For over a hundred years, experts have been predicting that salespeople were on their way out. Turn-of-the-century critics predicted that the traveling salesman would soon become obsolete because the branding and advertising industries would do his job. If this sort of prediction sounds familiar, it's because just in the last decade many have been making the same prediction, for reasons not dissimilar to those of 100 years ago: They say technology--e-commerce, automatic kiosks, and maybe even robots--will soon replace salespeople and cashiers. But there's one thing that these predictions ignore, which is the fact that despite persistent fears of automation's effects on retail hiring, the number of salespeople in the U.S. has actually been increasing. According to the latest Occupational Employment Statistics from the Labor Department, which collects data from roughly 200,000 employers, retail salespeople and cashiers were the two most common occupations in the country. Together, the two jobs are estimated to employ more than 8 million Americans--representing roughly 6 percent of total American employment.