Retail Is Dead: The New Professional Class Takes Over

Retail vanishes, professionals take over. America's newest job shift isn't on the factory floor. It's at the checkout counter. Retail clerks who dominated after the 1990s are steadily losing ground to E commerce, automation and self checkout, while a broad tier of white collared professionals takes the lead. Economists call it structural transformation. Productivity pushes workers from storefronts to keyboards, warehouses and offices. In the latest data storage store payrolls, thin online operations, scale and roles cluster in technology, finance, healthcare and logistics. Minors now count for roughly 10th of 1% of the workforce. Now they're allowed in politics. Tiny in employment, the center of gravity for everyday work keeps moving off the sales floor. Now this isn't doom, it's displacement. And the policy question is whether training, benefits and wages catch up before another automation wave hits. As one period detail reminds us of what's gone. An 1894 cobbler wrote this don't hurry. The shoes came very fine. The pace and jobs have changed. Okay, so what's the real message here? The nature of employment is changing, but it's always changed. The history of capitalism is so many jobs that are in demand one year are completely irrelevant. 20, 30, 40, 50 years later, the rate of change is going fast and faster. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. Now, there wasn't really a huge headline on this retail apocalypse. It didn't get all the attention that coal miners put out of business did. In part because you don't have the image of the 45 year old white man with the wife and kids at home and the two cars who could support himself with a coal miner's job. But those people were not working in retail for the most part. It wasn't seen as a manly, masculine job, rightly or wrongly. And retail was never frankly very good at supporting a family unless you were a manager at a big store. The income wasn't there, so doesn't mean it's not really bad for people who were in the retail space. Now the real jobs plan is reskilling, not nostalgia. The idea that people, any one politician of any party is going to bring back coal mining jobs, or so called good jobs. Manufacturing just doesn't face the reality test. It doesn't pass that test. Now we're also losing bank tellers, travel agency clerks. No surprise there. I can't remember the last time I used it. Well, I do, it was a couple of years ago, but for most people they've not used a travel agent in years. You just do everything online, Expedia, places like that, Travelocity, Mall photo labs. Who goes to a mall photo lab these days? Unless you want a special mounting to put on your wall, you just look at the photos on your phone or you get a really nice high quality printer where you can print photos at home. I have that. You probably do as well. Now there are some professional job categories still rising, according to this report, and this was courtesy of the Washington Post. Appreciate them. There are still a rise in some jobs for software developers, although typically not the introductory jobs that is being replaced by artificial intelligence, security analysts, data scientists. Big rise there. Now here's the problem. If you are someone who does not have a college education, which is most of America and certainly most people in the world, there was a time when it was relatively easy to get a job in retail. You showed up on time, you dressed neatly, you had a couple of references, you could get a job in retail. Well, if you don't have a college degree, I'm sorry, it's going to be very difficult to get a job as a data scientist. I couldn't get a job as a data scientist. You have to have advanced mathematical training, if not a master's or a PhD in some mathematical or scientific field or data statistics field, at least an undergraduate degree. So the people who lose their jobs in one category are not going to just go, oh, I lost my job at the Gap, let me go be a data scientist for IBM. It's not going to work that way. Now health care is absorbing a lot of the people leaving fields like retail because healthcare always needs home health aides. And for most of the time, in most situations, there are not the academic barriers to being a home health care aide. Care coordinators is another position that is growing quickly. The problem is these jobs just don't pay much. As much as we say, we love grandma, grandpa, other relatives who need constant care, we don't as a society typically pay them much. Now surgeons, yeah, they get nice money. There is a growth of jobs and the nurse practitioner route, again, that requires a lot of education. Often a four or five year nursing degree, sometimes a master's degree. So what does this really mean for you and for me? I think if you're a young person, it's fine to say, well, I've always wanted to be a doctor, I've always wanted to be an engineer, or I've always wanted to be a lawyer. It's fine to have ambition about the future, but really question yourself. Is this truly what you want or is this what