Tech left teens fighting over scraps, and now it wants those too

Right now, there are robots stocking convenience store shelves in Japan. We haven’t embraced that tech here in America yet, but it’s hard to imagine 7-11 or Walmart won’t at least experiment with it soon. Walmart gave up on its shelf-scanning robots in 2020, but machine vision and AI have improved a lot in the last five years, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s a machine refilling that row of family-sized Fruity Pebbles and not a kid earning some extra cash during senior year of high school.

Truth is, there just aren’t many jobs for teens out there anymore, and most of them have chosen to simply remove themselves from the job market. In August of 2000, 52.3 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 were active in the labor force. In August of 2025, that number is just 34.8 percent.

There are a ton of reasons why (which mostly boil down to “technology”), but regardless of the why, it’s bad for everyone.

First and foremost, nobody benefits from having a robot flip your burger instead of a human. Well, nobody except whoever invested in RoboBurgers.AI, that is. As Harry J. Holzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out, automation “shifts compensation from workers to business owners, who enjoy higher profits with less need for labor.” As a customer, you get a product that isn’t demonstrably better or more reliable than what a 17-year-old goth kid could whip up. You don’t get it any cheaper, either, and if there’s another AWS outage, you might not get anything at all.