The fight between US service staff and QR codes

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: US automation in the pandemic, Bank of America’s tech training

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, August 31st, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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QR codes have been replacing retail and restaurant workers during the pandemic, and prices are rising in Germany at a pace not seen in more than a decade. Plus, we’ll take a look at how Bank of America is retraining its employees to be more tech savvy.

Imani Moise
How much should employee education be the employer’s responsibility versus the education system responsibility? I think that’s an open question. But what you are seeing is more employers step up to this plate because they see an upcoming talent shortage.

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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In the US, the pandemic has made it hard for employers to find service workers, but some of them came up with a solution — QR codes. By scanning these codes at restaurants or retail outlets, customers can complete a transaction right on their phones. No workers needed. But some experts say that the pandemic induced automation might be a permanent fixture, and we might not see these jobs come back. The FT’s labour and equality correspondent, Taylor Nicole Rogers, has been reporting on this. Hi, Taylor.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Hey, Marc

Marc Filippino
Taylor. What’s the scale here? How many businesses are experimenting with this kind of tech?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I would say that most businesses in the service and hospitality area are experimenting with this to some degree, whether that’s as simple as the menu being available on your phone via QR code or the server being the QR code itself, meaning that you don’t actually interact with another human until they bring out your plate.

Marc Filippino
Which is, you know, when we hear about this sort of thing and the scare that comes with automation potentially taking jobs, we usually think manufacturing, right? Can you explain why a lot of these businesses turned to this kind of automation during the pandemic?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think it has a lot to do with social distancing, right? So one of the things customers were looking at in the early days of the first lockdowns in March of last year was where can I go and be as far away from other human beings as possible. So a lot of these solutions started out as ways to lower transmission rates and keep customers safe. But then as the pandemic progressed and workers got harder to find, they also started filling this gap in the labour market that we were seeing.

Marc Filippino
So who’s the most impacted by this?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Economists say that it’s mostly going to be women and then people with lower levels of education that will be losing jobs to computers. But it’s important to note that these are mostly going to be people who are working in businesses on the lower end of kind of the luxury scale. So if you’re a waiter at a high-end Michelin starred restaurant where people are expecting to be treated like kings and queens when they go in, I wouldn’t be worried about your job. But if you work on the other end of food service, maybe as someone who takes orders through a drive-through at a fast-food restaurant, then I would be worried. But it’s also important to note that because of the pandemic, because we’ve gotten used to living our lives through the screen, customers are also more open to interacting with a kiosk or QR code instead of a friendly face.

Marc Filippino
Now, we should mention that while this is happening in the US, other countries like China and South Korea are already using QR codes to order things. What are experts seeing in terms of the future of automation?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
The question is going to be, is the labour market going to get better? Because if, you know, service workers come back and and take some of these jobs and people get used to interacting with humans again, maybe these jobs will be OK in the long run. But there’s also the possibility that businesses are going to get used to how cheap QR codes are to work with and how they can get things done pretty quickly. And then these jobs that we lost during the pandemic just don’t come back.

Marc Filippino
Taylor Nicole Rogers is the FT’s labour and equality correspondent. Thanks, Taylor.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Thanks.

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Marc Filippino
Now, the worker shortage in the US has been affecting banks and they’re having an especially tough time finding workers for their growing digital operations. One of the country’s biggest banks, Bank of America, is even retraining its tellers and other staff to do coding and data analytics. I’m joined by the FT’s US banking correspondent Imani Moise to find out more. Hey Imani.

Imani Moise
Hi, Marc.

Marc Filippino
So Bank of America is training tellers to be IT specialists. What’s that all about, Imani?

Imani Moise
Yeah, it’s actually a programme that they have had since 2018. But the programme really helped them scale technology skills as everything became automated during the pandemic. So it’s open to everyone at the bank, from tellers to traders to people who already work in tech but maybe want to upscale. So that’s really how they’ve been meeting the talent needs that the pandemic has brought forward.

Marc Filippino
Imani, are staff happy about this? Is there are a lot of uptake or are they eager?

Imani Moise
It looks that way. I mean, three million courses have been taken so far since it launched in 2018. And Bank of America has about 200,000 employees. So if it seems like everyone could have taken at least a few courses, obviously. And you’re seeing people get into new roles and what happened now is they set a goal when they started this university to increase the internal hiring from 39 per cent at the time and now it’s 80 per cent. So clearly this is successful, and they’re able to create the talent that they need.

Marc Filippino
I also have to imagine that a lot of these employees see the writing on the wall, right? Like if you think about it, they can see that a lot of places, including banks, are going digital if they want to stay relevant, then they have to do this kind of training in order to keep their jobs.

Imani Moise
Absolutely. And that’s why I think you’re starting to see more companies offer this. So I was talking to the CTO of Bank of America, Cathy Bessant, and she said that the roles that she’s training for today are really for the jobs of the future. So she wants to encourage as many people within the company to start this training. And then you’re also seeing banks like JPMorgan. They started forcing their analysts and the requiring that their analyst in the asset management division start taking coding classes just because they believe that’s a good skill to have. You’re also seeing banks invest in the workforce more broadly, not even just for their own firms, but making sure that these skills are being taught. Because I think what you’re seeing executives see in the labour market is this incoming mismatch of skills.

Marc Filippino
Now, this isn’t going to fix everything, Imani. There are still a lot of questions, right?

Imani Moise
Right. I mean, how much should education be or employee education be the employer’s responsibility versus the education system’s responsibility? I think that’s an open question. But what you are seeing is more employers step up to this plate because they see an upcoming talent shortage for specific skills and they want to address that. I think this type of training programme has not been scaled yet, at least within Bank of America. And talking to Cathy Bessant, that’s the next thing on her wishlist or to-do list is to institutionalise this type of learning so that when things happen really quickly, as they did in the pandemic, you could reach a lot of workers, thousands of workers, as they were trained last year to meet that need.

Marc Filippino
Imani Moise is the FT’s US banking correspondent. Thanks, Imani.

Imani Moise
Thanks for having me.

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Marc Filippino
Inflation in Germany just hit a 13-year high. The country’s harmonised index of consumer prices rose to 3.4 per cent in August from a year earlier. It’s also up from July and it’s the highest level since 2008. So what’s the cause? Well, for one thing, Germany’s economy is rebounding from the pandemic, but there’s also higher energy prices and disruption to global supply chain to blame for higher inflation. The European Central Bank, like the Federal Reserve in the US, sees the rise in this year’s inflation as transitory. But the ECB’s Governing Council will meet next week, and they’ll talk about whether the eurozone’s economy is bouncing back from the pandemic enough to justify slowing down the pace of its bond-buying programme.

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Now, inflation in the US has also been high lately. We’ve told you about that quite a bit. And it’s having an effect on dollar stores. A lot more of these stores have popped up in the past few years. The company, Dollar General now operates about 18,000 stores, and Dollar Tree has nearly 16,000. These companies were thriving during times of tame inflation, but with the rising inflation of 2021, well, a buck just doesn’t go as far as it used to. Dollar General and Dollar Tree posted earnings last week. They blamed rising shipping costs and wage bills for weighing on margins. So Dollar General is raising some of its prices. And these stores are trying out new things like adding higher margin, fresh produce, testing new formats and adding pricier products like curtains, rugs and clocks.

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You can read more on all of these stories that at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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