Will industry shortage make automation come sooner

When was the last time you couldn't order something on Amazon and have it next day shipping? When was the last time you saw empty shelves in a store? The "driver shortage" is no more real than unicorns and Bigfoot.

 

Driver shortage.....depends on who you ask. If you ask companies with a few hundred plus trucks with established customers and broker relationships, then yeah they'll say it. If you ask small fleets and owner ops that rely on the spot market they'll say it's a pay shortage. If you ask dry van and reefer drivers/brokers who deal with such freight, they will say no driver shortage. If you ask flatbed, tanker, specialized hauling of some sort, they may say yea there is.

 

For the crap pay the megas trying to push. And remember, just about every driver shortage story comes from the ATA or similar "trade group".

If there is such a shortage, why has pay not risen to attract more people? The simple fact pay has not kept up with inflation for the last two decades is all the proof needed to dispell any driver shortage myth.

 

Amazon uses robots in their warehouses and african immigrants for their home delivery drivers who are non-cdl btw! I see your point about grocery shelves tho, even tho the supply chain is razor thin.

I still go to my point that if there was a true glut of people wanting to do this job, then it'd be much harder to find work. You can literally go ANYWHERE in America with a cdl in your pocket, and within 24-48 hrs have a job. That to me does not say that our labor market is tight right now. Things are wide open for us because companies are hurting to find guys willing to do the work.

 

Flat pay is the story across all fields, though. Construction workers in 2020 make the same, if not less, as construction workers in 1980. Everybody is living like a rat in a cage right now, except for wall street and silicon valley, and a thin crust of bloated govt workers.

 

Let's just use another industry that has too many workers to prove what? That's right, trucking has too many workers too.

Go read an economics book. The only industries not keeping up with inflation are ones with too many workers.

 

The jobs that have crazy salaries also provide huge profit margins for the companies they work for. Margins in trucking arent as high as they are for a firm in silicon valley paying a developer $200k a year to work on a single project that can reap them $100M.

 

What exactly does what they use as warehouse laborers or non CDL drivers have to do with a supposed shortage of CDL drivers? The big guys are always hiring because their employees are always leaving and going somewhere else, how many people do you know who've quit trucking altogether?
You look around at how many posts you see on just this website about people leaving Swift for Werner or some other company and then a year later they're looking again because the grass has turned brown.
Then you add in the fact that most don't have a gauranteed minimum earning so it doesn't really cost anything to have some employees sitting around being less than efficient but you have almost immediate capacity when needed. If there was at any point a shortage the big guys you hear complaining about it would not have been pushing ELDs and wouldn't be pushing speed limiters.

 

Do you know why they have crazy salaries? Because programming is a form of art. Like most forms of art it requires talent, and not everyone has said talent. I.E. there is more demand than labor.

P.S. Yes I have worked with a lot of programmers in my previous career. While I will never claim to be a programmer, I have made a couple of simple programs "from scratch" and with enough time can beat most code into submission.

 

You had brought up amazon and how they can deliver things so fast. I gotta admit I'm not to up on the ELD requirement other then the fact its the govt once again stepping in in the name of 'safety'. In fact, I thought that the tracy morgan crash in NJ with that walmart driver was the final straw before they really went hard pushing it? And I thought the slow truck epidemic is because companies are looking for less fuel consumption to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the loads? Same with them all wanting to go auto instead of manual transmissions.