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Automated Warehouse In Tokyo Managed To Replace 90 Percent of Its Staff With Robots (qz.com)
Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said."
The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).
The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).
I read the article and the identical linked article.
I couldn't find the # of people employed before the 90% layoff.
How many people did the automation replace?
The implementation costs are also wildly varied, there's a factor of 10 (1 to 10 billion?, so $8M USD to $80M USD).
From the article:
Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.)
BlameBillCosby.com
Trying to figure out if losing all those jobs to a robot will make things better in Japan or anywhere? Always skeptical when we dive into solutions like this without factoring in all the human ramifications positive and negative.
Japan has chronic labor shortages due to low birth rates, high longevity, and strict immigration. The latest unemployment is 2.5%. Anything that frees up people to do other things in Japan is good for them.
Will Amazon have this in place for next year's Christmas season?
Will Walmart have this in place for Summer 2019?
Will there be any (starter) job that is safe ?
Every employee replaced is one less customer for your products.
Every dollar not spent on that employee is one more dollar spent on something else, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Lump of Labor Fallacy
If noone is earning money, who is going to buy your product?
Is that why countries that have avoided automation, like Ethiopia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, are doing so much better than countries like America, and Western Europe, that have seen their economies destroyed by the "productivity catastrophe"?
When economic and cultural conditions destroy the incentives to have kids, and create incentives to avoid having kids, can we really say it is "their fault" for not having kids?
Who is at fault for making it so hard to make ends meet that people can't afford to have kids? Or for making the courtship process a legal minefield? Or for socially engineering people to to have completely ridiculous expectations?
Just wait until Amazon gets ahold of this company. Those raises wont have been so expensive after all.
Modern Japanese culture is a weird mix of ancient tradition and rapid post-world western influences. They work-culture westernized fast after the war, and since hard work has always been appreciated, Japan's economy boomed as people dedicated their time and careers to companies, working long days with little to no vacation time.
Westerners don't often understand the kind of pressure this puts on the workers. They're still heavily career-oriented: you're not expected to go 'shopping around' for a job that you find suitable, you're expected to pick a company once you graduate and then dedicate yourself and your career to that company. Due to age old concepts of honor, resigning from a position is seen as disgraceful, it's a sign of personal failure, and stain on your reputation. Same actually goes for firing people. Weirdly enough, many Japanese companies don't want to fire people unless they absolutely have to, as that reflects badly on the company, so instead they often just move the person or persons to do something trivial, in the hopes that they'd one day resign themselves and take the shame off the company. But since this doesn't often happen, you've got people showing up to work in many large companies doing tasks they really don't want or need to be doing, but they keep doing it,
The same attitude largely permeates the entire Japanese society. Their legal system is (in)famous for having an over 99 % conviction rate. That's right, if your case ends up in court you're going to be found guilty with 99 % certainty. This is because the prosecutors abhoar the idea of defeat (again, dishonorable) so only cases where the evidence is extremely strong will even be taken up by the prosecutors. This also means that a lot of the crime that happens goes unsolved because neither the investigators nor the prosecutors want to take up cases that will end up in failures, thus tarnishing their reputation and honor.
And the same is true ont he social side of things. Something like a third of the Japanese under 30 are virgins. It's not because they don't have sexual drives (anyone who knows anything about the Japanese porn industry will know this) but because again, ancient traditions combined with the insane expectations of the work-life (company first, always company first) and little spare time has created a situation in which the Japanese don't have a dating culture. It's not really a custom for people to go out on a lot of dates to try and find a suitable partner, because again, going through several different partners without marrying them and settling down is a shameful thing. You're expected to pick a partner, marry them and setup a family. This creates immense social pressure, and many people simply opt to stay single because they lack the skills and the mechanisms to choose a partner, especially since the social norms in Japan are such that approaching a random stranger say at a bar for example is extremely unlikely to happen.
These are all generalizations obviously, I am not Japanese nor have I been there but I know people who've worked and lived there. Obviously not everyone conforms to the aforementioned ideals, but the general point I'm trying to make is that Japan, defeated by the US suffered a massive national disgrace, to which they responded by embracing the ideals of their victors with zeal and dedication of Bushido, and that has created a very prosperous economy with a high-standard of living, but it's come at the cost of the social lives and mental well-being of its inhabitants. Economies can change and adapt fast, but cultural conditioning set forth by thousands of years of customs and history doesn't.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Strangely, the higher automation you see, the higher employment rates. But generally employment rates don't change much over the long-term at all... it's much more affected by short-term events (e.g. wars, housing market crashes, etc.) than anything to do with automation.
That's true historically, geographically, etc.
It's not hard to see why - less workers = cheaper products, more machines = more service and manufacturing of them, greater production = cheaper living costs, etc.
If we could find out how to build houses in an automated fashion (and thus make housing cheaper while cutting out an awful lot of labour costs), we could drastically change the world... maybe then rents/mortgages wouldn't be in the "half your wages or more" category.
Fact is my job didn't exist 30 years ago, and probably won't exist in another 30 years. The "utopia" of the robots doing all the work and humans not being able to earn money... well.. that's a very, very, very long way off as there are currently several billion jobs around the planet with more being made all the time.
Historically, if the job wasn't within a few hour's walk, you couldn't ever have taken it... you really think that in the modern age of remote-working, mass transportation, etc. that we're not almost ridiculously better off jobs-wise? And actually the other thing is - regulation. If humans can only legally work X hours a week, in certain conditions, and the vast majority of human jobs aren't machine-replaceable (as is currently true, but folding clothes is obviously NOT an irreplaceable high-skilled job!), then you need to hire more humans than you would have before such legislation.
Fact is, employment is much more to do with "how highly skilled you are". Because a machine *cannot* currently write software, or design CPUs, or work stained glass, etc. If you're a basic unskilled labour worker, you're always gonna struggle for work.
Get a skill, any skill, and you likely will have a much better time of it. Get a skill that a machine can't automate and you're guaranteed that you won't get pushed out.
It's almost like all those years of people telling me to "get an education" paid off, in fact.