This model.
Posted on 05/19/2015 7:56:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In just a few years, communities that depend on the trucking industry for their vitality will be facing major economic disruption.
Roscoe, Nebraska, is a good place to contemplate how the evolution of long-haul travel can change a community. This unincorporated settlement—some classify Roscoe as a “semi-ghost town”—sits about seven miles east of the city of Ogallala along U.S. 30, which follows the old Lincoln Highway route and before that, various overland migration trails to California, Oregon and Utah.
Just off U.S. 30, opposite the Union Pacific freight-rail tracks, there’s an abandoned gas station with its former pump, pictured above, standing as a relic from a different era of travel when overland motorists crossed this sparsely populated area of western Nebraska on the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental highway.
That was before Interstate 80 was constructed following a parallel route a few miles to the south. And that highway, like so many other Interstate highways, allowed cross-country traffic—including truck drivers hauling freight—to bypass the smaller towns and medium-size cities that spring up along the older routes.
Today, at the local exit leading from I-80 to Roscoe, there are no traveler services. There’s a rest area a few miles down the road and plenty more traveler services clustered nearby at the exit for Ogallala, which includes outposts for TravelCenters of America and Sapp Bros. Travel Centers, plus Denny’s, a Holiday Inn Express and Days Inn.
While autonomous vehicle technology has raised big questions about the future of mobility in urban areas, the long-term impact of driverless innovation on small-town economies supported by the trucking industry is perhaps less understood.
But it’s safe to say that the future industry disruption that driverless semi-trucks hauling freight will bring is poised to cause some serious pain for local communities that depend on human truck drivers.
In a recent Medium post, Scott Santens, a New Orleans-based writer-blogger who focuses on the intersection of poverty, inequality and technological advancement, writes about the looming “one-two punch to America’s gut” that will come from driverless trucks:
We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven’t seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns.
Santens continues:
Those working in these restaurants and motels along truck-driving routes are also consumers within their own local economies. Think about what a server spends her paycheck and tips on in her own community, and what a motel maid spends from her earnings into the same community. That spending creates other paychecks in turn. So now we’re not only talking about millions more who depend on those who depend on truck drivers, but we’re also talking about entire small town communities full of people who depend on all of the above in more rural areas. With any amount of reduced consumer spending, these local economies will shrink.
What could that mean for a state like Nebraska?
According to the Nebraska Trucking Association, the trucking industry employs one out of every 12 workers in the state, roughly 63,000 jobs. Trucks carry 76 percent of manufactured tonnage in the state. And more than 48 percent of Nebraska communities rely on trucks to move their goods.
Driverless trucks will still need to refuel on their cross-country treks, but advances in technology will, in time, reduce the need to have as many humans involved the trucking industry.
The first driverless truck hit the roads in Nevada this month.
And while there’s still a lot of testing ahead for autonomous driving technology in the trucking industry, Santens writes it’s a question of when, not if, major disruption is coming for communities that depend on trucking. “. . . [We’re] looking at a window of massive disruption starting somewhere between 2020 and 2030,” he writes.
And that could lead to plenty of truck stop settlements across the nation ending up like Roscoe, undermined by big changes in the way we travel and ship goods on America’s highway network.
I don’t know, what kind of sales were you doing, under what conditions, how many hires did you go through a month?
Shaping up just fine!
Robots will do all the work and government will print money out of nothing to give us all a basic salary as a human right.
What could possibly go wrong?
The truck will be like the 58 Plymouth “Christine”. Don’t mess with it.
Payphones, mortgages and recruiting. We didn’t hire monthly, people were more permanent than that. The payphones were outside sales, the others were inside. If you knew how much I made with the payphones you’d wish they were still around. LOL
Frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.
This model.
This WILL happen.
Driverless trucks. Drones for in-motion refueling. Observation and attack drones for security.
All you hayseeds out there might as well give up and move into the Eurbanopia.
What kind of salesroom sold pay phones, mortgages, and recruiting, and why were badly speaking immigrants so good at those?
I assume they were all sales over the phone, were you working strictly on commission?
I’ve been in sales for 27 years. I have always made money. The product doesn’t matter.
L
I am not sure if one or two generation might pass before new professions will realized. It might be possible that very few new occupations or professions will be developed in the future.
I am not sure if one or two generation might pass before new professions will realized. It might be possible that very few new occupations or professions will be developed in the future.
I sold those three things at different times. The immigrants did well at mortgages because of persistence. The payphones were not over the phone, we went to businesses who already had or could accommodate a payphone such as malls, truck stops, restaurants, bowling alleys and the like. I made $450 per phone in the mid-1980’s and averaged two sales a day. Think about that. Recruiting is one of the hardest sales jobs because you have to make two sales (employer and candidate) or nothing happens. Mortgages used to be a goldmine, with all the newer regulations it’s a wonder anyone still does it.
I will find out and let you know. Oh, how many cartons of Kools do you want?
Driverless vehicles will never happen. You have enough problems with people driving crazy without adding a driverless 40 ton truck whose software got buggy to the road.
well, for starters, many Mexican drivers will be put out of work (sorry, NAFTA). So all those taquerias will close.
#10 I buy that.
Think about how much money businesses will save once so many things are automated. They’ll make it work or die trying.
Fixed it.
I’ve been in some form of sales most of my life, from encyclopedia sales in multiple states and with my own people, professional fund raising as the branch manager, and aluminum siding, and other products, and when I left sales, I went into mostly doing service plumbing, because the first guy who hired me to make me a service plumber, paid strictly on commission, which was the only way that I liked getting paid.
The encyclopedia sales was the best for me, there was a lot of money in it and there were a lot of interesting work condition payoffs, like for some reason 19 year old girls being the best hires and the hard partying and daily classes that go with the business, and the deference that you get from other salesmen who thought of the door to door men as the Green Berets of sales.
Once I needed 4 T-Birds and I could do the entire deal over the phone, another time I was looking at Cadillacs, and the dealer would drive them over to my office to run them by me.
I always felt bad doing sales, even though I was always top salesman and have never been second in sales at any place that I have ever worked, including in plumbing, I was very happy to find a way to combine my sales talent and my pleasure in helping people, with a service that I felt better about.
I will say that I was actually making my best money at the professional fund raising, but I just couldn’t take the huge percentage that was in it for me, it tore me up inside. I did that after I had already done a year as a plumber, and I quit it to go back to service plumbing on commission, I have never plumbed when I wasn’t paid on straight commission, at the last company that I worked for, being the last time I worked for anyone besides myself, that meant that I only worked a few hours a week, and didn’t work Thursdays, and I collected commission off the people that I managed, which isn’t bad for plumbing.
I guess I averaged about 20 hours a week of twisting a wrench for them, and I still out sold every one else, always.
I remember some more about that last job for another plumbing company, I didn’t work on Thursdays because that was the day after my club meeting, and I didn’t take calls before 11:am, and I didn’t want to be in the field after 2:pm because of traffic.
So in reality I doubt that I actually worked many 20 hour weeks, a salesman can make even plumbing, a nice little job.
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