(2) Derek Thompson, Death of the Salesmen; More Americans work in retail sales than in any other occupation, but these jobs are threatened by technology.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magaz ... he-salesmen/309309/
Quote:
"Throughout the 20th century, American stores were the locus of low-skilled employment. The total retail workforce tripled between 1940 and 2000, and for much of the century, the sector employed more people than construction and health care combined. Even today, the two most common occupations in America, by a wide margin, are retail salesperson and cashier. Last year, 7.6 million people held those jobs * * * Retail still employs one in nine working Americans
"One Walmart worker replaces approximately 1.4 other local retail workers, according to a 2008 paper by David Neumark, Junfu Zhang, and Stephen Ciccarella. The Walmart Effect manifests not just as a double-digit price reduction, but as the disappearance of about 150 retail jobs per county in which Walmart operates, the researchers found (other studies show a more benign impact). 'Walmart is remarkably labor-saving,' said Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Philadelphia Fed.
"Yet Walmart, of course, isn’t the biggest threat facing retail workers anymore. That would be the inexorable growth of e‑commerce, which is poised to capture more than 8 percent of total retail sales by the end of 2013, according to Forrester Research. * * * Amazon amasses more than $600,000 in sales per full-time employee—three times the retail average.
Note:
(a)
(i) James Cash Penney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cash_Penney
(1875-1971
(ii) "For decades, the eponymous company he founded in 1902 lived up to the superheroic promise of his handle."
handle (n) : "NAME"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/handle
(iii) The article later states, "Sam Walton started his career as a young trainee at JCPenney in the early 1940s and ended it as the CEO of the largest retailer [Walmart] on Earth."
Sam Walton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton
(1918-1992; "Walton joined JC Penney as a management trainee in Des Moines, Iowa three days after graduating from college. This position paid him $75 a month. He resigned in 1942 in anticipation of being inducted into the military for service in World War II")
(b) "As recently as 1998, Sears was in the Dow 30. Today, Sears Holding isn’t even in the S&P 500."
Dow Jones Industrial Average
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average
(also called the Dow 30; one of several indices created by Wall Street Journal editor and Dow Jones & Company co-founder Charles Dow; is now owned by Dow Jones Indexes, which has its majority owned by the CME Group; the second oldest US market index after the Dow Jones Transportation Average, which was also created by Dow)
(c) "somebody builds an assembly-line robot—and suddenly the trend line finds itself on the long side of the mountain."
long (adj):
"forming the chief linear dimension <the long side [length] of the room>"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/long
The other is "the short side of the room" or breadth.
(d) Amazon, Inc "has by now fully grown into its name."
(i) grow into sb/sth: "to develop into a particular type of person or thing
<He's grown into a fine, responsible young man>"
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, undated.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ... sh/grow-into-sb-sth
(ii) "grow into its name"
amazon (n):
"1 capitalized : a member of a race of female warriors of Greek mythology
2 often capitalized : a tall strong often masculine woman"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amazon
(e) "Some stores have resisted the temptation to cut workers—and have benefited from higher sales and happier customers. Costco, Trader Joe’s, and QuikTrip not only have more (and better-paid) salespeople, but also report more sales per employee than their immediate competitors, according to research by Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management."
(i) QuikTrip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuikTrip
(a Tulsa-based chain of convenience stores [gas station actually]; The first QuikTrip was opened in 1958 in Tulsa, Oklahoma by Chester Cadieux and Burt B Holmes)
(ii) Zeynep Ton
http://www.zeynepton.com/ |
发表于 5-24-2013 12:01:07
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