in between different places where they're getting packed out.
And sometimes they're even guiding associates to store it to the shelves in a warehouse.
The reason for that kind of uptick, and it is small in terms of overall hiring, the reason for that uptick is because people are having such a hard time finding staff.
The warehouse industry has really kind of exploded with the growth of e-commerce, and there's a lot of competition for workers, and a lot of folks are finding that they're having trouble finding
handling the volumes that they get as more Americans shop online, they're having trouble handling the seasonal surges.
So they're looking for other ways to get help besides just adding bodies.
So there is still plenty of demand for seasonal labor.
That's for sure.
Again, the growth in the use of automation is more because people can't get enough workers, less that they're looking to replace workers.
Although in the long term, you may see some of the more repetitive tasks that humans do being replaced by robots.
What the employers say, or they're careful to say, is that the growth of online volumes means that they will always need to hire more workers to help.
The surges are very challenging and they sort of swing.
It's a different world than when you would plan for the holiday by putting in orders that come through the ports in the fall and then they're in your warehouse and they go to your store.
The demand cycles are faster.
People are placing tons and tons of online orders around Thanksgiving.
Then you might get a second peak right closer to Christmas.
So it's a lot to adjust for.
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