The fact that you can now warehouse with robots lowers the barrier of entry for warehousing, which creates new companies that will host competition against Amazon, offer contract labor for Amazon, and in both ways create jobs that are superior to the previously needed entry level pick and packer. The same laborer can now be promoted at a new company to a higher pay job that requires no greater skill set, simply because there are now more of those better jobs at more companies. We can't all be managers at Amazon. But we can all be managers at 100000 different warehouses that previously didn't exist. That's where they are supposed to go.
That seems wrong. Why would robot warehouses lead to more and better warehouse jobs for humans? Fewer humans would be necessary overall in the existing warehouses, and it's not obvious to me why a lot more warehouses would be created.
Did replacing manufacturing jobs with robot assemblers in—for example—the automotive sector, lead to more auto manufacturers and better jobs for auto workers? I don't believe it did. There may be more manufacturers now, and more jobs, but they aren't high skill or highly-paid jobs, and they aren't staffed by the people who were laid off originally (because they were mostly moved to other countries, where people can work more cheaply than the countries where the jobs were lost).
For capital intense upgrades like robots, why wouldn't the advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of small ones?
I also don't understand why the number of new skilled workers in this new world would somehow equal the number of warehouses workers laid off. What's the connection between those two seemingly unrelated phenomena? Why wouldn't it, for example, be a lot of laid off low-skill workers, and a just a few new, high-skilled workers?
Or for that matter, why the next generation of robots wouldn't just replace those higher-skilled warehouse jobs in a few years. And so on.
You aren't going to trust moving 100 million in product strictly to robots for a long time. And that's just a small business. And there's a lot of them.
>why wouldn't the advantage go to a few big players, rather than a ton of small ones?
Because it's still way way cheaper than labor. Maintenance means you're paying for one guy's medical benefits instead of 20 guys, for example. The labor is the cost that's difficult to overcome and gives the bigger players an advantage. When that's stripped away, it's possible to compete against the bigger guys.
Cheaper than existing labor costs, loans can overcome capital entrance, and you can afford to pay on them when there's a smaller operating cost, plus they have some fixed ROI. Existing need for more warehouses, combined, I don't see why we wouldn't see more warehouses. Of course we will.
Look at middle America. Almost every metropolitan in the country is building warehouses in and around their airports. Some indeed are Amazon's and other big suppliers, but the majority are not. They are small storage and shipping outfits. Don't forget who supplies Amazon!
Also, the push for more condensed housing means fewer people per household which means more duplicate junk per person as they won't share with another household, obviously.
Growth means warehousing. There's no way around it. Unless we will manufacture domestically, that demand isn't going anywhere.
The moat is definitely smaller when labor, your biggest cost, is smaller. You can finance a purchase that's much larger if you are able to make the monthly payment because you don't have high labor costs. Purchasing has an ROI, and labor doesn't.
