THE END OF RETAIL? Why The Future Of Shopping Doesn’t Need Workers.

This end of retail might have begun in 1997, the year the great jobs race was all tied up.

In that year, there were 14 million people working in retail, 14 million people working in the health & education super-sector, and 14 million people working in professional & business services. So, for a split second, there was virtual tie in the race within service jobs.

Fifteen years later, the tie-game has turned into a blow-out. Health care jobs grew by almost 50%. Professional/business services — a catch-all that includes such wide-ranging jobs as law, software engineering, and waste management — rode the roller-coaster of two recessions and wound up 4 million jobs biggers. And then there’s retail. In 15 years, retail added only 400,000 new workers, or 26,000 jobs a year. In the time that health/education jobs grew by 50%, retail grew by 0.2%. . . . Today, as Brad Stone and David Welch report in Bloomberg Businessweek, the future of retail looks like a wasteland. Even with stores like Circuit City out of business, it might be too late for even the survivors like Best Buy to have a sustained recovery.

Well, Best Buy can’t compete on service. Or, at least, it hasn’t tried. Meanwhile, some thoughts on an alternative approach.

UPDATE: Reader Sean-David Hubbard writes:

I’m finding more and more that I’m being let down by brick and mortar stores in terms of selection. I’m a big guy, 6’4, so finding clothes in my size is an exercise in frustration. A good portion of the clothes I wear now, I purchased off of Amazon. And just this morning, I was looking for a specific frozen food item (Chicken Tandoori with Spinach, in case anyone’s interested) in both Trader Joe’s and The Fresh Market and came up empty on both counts. It seems the the range of products available to the consumer are wider than ever, yet the brick and mortar stores only have so much self space. As a result more people are going to have to turn to Amazon, and similar online retailers to find what they’re looking for.

And reader Martin Murcek comments: “Well, it seems the Universe has a quota for disinterested – rude workers. As the need to interface with retail sales people fades, it seems the ‘can’t be bothered’ types smoothly transitioned to jobs in the healthcare sector. I anxiously await the day when everyone but my actual physician is a machine. At least I could forgive a drone for acting like – a drone.”