your parents are telling you you have to do? Is this really what you want, or you just watched a movie where there was a. Or a TV show where there was an attorney who was really glamorous. In my era, people saw Perry Mason, an old TV show where the attorney was always on the right side of justice, always got his innocent client off. And that inspired a lot of people to become an attorney. Okay, it worked out for some. But you've got to realize you want a career for the long term. Now I want a career for the next 35 years, which is in part why I'm right here. I'm here podcasting to you today, live and on demand, on every social media platform, every podcast platform, because frankly, I've done my research. Podcasting is a growth field. Now, am I telling you to become a podcaster? No. What I am asking you to do is look at your strengths, look at the marketplace, look at where there is growth and look at where there is shrinkage. And maybe, just maybe, you don't want to put all your eggs in the basket of some area that is shrinking. Look for where there is growth and possibility and where you can continue to learn and learn and learn. That's one reason why I am whole hog into this podcasting space, because I see traditional TV networks crashing their audiences, melting away their advertising base, leaving them. And it's coming, frankly, to shows like this podcast, audio format, video format. It's a growth area. Now, I'm not saying everyone needs to be a podcast. Surely that's not the issue. But if you're telling yourself, well, I want to be a lawyer because I just want to be a lawyer, there might not be nearly as large a demand for lawyers in the future. And I hate to sound like a snob here, but if you can't get into a top rated law school in your country, if you're in a second or third tier law school, it may be that your job when you get out of law school isn't going to be there, it's perhaps going to be taken by artificial intelligence, whether it's ChatGPT or legal chat or something else. So you've got to prepare for the future. Always be thinking about the future. Nobody has made more career blunders than I have. Let me be very transparent. I've been fired from jobs, I've had periods where I've started new ventures that really didn't make money for two years. So I, I'm very humble about this with good cause, with good reason. But one of the things I do pride myself in is always thinking about where's the World going to be in 10 or 15 years, and how can I be a part of that in addition to being a part of the economy right now? So in 1998, I said, hey, the future is going to be online training. And I started making online courses. I lost money for 15 years, but it eventually paid off. And forgive me for sounding like I'm bragging, but yeah, Now I have 12 million student enrollments, but it took a long time to get there. Year and a half ago, I started an artificial intelligence interactive video clone of myself to give people advice on public speaking, training, media training, personal development habits. And it's still losing money. But I'm convinced that interactive audio video clones will be the future, which, by the way, you can use it right now by going to tjwalker AI and you can say, hey, I missed what TJ said on the show today or yesterday. Sum it up. My clone can give you a nice distilled version of what you actually hear on this show. So again, let me be humble here. I can't really see the future. Anyone who tells you they can is typically wrong. But we can still make guesses. We can place various bets out there. And if you're placing the bet on, oh, there's always going to be room for me at the local retail store telling people, here's a pair of jeans, here's the place to try it on. You might need to expand your bets. You might need to go to a plan B, a plan C, a plan D. Because the very nature of capitalism has always been creative destruction. Companies are destroyed. You know, companies that were huge, huge and gigantic have disappeared. The companies that are a part of the Dow Jones Industrial Index often are completely different every 20 years. So there's always change. But there's also change not just at the corporate level, but at the individual job level. The nature of jobs has changed. Here's one thing that has always stood the test of time, and that is someone to have the smarts, the intelligence, the drive, constantly learn how to do new, hard things that are valuable to other people. If you're constantly learning and you're learning difficult skills that result in value to other people, I think you're going to have a job for a long time, or at least until general. Artificial intelligence is so great, it puts all of us out of work. And whether that happens in five years or 500 years, nobody really knows. So all we can do, I believe, is learn new skills, continue to learn. The idea of I graduate from high school or I got my degree from college, and I can just put in my eight hours of work, and the rest of the time is relax, have a beer, play video games and not worry about my career and just coast. Those days are over.