<story><title>I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine</title><url>http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s&lt;/a&gt;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>potatolicious</author><text>Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That&apos;s a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine</title><url>http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s&lt;/a&gt;)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Permit</author><text>Wow, that&apos;s truly incredible. I didn&apos;t realize anyone had reached this point. I&apos;m excited to see this stuff progress, but I can&apos;t help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be created by this.</text></comment>