Maybe you didn’t notice how she started out with Sam’s Club salaries and then switched to the WalMart business model? It appears that WalMart uses the same pay model for Sam’s Club as they do for their WalMart stores. I’ve never been to a Sam’s Club (none around here) but I can’t imagine it is much different from Costco.
The table, btw, shows that WalMart has a higher profit margin than Costco. That’s not the same thing as product margin, but is interesting.
WalMart’s business model is to stock everything. Keeping the shelves stocked is nothing compared to the logistics problem, but WalMart is very good at logistics - and aren’t afraid to spend on stuff like RFId. (I don’t know if that worked, but they were trying it.) Now if the inherent complexity of their stores means you need a more skilled workforce to handle it, and they don’t pay enough to get that workforce, whose fault is that? It would be fairly trivial to generate a list of what product goes to what aisle and shelf based on the sales database - in fact I’d be shocked if they didn’t do that already. But that won’t make workers hustle. Costco workers hustle. From the articles she was responding to, it seems WalMart workers don’t. Not that I blame them.
English major PhDs perhaps. I don’t work in academia, I work in industry, and engineering PhDs are not commodities by any possible definition of the term.
In my field there are relatively few PhDs in the specialty we need. I’m a good recruiter for them because I know the professors working in the area and I can get first shot at them.
But even in academia PhDs are not commodities. Universities don’t hire the first four who come in the door and avoid drooling. Advisors and grad schoo and post doc publication records are vital. There is an oversupply in some areas, but that is different from commodity status. I somehow doubt applicants to McDonalds carry with them the same kind of resume as people applying for university jobs.
In many fields the distinguishing factor between employed professors is publication record and how much grant money they bring in. What do you think tenure decisions are based on?
Skilled or PhD candidates can play off multiple offers, in good times like today at least. (In bad times we just don’t hire anyone.) See if your fast food worker can do that.
Now, some schools produce hordes of MS students for money. They all have identical resumes. They are pretty close to being a commodity.
I believe I understand what you are saying Voyager, but I think we’ve laid out our views and really we just have different opinions of things. You brought up the Walmart thing, but I am not convinced that there is enough basis for an analysis that supports your view. I think we are splitting hairs on whether phd’s are commodities or not; when you say, well a Phd needs to be this type of Phd with this kind of post doc work during the right time period then you are getting far more specific and these criteria only apply to a small minority of Phd’s, so you are not talking about Phd’s in general at all, only a minority Phd’s with the right stuff at the right time. To me that is saying something quite different.
I guess if you want to get at the heart of our views, you could say I don’t really find anything that impressive about the life of someone who has to work for a living usually. Companies and markets are indifferent to anything other than whether or not they want what you can provide and they will generally only pay the minimum price to get it; no matter how exciting your resume is. Admittedly, my views are probably a little outside of the norm on this so I’ll just say YMMV.
I’m talking about all PhDs - based on my experience, my daughter’s experience, and the many I’ve known. I’m not saying that supply and demand don’t play a major role. If no one is hiring no level of skill is going to help. And demand increases starting salaries. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to grad school, but there is a definite pecking order of grad students, with those on top getting funding and the better advisers.
Well, sure, no company is going to pay more than it has to. What that price is is what we’re discussing. An exciting resume to me is one that shows the student has the skills I need. If those skills are in demand we’re probably going to pay more for them. That’s the minimum not to lose the candidate.
I don’t know what you mean by impressive. Are the only impressive people those who inherit money? Was Bill Gates not impressive before he became rich?
Bill Gates was born into an extremely wealthy family, so yes? I mean impressive in the sense of there is not really so much distinction for me in this parsing of middle classiness - Phd, no Phd; none of it really changes one’s lifestyle the same way having an amount of money that allows one to live well off investment income - that is impressive to me, that is just how I feel. It’s not to say that you and your educated friends are not impressive or special in your own way, but to me it’s just not the same. I’m not a wealthy man myself, but I don’t really lose any sleep over these things.
Bill’s family was quite well to do, but not really wealthy. But my point was that he really worked before he became superrich. I used Microsoft Basic on a C64 before MS-DOS existed - it was pretty good.
In about a year or so I’m going to start living off investment income, so maybe I’ll impress you then.
I think you misinterpret what I mean by impress. The sentiment I am expressing is that I just do not see such a large distinction in the life of various levels of workers, even highly skilled workers are far from being immune from the vagaries and turmoil of macroeconomic forces whereas having substantial wealth will shield one from such things to a much larger extent. It was not meant to be personal - I don’t know how you came to view it that way. As I said, I myself am not wealthy.
PhDs may not be commodities YET, but it’s trending that way, what’s more, it’s trending towards them and everyone else becoming not just commodities, but unneeded, unwanted commodities. Automation and robotics are getting nothing but more advanced and sophisticated and cheaper. Not just menial hand labor is going to be replaced. Some tasks formerly done by doctors and lawyers are now being done by computers. By some estimates, we would be at full employment right now if it weren’t for all the advances in productivity created by computers, and every sign indicates that computers and robotics will do nothing but expand their capability to replace human beings in the workplace. You and others like you are whistling in the wind.
