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9/23/2017

14 Comments

 
Picture
Has the future of pizza delivery arrived?
​So many jobs that teenagers used to get hired to do in The Olden Days—without a hint of irony, this is how my daughter refers to my wanton youth—have vanished.  
 
At least in our sweet beach town, I’ve never seen an actual bicycle riding paperboy.  It appears that this rise-at-dawn, you’ll-get-a-ton-of-exercise task is now being done by middle aged adults in sensible vans, probably because they’re struggling to make ends meet since living wages are becoming as rare as an affordable house.  The same seems to be true for pulling weeds and pushing lawnmowers.  And thanks to automation, I also haven’t noticed any teen pinsetters in any bowling alleys I’ve visited in the last decade.      
 
Still, there was one young person gig I couldn’t imagine ever going away. 
 
That was the pizza delivery guy (or gal).
 
Usually a local high school senior or a community college student, usually driving an okay car still able to toot its way around the hood, the hours are flexible, and the tips make it a pretty good deal.  In fact, delivering pies was one of the first jobs a neighbor’s son scored, and he liked it okay.  During one four-hour shift, he told me he’d once pocketed $92. 
 
But now, Domino’s—the second largest pizza business in the United States, its annual gross sales are $8 billion—wants to take even this job away. 
 
Yup, as I write this, the cheesy pepperoni giant is in the midst of a six week experiment—delivering pizzas without drivers to customers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of its corporate headquarters.
 
Here’s how it works.
 
For selected pizza lovers, their round meal arrives in a special gussied up Ford Fusion equipped with radar and a camera, but no one gets out of the car. (For now, a Ford engineer is behind the wheel, but the front windows are blacked out to guarantee zero interaction.)  When their pizza is ready, customers must instead leave their couches and TV remotes behind, go out the door, and meet the car at curbside.
 
Once at the special black and white car, they next type a four-digit code into an exterior car keypad.  After that’s done, a magic rear window opens and allows customers to pick up their order from a specially-heated compartment.  Customers are chosen randomly, and receive a phone call if they want to participate.  If they decide to try it out, they’ll then get a text letting them know the car is about to pull up. 
 
There’s more: in the years ahead, not even a four-wheeled vehicle may be needed. That’s because the company is also testing delivery using—wait for it—drones.  
 
These kind of no-humans-involved transactions seem pretty odd to this Girl Clown.
 
Then I remember that the future has always included leaving jobs behind.
 
Indeed, a quick Google search of once important jobs that are now obsolete—and yikes, some were around when I was well into adulthood—yielded more than a few examples.
 
There was the lector, a person hired to read out loud to cigar makers while the latter did their repetitive work.  Paid via the pooled wages of the workers, he would sit in a chair on a raised platform so that most of the laborers could hear him read whatever requests were offered up to him.  And if you’ve seen any movies about the old timey newspaper business, you’ll for sure have seen someone playing a copy boy—essentially, an errand runner in charge of delivering news and press releases to reporters and editors on deadline, usually ripped from clattering wire news services machines.  
 
Other non-existent jobs of yesterday include lamplighters, persons who manually lit the gas lamps that used to line
city streets, and ice men, who delivered blocks of ice to homes with ice boxes (also known as the first refrigerators).  
There were also Dictaphone operators, most often secretaries who would transcribe memos and letters that had
been dictated into a machine by her boss.  About the size of a bulky shoe box, it was a device, in fact, that I had
to master in the mid-1980s.
 
And while we’re at it, let’s get into the iPhone.
 
Seemingly single handedly, these can’t-leave-home-without-it devices haven’t just replaced switchboard operators.  They’ve also superseded folks who used to manufacture and sell alarm clocks, timers, flashlights, calculators, photo albums, address books, day planners, video cameras, maps and a lot more stuff that I can’t think of right now.  Sooner than later, I’m expecting a Zippo lighter, fly swatter and luxe Swiss army knife to be part of the package, too.  
 
But it’s not all that bleak.
 
That’s because for every job that isn’t around anymore, another and often better job slides into its place.
 
So, if the Dominos experiment works, there could potentially be tens of thousands of test vehicles on the road, and that will take more designers and engineers, not to mention state-of-the-art mechanics, radar and camera technicians who need to be on hand to service all of those cars.
 
And while there aren’t any more lectors, there are certainly a lot of stand-up comedians doing their shtick out loud at clubs (whose owners hire managers, food preparers, bouncers, servers, busboys and bartenders) around the world.  
 
Moving on to the extinct copy boy, the Internet has instead exploded with all sorts of jobs that have everything to do with writing, editing and managing news sites, blogs and other information driven web site addresses.  And there are some well-paying careers that are completely brand new, such as those in renewable energy; advanced robotics, and all manner of computer coding, support and development. (The latter could be exactly where today’s teenager might be happiest anyway.)  
 
It’s a brave and sometimes scary new world out there, for sure. 
 
There’s one more thing.
 
I want to take part in at least some of this—because once I stop learning, I’ll stop living.
 
Have you, or a friend or family member, ever had a job that’s now obsolete?  I look forward to your comments
​and stories!  
Picture
Once every secretary's best friend, the Dictaphone machine
14 Comments
Larry Grant
9/23/2017 05:26:10 pm

With drone delivery services there will probably be a new kind of air traffic controller job coming along. Just a thought from a former teenage paperboy.

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Hilary
9/23/2017 07:04:52 pm

YES! And one that might even give tips to the drone operator for delivering a hot pizza in the most time-effective way, too.

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Patti
9/23/2017 05:50:18 pm

When I was a teenager my family spent a week in a cabin near Shasta. Although the cabin had electricity, it still had an icebox. I remember the rather scary drive we had to make into town a few times, just to buy a block of ice for the icebox! (Wow, I am really getting old!)

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Hilary
9/23/2017 07:08:48 pm

I'm sure my daughter has no clue that for a time, the words refrigerator and ice box meant one and the same. Although, the ice box was originally just... that. Larry just explained to me that the ice man would put the ice in a special compartment in the TOP of the box, where it would cool down the rest of the unit. There was a bucket at the bottom to collect the melted ice. And in movies I've seen from the 1930s, the ice man delivered the ice by horse and wagon. How far we have come!

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andrea
9/24/2017 03:48:44 pm

I can't remember a job, but I did learn shorthand in high school and I never found a use for it. I also learned on a typewriter. Typing class was huge; there must have been 40 typewriters. There was ''that one girl'' who was advanced so she used the one computer. Was it DOS? Can't remember. Also, when I was really young we had a milk man who delivered milk. Imagine this in the heart of Los Angeles!

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Hilary
9/24/2017 06:04:48 pm

RE: shorthand, I guess that would work for taking notes in classes, but I don't know anyone who did that, even when I was a college freshman decades ago. I think that once the Dictaphone came into widespread use, you didn't need shorthand... I know the boss I had just dictated letters and other stuff; she's hand the tape to me and I would transcribe it. I also learned typing, on a MANUAL typewriter, in a summer school class, the summer going into 10th grade. My mother told me that I could no longer write term papers; I would have to type them. I passed the class, typing 20 words per minute, and I was proud of myself because although slow, I was steady, and made zero mistakes. Typing is still a valuable skill, but my daughter started learning it in second grade! And we had a milk man, too! In Long Beach, in the 1960s! I think they still exist in certain parts of the country, but overall, yeah, they're gone.

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leslie spoon
9/24/2017 04:25:15 pm

Hilary I remember when I was a young kid back in the early 60`s my relatives lived in San Pedro. There was a ice house down around 7th St. that people still used there. My Great Aunt Lucy still used an old ringer washing machine that was out in her backyard. Times have really changed a lot.

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Hilary
9/24/2017 06:06:45 pm

Wow, an ICE HOUSE. I guess people went to get their ice there instead of having it delivered; it was probably cheaper that way. Also, I'm sure your aunt LOVED the wringer machine--much easier than scrub boards. How far we've come in a relatively short amount of time!

