{"id":33452,"date":"2016-08-04T23:14:45","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T04:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prefblog.com\/?p=33452"},"modified":"2016-08-04T23:14:45","modified_gmt":"2016-08-05T04:14:45","slug":"august-4-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prefblog.com\/?p=33452","title":{"rendered":"August 4, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

On July 26<\/a> I passed on some support for the thesis that it wasn’t trade that was destroying jobs, it was tech. And now George Anders of Forbes argues that tech isn’t all that bad<\/a>:<\/p>\n

2.Tech\u2019s positive impact on employment is much more striking if we also look at a wide range of white-collar professions where software advances improve individual workers\u2019 productivity to the point that demand for their services soars.<\/p>\n

3.A case in point: market research. Turn the clock back to 2010, when cheap, efficient services such as Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey weren\u2019t yet ubiquitous. The U.S. got by with just 262,000 market research analysts and marketing specialists then. Splash in new technology that puts online polling and digital marketing within reach of everyone, and \u2014 voila! Employment in this category leaps 93%, to more than 506,000.<\/p>\n

4.Another example of software\u2019s ability to generate jobs: event planners. If you need to stuff envelopes and make dozens of phone calls, full-scale event planning is a luxury that only rich people (and Jennifer Lopez\u2019s clients) can afford. Digitize everything, and opportunities increase faster than you can say: \u201cCome to our Thursday night meetup.\u201d Employment in this category has climbed 54%, to 87,400, with the creation of 31,000 net new jobs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, it appears that vegan food startup Hampton Creek Inc. has been naughty<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In late 2014, fledgling entrepreneur Josh Tetrick persuaded investors to plow $90 million into his vegan food startup Hampton Creek Inc. Tetrick had impressed leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms by getting his eggless Just Mayo product into Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, and other top U.S. supermarkets within about three years of starting his company.<\/p>\n

What Tetrick and his team neglected to mention is that the startup undertook a large-scale operation to buy back its own mayo, which made the product appear more popular than it really was. At least eight months before the funding round closed, Hampton Creek executives quietly launched a campaign to purchase mass quantities of Just Mayo from stores, according to five former workers and more than 250 receipts, expense reports, cash advances and e-mails reviewed by Bloomberg. In addition to buying up hundreds of jars of the product across the U.S., contractors were told to call store managers pretending they were customers and ask about Just Mayo.
…<\/b>
\u201cWe need you in Safeway buying Just Mayo and our new flavored mayos,\u201d Caroline Love, Hampton Creek\u2019s then director of corporate partnership, wrote in an April 2014 e-mail to contract workers known as Creekers. \u201cAnd we\u2019re going to pay you for this exciting new project! Below is the list of stores that have been assigned to you.\u201d Love\u2019s memo also referenced a key competitor: \u201cThe most important next step with Safeway is huge sales out of the gate. This will ensure we stay on the shelf to put an end to Hellmann\u2019s factory-farmed egg mayo, and spread the word to customers that Just Mayo is their new preferred brand. :)\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the key takeaways, as they’re called in these degenerate days, are:<\/p>\n