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

Currently, robots are filling the shelves of convenience stores in Japan. We haven’t yet adopted this technology here in America, but it’s hard to imagine that 7-11 or Walmart won’t experiment with it at least soon. Walmart discontinued its shelf-scanning robots in 2020, but machine vision and AI have improved a lot over the past five years, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s a machine filling that row of family-sized Fruity Pebbles and not a kid earning extra money during his senior year of high school.

The truth is that there simply aren’t many jobs for teens anymore, and most of them have simply chosen to opt out of the workforce. In August 2000, 52.3 percent of Americans ages 16 to 19 were active in the labor force. In August 2025, this figure was only 34.8%.

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

First and foremost, no one benefits from having a robot flip your burger instead of a human. Well, no one, except the one who invested in RoboBurgers.AI, of course. 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 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 concoct. You won’t get it any cheaper either, and if there’s another AWS outage, you might not get anything at all.

Just as importantly, adolescents are missing out on valuable experience during some of the most formative years of their lives. Learning to juggle the responsibilities of a job, navigate a workplace, and develop basic financial skills only gets more difficult as you get older. They will enter the workforce with less experience under their belt, without having had the opportunity to experience a difficult boss in a low-stakes job at a Dairy Queen.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, says automation doesn’t really improve productivity much, but only drives income inequality by displacing low-skilled workers. Automation has eaten away at manufacturing and warehouse jobs, pushing adults who would normally fill those positions into fields traditionally reserved for younger workers, like retail, food delivery and even paper routes. The average age of a retail employee in the United States in 2024 was 38.7 years old. In clothing retail in particular, which is much younger than retail as a whole, it was 33, a dramatic increase from 29.3 in 2015.

And now that adults are delivering pizzas as a supplement to supplement their stagnant wages and to try to keep up with soaring prices, robots are coming for those jobs, too. It’s not enough that 17-year-olds with driver’s licenses are priced out of the delivery market by Uber Eats and DoorDash, where, depending on the state you live in, you may have to be 21 to deliver Chinese takeout to hungry families. Now, these two companies are moving into autonomous food delivery robots in the United States.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I’m not interested in having a self-contained cooler arrive at my door to bring me sushi – I see no benefit to me as a consumer. There is nothing broken in the current system that a robot can fix. Plus, I’ll never have to worry about my salmon-avocado rolls going bad in a delivery driver’s 2012 Prius because of a firmware update and spotty cell reception.

Stocking shelves, scooping ice cream, flipping burgers and delivering takeout are not glorious tasks. But it used to be the kind of thing that gave young adults and teenagers their first taste of independence. They offered valuable lessons on managing a budget and taught them important interpersonal skills. But the impacts of online shopping, automation and digital media have largely driven them out of the job market.

Teenagers have voluntarily withdrawn from the workforce because they are forced to compete for an ever-shrinking job pool with an ever-expanding pool of workers. And now we’re training robots to scavenge the few remains. Even the packaging of groceries is not safe.