“We’re not looking to do the same work with half the people,” said Rick Zumpano, vice president for distribution at Boxed. So even if each warehouse employs fewer workers, the proliferation of new warehouses is projected to generate hiring across the industry.When people shop online, tasks that once filled their days — driving to a store, searching through aisles for a product, bringing it to a cashier and paying for it — are now done by warehouse employees and truck drivers.Yet their fears didn’t come to pass.But worries about a “retail apocalypse” have missed a more important trend: E-commerce actually leads to more jobs by paying people to do things we used to do ourselves. Venerable chains such as Toys “R″ Us, RadioShack, and Payless ShoeSource have all filed for bankruptcy this year.The surge in e-commerce has required the rapid build-out of a vast network of warehouses and delivery systems that include both robots and human workers. Song attributes the time savings mainly to e-commerce. Yet it’s also at the vanguard of automation. “Since we’re growing, we need everyone.” Newer robotic technologies do loom as a threat to some e-commerce jobs.  

Instead of walking thousands of steps a day loading items onto carts, employees could stand at stations as conveyor belts brought the goods to them. People spend less time shopping than in the past, research shows. Automation has actually helped create jobs in e-commerce, rather than eliminate them, and stands to create more in the years ahead.That means the bankruptcies and store closings in the retail sector aren’t the complete picture. Such savings, in turn, have lowered the cost for Amazon to open new facilities — and hire more workers.But the explosion of e-commerce and the ease of automation are leading e-commerce companies to build more warehouses.In the meantime, jobs have been lost at storefront retailers, which have suffered under the e-commerce onslaught. By accelerating delivery times, robotics and software have made online shopping an increasingly viable alternative to bricks-and-mortar stores, and sales have ballooned at online retailers. Since 2014, Amazon has deployed 100,000 robots in 25 warehouses worldwide. At the same time, it’s nearly tripled its hourly workforce, from roughly 45,000 to nearly 125,000. E-commerce sales are surging roughly five times as fast as storefront retail sales, according to market research firm Forrester.Joe Song, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who has studied government data, has found that working women are spending less time shopping — nearly 25 hours less per year compared with a decade earlier. Families increasingly outsource shopping to e-commerce employees, just as many have long outsourced other household tasks to child care workers or house cleaners.

Yet e-commerce and warehousing are growing far faster than manufacturing is — a crucial difference that lessens the impact of automation. By 2022, they’re expected to account for 17 percent of all SHJ-P Weft Feeder retail sales, up from 13 percent this year.Robots have displaced many manufacturing workers in the past two to three decades, enabling factories to produce more with fewer employees. . While jobs have been lost in stores, much more have been gained from online shopping.When the new warehouse opened this spring, workers found that their jobs were less physically demanding than at the older, manual warehouse in Edison, New Jersey. Those devices may replace some workers over the next decade.Mandel points out that it’s a lot like what happened more than a 100 years ago when Henry Ford’s installation of assembly lines — an early form of automation — helped reduce the price of cars, which boosted demand so much that Ford needed more workers.Its use of robotics has shaved the operating costs for a warehouse by about 20 percent, according to a report by Deutsche Bank.“I had a lot of people asking me, ‘What is going to happen to us?’” says Veronica Mena, a trainer for the e-commerce startup, recalling the anxiety that rippled through her co-workers after company executives announced plans to open an automated warehouse in nearby Union, New Jersey.There are widespread fears that things will get only worse for the nation’s 16 million retail workers.  

The robots didn’t take jobs from people because many of the jobs didn’t exist before.When the robots came to online retailer Boxed, dread came, too: The familiar fear that the machines would take over, leaving a trail of unemployed humans in their wake.Amazon accounts for much of the additional employment.  

Startup robotics companies are developing robot arm prototypes, for example, that can pick goods from shelves.What happened at Boxed — and has occurred elsewhere — suggests that widespread fears about automation and job loss are often misplaced. Self-checkout kiosks and experimental stores like Amazon’s Go, which has no cashiers, could theoretically eliminate millions of retail jobs.And rather than cutting jobs, the company added a third shift to keep up with rapidly growing demand. In each case, jobs are created. Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, calculates that the number of e-commerce and warehousing jobs has leapt by 400,000 in the past decade, easily offsetting the loss of 140,000 brick-and-mortar retail jobs.From a handful of distribution centres in 2000, Amazon now has more than 240 warehouses and smaller delivery facilities, according to MWPVL, a consulting firm.