Tills and skills: How to prepare America’s retail workers for technological change

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Tills and skills

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IT USED to be the American shopper that exemplified the state of the world economy. The focus now should be on the person on the other side of the till. America’s retail industry is huge: it employs 15.9m workers, who represent one in nine American jobs. It is also undergoing wrenching change, as e-commerce eats into sales. There is no more pressing test of society’s ability to cope with technology’s impact on work.
That impact is already visible (see article). For all the benefits that online retailing brings to consumers, it is causing immense pain to offline rivals. Last year 4,000 American stores closed; this year more than twice that number may shutter. Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency, expects retail defaults this year to outnumber those in 2009, at the height of the global recession. Some formats—discount stores, groceries, high-end malls—will continue to thrive. But many will shrink. The industry has shed 50,000 net jobs since January. Department stores may need to close more than 800 stores to reach the …
Source: Retailing
Tills and skills: How to prepare America’s retail workers for technological change