May 29, 2015
Morning Edition had a segment on computer tablets that many restaurants are now placing on dining tables which allow people to order and pay their bill without needing a waiter or waitress. The point of the piece is that these tablets are likely to cost the jobs of many table servers.
While this is true, we have always seen productivity growth. (That is what it means to displace workers with robots or computers.) Contrary to what you might believe from reports like this on NPR, productivity growth has actually been very slow in the last decade, as in the opposite of robots taking our jobs. Here’s the data on productivity in the restaurant industry over the last three decades.
Productivity in the Restaurant Industry: 1987-2013
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As can be seen, productivity increased relatively rapidly in the restaurant industry from 1996 to 2006. Since 2006 productivity has actually fallen in the industry. That means that restaurants are getting less money for each hour of their employees’ work. It might be interesting to hear a segment on why we seem to have such low productivity (i.e. negative) growth in sectors like restaurants rather than implying that we are seeing the opposite story.
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