by mandevil | 2025-06-04 16:06:31+00:00
Not sure about what will happen with software engineers, lawyers, or doctors, but I do know how computer assistance worked decades ago when it took over retail clerks, the net effect was to de-skill and damage the job as a career, by bringing everyone up to the same baseline level management lost interest in building skills above that baseline level.

So until the 1970's shopping clerk was a medium-skill and prestige job. Each clerk had to know the prices for all the items in your store because of the danger of price-tag switching(1). So clerks who knew all the prices were faster at checking out then clerks who had to look up the prices in their book, and reducing customer friction is hugely valuable for stores. So during this era store clerk is a reasonable career, you could have a middle-class lifestyle from working retail, there are people who went from clerk to CEO, and even those who weren't ambitious could just find a stable path to support their family.

Then the UPC code, laser scanner, and product/price database came along in the 1970's. The UPC code is printed in a more permanent way so switching tags is not as big a threat (2). Changing prices is just a database update, rather than printing new tags for every item and having the clerks memorize the new price. And there is a natural language description of every item that the register can display, so you don't have to keep the clerk around to be able to tell the difference between the expensive dress and the cheap dress- it will say the brand and description. This vastly improved the performance of a new clerk, but also decreased the value of the more experienced clerk. The result was a great hallowing-out of the retail sector employment, the so-called "McJob" of the 1990's.

But the result was things like Circuit City (in its death throes) firing all of their experienced retail employees (3) because the management didn't think that experience was worth paying for. This is actually the same sort of process that Marx had noted about factory jobs in the 19th century- he called it the alienation of labor, this is capital investment replacing skilled labor, to the benefit of the owners of the investment- but since retail jobs largely code as female no one really paid much attention to it. It never became a subject of national conversation.

1: This also created a limit on store size: you couldn't have something like a modern supercenter (e.g. Costco, Walmart, Target) because a single clerk couldn't know the prices for such a wide assortment of goods. In department stores in the pre-computer era every section had its own checkout area, you would buy the pots in the housewares section and then go to the women's clothes area and buy that separately, and they would use store credit to make the transaction as friction-less as possible.

2: Because in the old days a person with a price tag gun would come along and put the price directly onto each item when a price changed, so you'd have each orange with a "10p" sticker on it, and now it's a code entry and only the database entry needs to change, the UPC can be much more permanently printed.

3: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2994476 all employees paid above a certain amount were laid off, which pretty much meant they were the ones who had stuck around for a while and actually knew the business well and were good at their jobs.