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Jim Nolt
9/28/2017 06:39:38 am

Hilary, my paternal grandfather (who died soon after I was born) owned an operated a threshing machine. He hired himself out to farmers in Lancaster County, PA. His brother operated an ice house. No one in the family remembers it too well, but I'd surely like to know how they made, kept, and delivered that ice... and for how long the business operated.

I also remember what we called "The Lockers." Before people had freezers, they stored their perishables in rented freezer lockers. The closest one to us was about six miles away.

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Hilary Grant
9/28/2017 03:42:16 pm

Even this city girl knows what a tractor is, but I couldn't be sure of a threshing machine. So I looked it up! Wikipedia says: "A piece of farm equipment that threshes grain, that is, it removes the seeds from the stalks and husks. It does so by beating the plant to make the seeds fall out." It sounds pretty specialized and probably not cost-effective to own one as a single farmer, so it would make sense to have one guy in the area do the work on a "rent me and my machine" basis. But what is used nowadays? Do you know? I, too, would like to know the logistics of operating an ice house! As far as freezers, I don't remember freezer lockers, but I do remember that in the '50s and '60s, owning a family "deep freezer" was considered an absolute necessity for the growing suburban family. Some advertising agency convinced housewives that it was imperative to keep 40 pounds of frozen meat in your garage at any given time! Of course, now there are pretty big frigs that have pretty big freezers, so they aren't really around much... plus, I bet they ate up TONS of electricity. The sales jobs for appliances live on... but since most large appliances are now made in Mexico and China, those who actually made them here in the States moved on to other factory jobs... or retirement.

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Jim Nolt
9/28/2017 05:19:42 pm

Hilary, I don't know exactly when, but the threshing machine was replaced by the combine (accent on the first syllable). Threshers, by the way, were also called thrashers; you might see that spelling in some articles. The combine harvests and threshes the grain stalks all in one operation. By the time of my farming days, most farmers had their own combines. I was not cut out to be a farmer, and my career was brief! Actually our farm was small. We grew potatoes, corn, strawberries, cherries, and had chickens and pigs for our own use... but the work was done entirely by hard. There was the old John Deere tractor, but that wouldn't start most of the time... and the only the only thing we used it for was to pull the manure spreader once or twice a year. In my spare time I helped on my uncle's larger farm up the road. If I remember correctly, he had three tractors, a baler, and a combine... as well as the much-needed manure spreader. Those were the days, my friend... and by gosh I thought they'd NEVER end. :-)

Hilary
9/28/2017 08:30:02 pm

Wow! One of the last typewriter repair stores! http://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2017/09/14/gramercy-typewriters-wonder-list-handmade-orig-vstan.cnn/video/playlists/stories-worth-watching/

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jennifer
10/6/2017 02:05:40 pm

It's a shame that we're training our children to keep their eyes on a screen (computer, ipad, phone) - they're not learning how to work. CBS Sunday morning had a piece about construction jobs. We lost 1.5 million construction jobs in 2008 during the crash. Only half of those workers came back...and now, for every new construction worker, another 5 retire. On top of that, we're chasing out the undocumented workers from Mexico - instead of figuring out how to give them temporary work permits. As a result, rebuilding Houston (and Puerto Rico and, and, and...) just won't get done in any kind of timely manner. btw, the piece also included interviews with high school students in Pennsylvania who attend a trade school. They'll earn $60k right out of school working as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc - rather than being in debt, as most college graduates are these days. For those interested, the junior college Los Angeles Trade Tech is fantastic.

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Hilary Grant
10/7/2017 03:27:26 pm

Agree with everything here. Tech jobs are absolutely where it's at these days. NBC Nightly News did a story on Delta Airlines' search for jet mechanics. The company has launched a program through Lansing (Michigan) Community College, where the students get certified to work on the planes... and IT knowledge is absolutely part of the mix. Jobs start--and this is Michigan, where the cost of living is much lower than California--at $50K. It's tough to find a good handyman around here, for sure. I'm on a waiting list for the man I use.

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    Hilary Roberts Grant

    Journalist, editor, filmmaker, foodie--and a clown! 
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