“Retail still employs one in nine working Americans, and retail jobs have grown since the bottom of the Great Recession. But we might be witnessing the moment when it passes over the mountaintop. Between 1950 and 1990, retail employment grew more than 50 percent faster than the general workforce did. Since 1990, it’s grown 50 percent slower. Retail now employs fewer people than it did in 1999. And those people work significantly fewer hours, too.“

Back in May, Derek Thompson for The Atlantic took a look at the macro view of American retail. While the jobs are not being outsourced to Asia like other industries, such as manufacturing or support, they are being eliminated through efficiency and technology.

In a society of increasingly specialized fields, the niches for generalists and the unskilled becomes smaller and smaller, and the new jobs that are created in these sectors are sub-living wage. As Thompson put it, “We are getting exactly what we pay for” – and indeed we are.