The Icepick Cometh

Hmm, or maybe not: Perhaps my faith in us all working in retail in the future was, er, misplaced. Check out this article and excerpt from Slate.com:

In the coming years, retailers, who are integrating online sales into their business models, simply won't need the same amount of acreage. The upshot: Demand for retail space is likely to grow at a pace far slower than that of the overall economy.

So, in other words, there's going to be no jobs for us in the future, including retail. Are we at world's end? Or do we all just join the fastest ships in the shipping industry?

More from the Slate article:

But e-com­merce has quietly been growing at a rate far higher than that of the overall econo­my. For the last four years, online retail sales have grown at an annual rate of more than 20 percent.

And this, with perhaps a hint of a silver lining for all our future jobs at Target, Wegman's and Stop & Shop (unless, of course, you were planning on working at the Carousel Mall, apparently)…

For 2008, [research firm] Reis projects there will be 159 million square feet vacant … But landlords shouldn't lose faith just yet. While vacancy rates are high in some depressed markets — 15 percent in Syracuse, N.Y. — there's no imminent danger of America's malls turning into ghost towns. The minute the credit crunch breaks, consumers will surely hit the malls with a vengeance.

And then there's this column from Forbes.com, which has little to do with this article and has more to do with The Present and (at least in this pull-quote) My Past and many of My Friends' Present and Past, rather than The Future…

Eventually, companies who strangle and handcuff their employees lose valuable workers and will lose market share; they will be left unprepared when the economy recovers, which it inevitably will. In reality, the abusive or neglectful boss will only be left with people who will take the abuse, and all too often these are underperformers who have little choice in the job marketplace. So, incompetent managers actually weaken the organization for the next economic cycle, while, of course, diminishing their own value and credibility. So, if you are like most managers, complaining about your distressed workload and a life out of balance, ask yourself how many great employees you helped to (unnecessarily) exit the business.

Not that I'm bitter or anything. Just needed something extra to put on my Price Chopper job application.

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Fun week for newspapers! Thanks, Romenesko at Poynter, for rounding them up. You made my evening mix of Coffee Milk and Jameson justified. Mmmm. Let start with the biggest one: the New York Times will cut 100 newsroom people. The L.A. Times is cutting, Baltimore Sun is cutting (David Simon is boiling, and so am I), everyone is cutting. What to do with all these soon-to-be out-of-work journalists when they join our jaded ranks, hopefully in gainful (and sometimes ungainful) employment? I know, how about this?

Actually, I'm not really kidding. My prediction, to anyone who is listening, is that in 20 years, most of us will be working retail full-time, most likely in supermarkets. And this is no knock on retail. It's just going to be the only work left in this country.

Think about it: All the remaining manufacturing jobs will be gone, and most white-collar jobs will be outsourced by then, too. With video and telephone conference-calling and high-speed connections, call centers won't be the only branches exported to central Asia. So why will they need you to sit in that cubicle? (Small consolation: why will they need your middle-manager boss in her tiny mid-row office, either?)

With most major events televised, and even the smallest city council meetings on TV or streamed through the Web, they've even experimented with outsourcing journalism overseas. That includes outsourcing the graphic artists. And check out this one, where the guy naively thinks this won't work for local news because corporate editors are going to worry about having to “spend time and resources on training these [outsourced] reporters to 'know'” their coverage areas. Papers don't spend that money to do that now in their own newsrooms, fool!

So what's left? Retail, my friends.

Ah ha! What about Amazon, you say, and all those reports about chain stores having a shitty Christmas sales season? True, that will mean fewer stores, but they will be there. Put simply, people like to shop, and there is a large segment of people that still like to go out to shop, or just walk the malls. This country's credit love affair (the subprime crisis aside) will continue to make this so.

Plus, fresh (and even frozen) foods will still make supermarkets appealing, even if you can buy boxed stuff over the Internet.

And with retail shipping growing, there will be more of a need for packagers at the various warehouses, truck drivers and deliverymen.

So essentially, we will be a nation of retail workers buying and selling from each other. I work at Stop and Shop, you work at Target, let's make a deal.

The only other growth industry I see is in trash collection (especially with all those shipped boxes to throw away, er, recycle). That is, until Mr. Fusion comes along.

