The United States workforce is becoming ‘casual’ | Photo credit: Jorge García
Everyone knows that food can be cooked at home or abroad. If you are outside, you can go to it or you can get to you. Using micro mobile phone data, a NBER research work by Austan Goolsbee, Chad Syverson, Rebecca Goldgof and Joe Tatataka show that Americans are inspiring for food to reach them.
This has applied a massive increase in productivity or restaurants. Pararallety, Americans spend less time in restaurants.
The document says that “this cannot be explained by the economies of scale, the expansion of the market power or a direct result of the fluctuations of covid source demand. The rates of growth of the productivity of the restaurants are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the time that its customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a growing participation of the expense of the customers 10 minutes or less.” It is better to leave this change in American behavior here. I think the change is driven by three other factors.
One is cheaper not to eat in restaurants where the tip adds 20 percent to the invoice;
Two, it is more convenient to order because there are no problems related to travel;
And three, the work supply curve in the United States has changed down, which means that unqualified work has increased, suitable only to serve as emails at low wages.
Meanwhile, other small surveys have shown that, regardless of the dreams of the president of the United States, Americans are not dying to return to the floors of factory stores. They prefer the service sector where the person sells their production instead of their time.
Being casual is casual in other words, the labor market. This, in turn, suggests an excess supply or labor. Or, to put it differently, the US labor market now resembles those of India: some highly qualified and a sea of non -qualified.
The difference is that India has a shortage of capital and the United States has abundance. Hopefully the bilateral agreement will solve this problem.
Posted on April 24, 2025