Automation May Be Creating Jobs--in Retail, at Least

Since 2007, 140,000 brick-and-mortar retail jobs have vanished in America. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics defintions, e-commerce has created just 126,000 over the same perioud. The takeaway, it seems: automation, here in the form of the software and robots that power online retail, is eating jobs. But according to a new analysis by the Progressive Policy Institute, those figures miss the point. If you actually include all the fulfillment-center jobs that e-tail has created, which wouldn't have otherwise needed to exist, the figure rises from 126,000 to 400,000, far outweighing physical-store losses. And those fulfillment-center jobs also pay on average 31 percent more than brick-and-mortar store jobs would in the same county.