We came across an article from Business Insider that points out what we’ve been writing about for some time and we highly recommend you read it. Here is a quote:
Ever since the baby boom that followed World War II, companies have enjoyed a never-ending supply of workers to tap. Hate your job? Fine — we’ll just replace you with one of the hundred others who would be happy to fill your shoes. The abundance of workers made them cheap — and disposable.
But now, those baby boomers are retiring in droves, and companies are suddenly finding themselves without an endless reserve of available bodies.
Source: Business Insider
Of course, we’ve done a series of posts on labor shortages throughout the United States and in European and Asian countries. Ironically, many of the solutions to the demographic problem involve “importing” labor from other countries but there aren’t too many places to import labor skill labor from because it doesn’t exist.
The resulting effect of all of this will be a slower future as we wrote about in The Future Is Slow. The current quality of life will degrade over time. In years past a visit to the grocery store would come complete with a person to check you out and bag your groceries, now you have to do most of those things yourself. The people that don’t like checking themselves out and bagging their own groceries order online and have stuff delivered but that only works as long as there are people that can do your shopping and delivery your stuff.
If you want to get a glimpse of the future, look at what Amazon has started doing, they pay customers to come pick up their stuff.
Amazon.com (AMZN.O) is offering U.S. customers $10 to pick up a purchase rather than have it shipped to a home address, as the e-commerce giant joins other retailers in racing to slash costs for home delivery and returns amid slack consumer demand.
Source: Reuters
We continue to research profit opportunities in this strange new world so stay tuned, stay profitable and stay solvent…