Newsletter #14 (1/13/2025)
Expensive tuna fish, Chick-Fil-A robots, AI is coming for jobs (yawn), and Waffle House behaving badly
Here we are with the first newsletter of 2025: a revised format and now going out weekly (every Monday). You’ll likely see other tweaks made soon. Let me know what you think.
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AI is not coming for your job if you are in construction. Or other service-based jobs. Yet. Maybe never?
This is according to Fast Company’s recent article about the latest Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum.
In fact, some jobs are expected to continue to grow, “including: farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, salespeople, and food-processing workers. Care economy jobs, such as nurses, social workers, counselors, and personal care aides are also expected to grow significantly over the next five years, alongside teachers.”
Critically, there are certain human-based skills/traits which are most in demand, including “critical and creative thinking, including resilience, flexibility, and agility….. In fact, analytical thinking is the most sought-after core skill among employers, with 7 out of 10 companies calling it essential.”
For example, when an HR department’s beloved ATS system that autorejects someone’s entry-level application that mistakenly ‘requires’ 5 years of experience, that’s a great example of something that needs to have oversight. While technology can help you automate portions of your company, do not overlook how valuable a person is to your organization’s automated processes as an overseer. Like anything else, AI is going to need oversight.
The nation’s top grocer is someone you’ve never heard of.
Apparently, that is, if you live outside of Texas. Our friends at Forbes, probably based somewhere on the East Coast, recently told their audience that for the third time in the last four years, our good friends at HEB have been named the nation’s best grocer according to the RPI, or Retailer Preference Index.
I say our good friends because, if you do live in Texas, chances are you not only have you heard of HEB, you shop there several times per week. Now, not everyone is blessed in Texas to have the chance to frequent an HEB, as they are lighter on locations in West Texas and up in the Panhandle, but as you get closer to I-35, HEBs are seemingly everywhere. And with good reason. They have great training, which makes for great employees, and their grocery selection is top notch. But, most importantly, they run an efficient operation and everything is planned to a “T”, including famously when the shit hits the fan.
Is Waffle House really stealing money from their employees?
A group of employees has alleged in a federal labor complaint that Waffle House is doing exactly that, to the tune of up to an alleged $46 million annually.
In the complaint, waiters and waitresses of Waffle House have alleged they are made to do non-serving labor such as janitorial work, allegedly for hours per day, at the tipped scale wage (currently at $2.13/hour at the federal level). There’s a lot to unpack in this complaint, but Waffle House needs to figure out how to address this situation or risk fanning the flames even more.
The Chick-Fil-A robots have arrived.
Only for squeezing your lemons, at least so far. The company said the move, centralizing a mundane task into a manufacturing location, has saved the company 10,000 labor hours per day. At $15/hour, that’s a savings of $150,000 companywide PER DAY, or $45 million over the course of a year (note: I assumed 300 business days since Chick-Fil-A is famously closed on Sundays and assorted holidays).
While the article does not disclose how much capital has been invested to setup the facility and the robots, saving $45 million in labor costs will help offset that kind of investment rather quickly anyway.
So, what does this factory look like? Check out the shop line photo from another article about the new process, this time from Bloomberg:
$1.3 million for a tuna fish.
For over 600 pounds of a tuna fish, that is.
The first sushi auction of 2025 in Japan netted over $1 million for the 608-pound tuna, according to USA Today.
For some reason, all I can picture is a gigantic can of tuna fish at the grocery store. But, in all seriousness, the opportunity to garner a $1 million sale for that kind of catch is enough to get most anyone interested in finding the capital to do so, at least those interested in fishing. Just wow.
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© January 2025, Brandon Caldwell. All rights reserved. Hyperlinks are used frequently for proper credit to source material on respective websites, news articles, social media or other sources. Images are used with and in credit to rights reserved to their respective owner(s). While it can be a useful tool, no ChatGPT or other generative AI was used in the production of this newsletter. Opinions are mine and do not reflect the opinion or policy of others including employers past or present.