New Record: Restaurant Employees per Capita

Click to enlarge.

As of November of 2013, 3.28% of our population works in the food services and drinking places industry. That's a new record. Can't ever have too many highly compensated restaurant workers in this brave new world!

As clearly seen in the chart (red trend line), it will only grow exponentially higher from here. Just look at that 0.990 correlation!

What's that blue line you say? Oh, that's an old trend that you need not concern yourself with all that much. With a lower correlation of just 0.988 it was surely doomed to fail at some point. And what a pathetic growth rate it had. That 1.78% annual growth rate pales in comparison to the new and improved 2.42%.

And to think, all we needed to get here was a Great Recession to speed things along. It's only a matter of time before every man, woman, and child in America will be flipping burgers for a living! Hurray! What could possibly go wrong?

Motherboard: Meet the Robot That Makes 360 Gourmet Burgers Per Hour

Yeah, robots are taking our jobs, and it’s not a question of if, but when and how. Economists often treat the service industry as some last bastion of downsize-proof labor, but, clearly, robots will make sandwiches and take orders, too.

A future where we can get gourmet burgers, cheaply and on the quick, sounds pretty nice. But that future will also have structural unemployment, unless we start taking major strides to rethink and reform how we work in a world where robots are doing much of the heavy lifting.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart