Karen Weise

Walmart, UPS, DHL, all these companies are investing in automation.

Right.

And so this allows them to stay competitive and to keep offering the faster service, the more products, the cheaper prices that we talked about that customers consistently love.

I mean, you run the risk of kind of this bifurcation where you lose more of the baseline hourly work and you gain more higher skilled, higher paid work.

I mean, in theory, automation is supposed to get rid of the bad, the mundane, the boring parts of the job.

But it's unclear how those numbers balance out.

You know, in this case so far, we're seeing not as many of those higher skilled jobs as there would be of the hourly work.

It's also not clear if they're the same people that can do them.

You know, Amazon has this apprentice program.

They say 5,000 people have gone through it.

But you do have more requirements going into it and you need to go through training.

So, I mean, they're worried about having enough people who can do that work.

But it's not necessarily the same person that might come in and find a typical Amazon job because...

You don't need great English skills because you don't need to come in with much beyond a clean drug test and being over 18.

I think that's right, because when you have a tough economy, companies look for more efficiencies.

And so it creates more pressure to do exactly this type of thing, regardless of the jobs.

Yeah.

Exactly.

The Amazon jobs are known for being there and accessible in many ways.

You know, they pay above minimum wage.