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Don't say I didn't tell you so, but I ain't the only one who thinks Congress is taking the cynically easy answer with this corn-for-fuel bullshit. Check out this story from NPR's All Things Considered. Frankly, I always thought that the answer to the fuel problem and the garbage/landfill problem could be one and the same — and if you were watching closely to the end of Back to the Future you'd have known if for, like, 23 years! Right at the end of the movie, Doc returns in the flying DeLorean and fuels up by dumping household garbage into the "Mr. Fusion" at the back of the time machine. Hmmm, let's see, NPR article, can you help me out?...

But Alex Farrell at Berkeley sees a way out of this. He says the focus of the biofuels industry needs a rapid change of direction, away from using cropland — which is where most U.S. biofuels come from today — and toward other sources of starting material.

"We could replace all of the ethanol that we consume in California just using waste that goes to the landfill today, and turning that into ethanol," Farrell says.

Environmentally friendly biofuels could also be made from agricultural waste or grasses grown on land that's not suitable for crops. The biofuels industry is heading in that direction, but the technology to make use of fuels other than corn and soy is still in its infancy.

Earlier, I was talking about Congress winning easy votes from both the Green types (and sort-of Green types, like me) and from Middle America with this ethanol ploy; instead of doing the hard thing and funding more research into better sources of alternative fuels to wean us off gasoline, Congress grabbed onto the first thing that sounded kind of eco-friendly and then put a bright green sticker on it. But, I didn't know then that ethanol can, in fact, come from sources other than corn — like from trash, as this Berkeley guy said. I also only pointed out the Mississippi-bound sludge and rising farm feed costs (and no change in trucking pollution) angles from the corn-fuel scam. But NPR's story also notes that negative global impacts of clear-cutting land to grow corn to take advantage of Congressional incentives, and the attendant costs of that.

Still waiting on my Mr. Fusion. Keep waiting, and keep waiting for that flying DeLorean, too. According to Back to the Future, we're due for flying cars in 2015, just seven years away, when Congress will likely still be giving us and the environment the ol' spitting corn-cob treatment.

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I consider myself environmentally conscious, if not true 100% green, but I'm trying, and I want to do my part. I drive a car with pretty good mileage (stick shift, 33 mpg). I recycle, my newspapers especially, obsessively (when I get to them, that's when; so stop asking me about my newspaper stack/end-table).

I guess that makes me Bourgeois Green. But my environmental awareness doesn't include these stupid swirly Compact Fluorescent light bulbs. I cannot stand the light that emits from them — it unmazes me. They are the very definition of "not soft."

I had worries about the mercury in them, but this Slate article puts some of those fears to rest. There's really little mercury in them, so don't worry about it (as the article essentially says). Of course, eating a little asbestos with mustard on it prolly won't kill you, either. Still, I'm convinced the mercury hazard is more or less minimal (but please don't eat them).

No, for me, the CFL light is simply too harshly white (take that whiteys!). It resembles nothing of the softness of a regular light bulb. You say, so what? Deal with it. Or as one obstinate Slate commenter put it (in response to a kind of overwrought defense of the old-fashioned incandescent bulbs that I'd like to distance myself from): So, your personal aesthetics will take a back seat to environmental responsibility. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Decider. It is that kind of "I'm-right-you're wrong" attitude that gives us liberals a bad name. Um, that is not to be confused with my "I'm-right-you're-wrong-attitude." Not in the least. Please move on. Nothing to see here, my fine fellow American human friend.

Make these bulbs emit softer light and make 'em capable of dimming (I can't find any that work on a dimmer, other than dimming directly from "full blast" to "off") and we'll talk. Otherwise, I'm a gonna have to find another way to offset my old-fashioned incandescent carbon emissions. Of course, Congress spent its time dealing with these bulbs rather than, um, the economy, our inner cities, and, like, The War (sort of like the case stated in that previously mentioned overwrought article that I thought I was distancing myself from). Whatevs. Next thing you'll tell me Congress is pushing for a move to corn-based fuel that will inadvertently raise food prices by raising cattle feed prices and produce a sludge that will further muck up the Mississippi and continue to send smog-spewing trucks (ethanol-running or otherwise) out on the road to deliver said fuel, rather than work a little harder and fund research for a better alternative and shun the easy skin-deep popular and politically expedient thing to do in a cynical and transparent attempt to appear "green" and win some alterna-votes and appeal to middle America, to boot. But Congress would never do that.

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