Right now there is robots fill store shelves in Japan. We haven't yet adopted this technology here in America, but it's hard to imagine that 7-11 or Walmart won't at least experiment with it soon. Walmart abandoned its robots scanning shelves in 2020, but machine vision and artificial intelligence have improved significantly in the last five years, and it's only a matter of time before it's the machine filling that family-sized row of fruity pebbles rather than the kid making extra money in his senior year of high school.
The truth is that there simply aren't many jobs available for teenagers right now, and most of them have decided to simply drop out of the job market. In August 2000, 52.3 percent of Americans ages 16 to 19 were actively working. In August 2025, that number will be just 34.8 percent.
There are a ton of reasons why (which mostly come down to “technology”), but no matter why, it's bad for everyone.
First of all, no one benefits from having your burger flipped by a robot instead of a human. Well, no one except those who invested in RoboBurgers.AI. As Harry J. Holzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said, indicatesAutomation “shifts wages from workers to business owners, who earn higher profits with less labor needed.” As a customer, you are getting a product that is clearly no better or more reliable than what a 17 year old goth could make. You won't find it cheaper either, but if there is more… AWS failureyou may get nothing at all.
I'll never have to worry about my salmon and avocado rolls going bad in the delivery driver's 2012 Prius due to a firmware update and spotty cell reception.
Just as importantly, teenagers are missing out on valuable experiences during some of the most important years of their lives. Learning to juggle responsibilities, navigate the workplace, and develop basic financial literacy skills becomes increasingly difficult as you age. They will come to work with less experience under their belts, without having the opportunity to experience working with a difficult boss in a low-paying job at Dairy Queen.
MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argues that automation doesn't really improve performance In most cases, this simply increases income inequality, pushing out low-skilled workers. Automation has eaten up jobs in industry and warehousespushing adults who would normally fill these positions into fields traditionally reserved for younger workers, such as retail, food delivery and even paper routes. average age of retail worker in the US in 2024 was 38.7. In particular, in the clothing retail trade, which is significantly younger than the retail trade as a whole, this figure was 33, which is significantly higher 29.3 in 2015.
And now that adults are delivering pizza in addition to their stagnant wages and try to keep up rising pricesrobots I'm coming to this jobtoo much. It's not enough that 17-year-olds with driver's licenses have been priced out of the Uber Eats and DoorDash delivery market, where, depending on what state you live in, it could take you 21 to deliver Chinese takeout to hungry families. Now, both of these companies play around autonomous food delivery robots in the USA.
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I have no interest in having an unmanned sushi refrigerator drive up to my gate—I don't see any benefit to myself as a consumer. There is nothing broken in the current system that a robot can fix. Plus, I never have to worry about my salmon and avocado rolls going bad in the delivery driver's 2012 Prius due to a firmware update and spotty cell reception.
Stocking shelves, scooping ice cream, flipping burgers, and delivering takeout isn't the most glamorous job. But they used to give young people and teenagers their first taste of independence. They taught them valuable lessons about budget management and taught them important interpersonal skills. But the spillover effects of online shopping, automation and digital media have largely driven them out of the workforce.
Teenagers have voluntarily left the labor market because they are forced to compete for an ever-shrinking number of jobs with an ever-increasing number of workers. And now we teaching robots take the few remnants that remain. Even product packaging not safe.
