Amazon's Whole Foods takeover: Automation will be the job killer

A Whole Foods store in Boston.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Amazon’s plan to buy Whole Foods has elicited a lot of heavy breathing and assertions that Amazon will wipe out a lot of grocery stores. I thinkthat these forecasts are exaggerated. Groceries – stuff that can rot – are not the same things as books and clothes.  The distribution challenges are very different.

Most people will continue to drive or walk to a regular (not high-end, expensive “organic”) supermarket or small grocery store for the foreseeable future. Inflation-adjusted wages have been falling for most people. The market for expensive (and some would say pretentious) food is unlikely tovastly expand. For all its alleged glamour, most people don’t shop at the expensive likes of Whole Foods – and never will.

An Amazon-Whole Foods mating might work very well in densely populated affluent areas with a close enough proximity to warehouses to ensure that the stuff can be delivered unspoiled to Amazon-Whole Foods supermarkets or to your home. But it wouldn’t work well in thinly populated areas.

Finally, even in this plutocratic age,  it’s possible that the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department will awake from their all-too-frequent torpor and press monopoly charges against the company if it tries to take over a big hunk of the grocery business.

Anyway, I’m more worried about the effects on employment and wages of the automation of cashier and other jobs now underway in many kinds of stores than about Amazon specifically (I always use cashiers, not those machines, in a tiny effort to help preserve jobs.) And I worry about the effects on local tax revenue and jobs from so many stores of all kinds closing because of the online revolution.