I never said it was foreboding. It is a sign of change. The location used to employ about 60 people on three shifts, seven days a week and a fleet of drivers that serviced drug stores and small groceries for a hundred mile radius. The digital change in photography as well as advanced cheap home printers eliminated nearly all of the need for places like this. The reality is the displaced workers from events like this usually wind up in lower wage or no wage situations and this plants some of the seeds for the coming recession. The large paper mill shuttered three months ago, and many of the workers now have new jobs - a half the wages they were making before. That will reduce spending and bill paying. Foreclosures are ticking up. The railroad cut hundreds of high paying jobs due to automated changes. I don't blame the railroad, it has no real choice, but those workers will be losing money and spending power which means less truck sales, mortgages and I'm betting a local store that mainly sold specialized footwear that railroaders were required to buy will close soon too. This is the world in 2019.
This is not the first time this type of change has occurred, but it will be the largest downsize in workforces in generations and it will be felt in what will be the Trump Recession. No, it has not started yet, but all the pieces are in place, and Trump, font of wisdom that he is has already spent all the ammo governments have to fight recessions - lower interest rates, tax cuts targeted to create jobs. His cuts merely took money out of companies and into profits for shareholders - that will not create jobs. The deductions for R & D have also been altered to diminish that as well.
When people are eliminated from the job market and economically downsized due to technology and plain old fashioned greed, it is foreboding.
Well, I don’t disagree with R&D. That is a key to any new business development opportunity.
That said, my post was in response to your comments, which were presumed to be in line with the titles’ thread. Advances in technology will always result in change. Jobs in a photo finishing stores, while honest and admirable, were never high paying careers. If workers chose that as a profession, so be it. But they would never be rolling in the dough, so to speak, while trying to make a living. Technology has elimated this almost entirely, as it has with other jobs. That’s what some folks might call as “progress.”
As for railroads, those companies associated with moving goods will remain. Commerce needs the rails. But those railroads involved with commuter transportation, for example, have their unions to blame for layoffs and modernization. Again, ‘ twas never a professioon that one might become rich, but was still admirable, and still respected. But when the unions force commuter tickets to run between $300-$400 per month, as they do for the Metro North / NJ Transit / Long Island Railroad commuter lines in the NY tristate area, for example. then the consumer will fight back, and complain. Mind you, many of these commuter lines are charging absorbidant monthly ticker prices, and are in the red because of the unions. So what happens? The unions have killed the golden goose, and the lines will look to technology to help run more efficiently, and more cost effectively.
Feel free to blame trump for a recession if it occurs on his watch. He’s in office, that will be on him. Just as the rise of the stock market is on him. Your logic is disingenuous, since you are upset that profits are going to well run businesses and shareholders (horrors!!! the typical socialist rant), companies that employ workers by the way.