Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

If you can read that in your outside mirror, maybe you are not watching the road closely enough.  And, you need to process the flawed image to imagine its probable reality before planning a reaction.  Business relationships are a little like that, too, in that what we think we see may not be either the whole, or an accurate, perception.

On the other hand, it is vital to get some view of what might be gaining on us, so as not to be completely blind-sided when the future zooms up out of the mists of a murky present and confronts us head-on.

Here's one thing to be thinking about, based on fragmented images.  Minimum wages are on the rise, partly out of raw economic necessity and partly out of political posturing and pandering.  Irrespective of those motivations and movements, entry-level wages are leaping significantly beyond minimum wage pressures, with burger flippers extorting, based on fundamentals of supply and demand, $13 an hour and up, with retail associates getting on to tracks that will get them to $15, then $17 in a matter of months or a couple of years.

Meanwhile, our industry can't get enough warm bodies to fulfill orders, and we'll be forced into a cost-busting wage war with those who are woefully short of the skills that are needed in our world, even at the most elemental execution level.

Ultimately, the end game cannot be anything but more, and more complex, automation as shortages continue, or worsen, and cost justification gets progressively easier.  That means a greater number of less-skilled workers unemployed, and a horrendous shortage of the brilliant analysts, designers, engineers, and other STEM-types.

So, are we over-investing and over-focusing on training the forklift driver/order picker population that will be going away over the next decade or two?  And, are we continuing to peck away at the STEM challenge without really solving it?

I'll repeat.  Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.