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

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

The truth is, there aren’t many jobs for young people anymore, and most of them have chosen to remove themselves from the job market. In August 2000, 52.3 percent of American 16- to 19-year-olds were active in the labor force. In August 2025, the number is only 34.8 percent.

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

First and foremost, no one benefits from having a robot flip a burger instead of a human. Well, none other than the one who invested in Robburgers.com, that is. Harry J. Holzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said automation “shifts compensation from workers to business owners, who enjoy higher profits with less need for labor.” As a consumer, you get a product that is no better or more reliable than what a 17-year-old goth kid could whip up. You don’t get it any cheaper, and if there’s another AWS outage, you might get nothing.

Just as importantly, teenagers are missing out on a valuable experience during the most formative years of their lives. Learning to juggle the responsibilities of a job, navigate a workplace, and develop basic financial literacy skills only gets harder with age. They’ll arrive in the workforce with little experience under their belts without a run-in with a difficult boss in a low-stakes job at Dairy Queen.

MIT economist Darwin Akimoglu argues that automation does not actually improve productivity, driving income inequality largely by displacing low-skilled workers. Automation has eaten into jobs in manufacturing and warehouses, and pushed adults who would normally fill these positions into areas traditionally reserved for younger workers, such as retail, food delivery, and even paper routes. The average age of a retail worker in the US in 2024 was 38.7. Especially in apparel retail, which is much smaller than overall retail, it was 33, up dramatically from 29.3 in 2015.

And now that adults are delivering pizzas to supplement their steady wages and trying to keep up with rising prices, robots are coming for those jobs, too. It wasn’t enough that 17-year-olds with driver’s licenses were forced out of the delivery market by Uber Eats and DoorDish, no matter which state you live in, you’d need to be 21 to drop off Chinese takeout to hungry families. Now, those two companies are battling autonomous food delivery robots in the US.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I’m not interested in having a self-driving cooler roll up to my gate to bring me sushi—I don’t see any benefit to me as a consumer. There is nothing broken with the existing system that the robot is going to fix. Plus, I never have to worry about my salmon avocado rolls inside the delivery driver’s 2012 Prius thanks to firmware updates and spot sale reception.

Stocking shelves, scooping ice cream, flipping burgers, and delivering takeout is not a glamorous job. But they used to be the kind of thing that gave young adults and teenagers their first taste of freedom. They offered valuable lessons in budget management and taught them important interpersonal skills. But the knock-on effects of online shopping, automation and digital media have largely driven them out of the workforce.

Teenagers have voluntarily removed themselves from the labor market as they are forced to compete for a shrinking pool of jobs with a growing pool of workers. And now, we’re training the robot to make some scraps. Even bagging groceries isn’t safe.