Sort of a high tech version of the old hippie dream of “getting back to the land” eh? How much land will people need to survive in such a scenario, and how will they acquire it, I wonder?
I can’t imagine what I said that gave you the impression that I think anyone is immune from the effects of macroeconomic forces. I’ve been through enough business cycles to have seen their effects. All I was saying was that traditional market forces are more in play for new hires than for existing hires, and that is because of psychological factors such as inertia.
During downturns hardly anyone new gets hired, and students are in worse shape than those employed.
My comment was more of a joke than anything else. However there isn’t that solid a line between the two cases. Many people in jobs have investment income also, though we don’t have to live off it. yeah, the rich - and those living off investment income are rich - have it better.
We’d more likely be at full employment if the wealth created during the run up had been distributed as has traditionally been the case, rather than going in very large part to the top 1%.
I work in one of the most automated industries around. A ton of the stuff that was done manually 25 years ago is automated today - and I was involved in some of the automation. But we still hire like crazy. Why? Because we can churn out more new designs faster than we could 25 years ago. Because we can make far more complex designs than we could 25 years ago. And we aren’t anywhere near where we can be, especially on the software side.
I’m retiring soon, so I’m set. But the kids we hire will be fine for the foreseeable future. They’ll have to reinvent themselves as technology changes, but I had to do that also.
The people we should worry about are commodities - those who bring nothing special to their jobs. How can we find them something useful to do that will contribute more than flipping burgers?
Without getting into detail, surprisingly little. This is due to a blending of new and old technologies and practices. For the US, I do not believe lack of land would be an issue. Cost of land per acre is extremely low in many area of the country. I can appreciate your healthy amount of skepticism though, I’ve seen more weird fringe ideas come and go than I can recall, and I’m only 38. So I would not really expect a reasonable person to just hear this idea and thinks it is a very likely scenario.
I think our difference of opinion stems from our perceptions of what constitutes a commodity worker. To me a worker escapes commodity status when something outside of productivity buffers them against substantial loss of income. Some union workers fit this, tenured professors fit this, wealthy investors fit this, some CEO’s fit this, even, I would say, a Mcarthur genius grant recipient fits this to some degree. A really talented or highly educated person does not by default fit into this category to me. They always need to be productive; their income depends upon them being and remaining productive, and their is nothing to buffer them against substantial loss of income if they are no longer able to be productive in a competitive market.
Thanks, I understand where you are coming from. But I think this stretches the definition of commodity. Let’s consider a non-person item say jewelry. There is commodity jewelry which is sold in umpteen stores in the mall and which is more or less identical. There is luxury jewelry, which is sold in specialty stores and which is unique. Demand for each is controlled by market forces.
Tenured professors and union workers are buffered contractually. many union workers are not unique. I doubt autoworkers went through the same screening process as professors do.
If 20 people at a job do roughly the same thing, in other words are effectively commodities, someone wishing to reduce costs can randomly choose those for the axe. If however someone is not a commodity, and has a unique skill, he or she is much less likely to get axed for cost cutting. (Skill no longer needed is another matter.) I’ve seen this happen.
Another example is acting. Extras are commodities - and they get less pay and worse conditions. Featured players - not stars by any means - get dressing rooms, more pay (still union scale) and access to craft services.
Booting an extra during shooting is probably not going to cause a problem, booting a featured player will. When they get high enough you get disruptions, like we see in the dead character thread in CS.
BTW the investor is also at the mercy of the environment. At least a non-rich one whose investment income is roughly what he needs to live on. Look at what happened in 1929!
That way of looking at workers makes sense to me. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to quantify the risks and likely lifetime earnings measured along with quality of life measurements for these various subcategories of workers - I can’t think of anywhere it has been done in a serious way.
Your way is a useful way of looking at jobs. I think it used to be far more important. When I was a kid back in the '50s and '60s we had really excellent teachers. One big reason they were excellent was that they grew up during the depression when teachers were one of the few job categories which were safe. Government jobs commanded less money because they were safe. When I started work jobs in the Bell System were considered safe, and I knew lots of people who were lifers - who. had been working there for decades.
That used to be a factor - along with salary - if a job was worth taking. Now almost no job is safe, not even union ones - so I think it counts for less.
Tenured faculty is safe - but no one gets hired as tenured faculty, unless you have tenure already. Academic jobs are far from safe.
“Commodity” has a very distinct economic definition. Specifically, there is nothing unique about any one piece of product vs another. Any firm manufacturing the product makes the same product as any other firm. Oranges and other produce are a commodity.
Maybe that’s what PwC meant by the “orange world”. Companies looking to hire a contractor programmer or data analyst or lawyer or project manager don’t care who they hire. They look for a checklist of degrees or certifications and experience levels. Sort of like shopping for a bag of oranges.
This speaks to the concept of having a “career” vs a “job”. With a career, there is an expectation of increased responsibility and income as one gains experience and expertise. Possibly make lateral transitions to other aspects of your field.
I think the trend now is to silo people into permanent tracks. Managers are hired from one pool. Top executives from another. Worker bees and even their project managers may be mostly outsourced contractors and consultants. Sort of how the military separates officers from enlisted personal. No one works their way up from the mailroom to vice president anymore because they are in two functionally separate and distinct classes.
