Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines

https://restofworld.org/2025/philippines-offshoring-automation-tech-jobs/

by thm • 9 months ago

68 47 9 months ago

pjmlp5• 9 months ago

Eventually neither the Japanese nor the Philippine workers will be needed, and then it will be too late.

I never use self-checkouts unless forced otherwise, as I rather not contribute to the capitalistic end goal to get rid of all employees other than those doing robot maintenance.

gruez5• 9 months ago

I never use self-checkouts unless forced otherwise, as I rather not contribute to the capitalistic end goal to get rid of all employees other than those doing robot maintenance.

What's the alternative? Having people do menial jobs that can otherwise be automated? What's the difference between that and paying people to dig ditches and fill them back in again, or banning people from filling their own cars so we can keep teenagers employed as gas station attendants?

pjmlp5• 9 months ago

Yes that is the alternative, people need jobs, even they happen to be menial.

carlosjobim2• 9 months ago

Self-checkout is a system where you as a honest person are paying so that other people can steal goods.

Owners of supermarket have calculated that the increase in theft is off-set by the savings of not paying wages to cashiers. But those losses have to be paid by somebody, and that somebody is of course the customers who don't steal goods.

I'd rather not be the person who has to pay extra so that another person can steal. That's an undignified existence, and hence why I also boycott self-checkouts. I don't care what "rationalists" say.

Also, a store with a lot of self-checkout lanes and few cashiers will attract thieves and repel honest customers who want good service. The result is a worse store in every way, until it folds and closes - as owners have probably planned for a few years.

slicktux• 9 months ago

The difference is there’s two options; to scan and bag your own stuff or go to a human(s) that can scan and bag your stuff. If the former catches on then we/you will be doing the “menial job” of bagging and scanning our own stuff all the time… and then some self checkout attendant will have the “menial job” of supervising the checkout and resetting it when it errors out.

netdevphoenix2• 9 months ago

You seem to be under the impression that most jobs, as they exist and are done, are objectively needed. Just like RTO policies, they only exist to keep the economy going. Automation is not driven by a love of engineering or the desire to automate for efficiency's sake. The drive is the most efficient path to increasing profits and reducing costs not performing existing jobs in the most efficient way.

Larrikin• 9 months ago

Optimize the check out flow for the human worker like Aldi has done and pay them a decent wage so it's no longer a menial job?

Self check out of more than a few items at the grocery store will always suck and be slower than someone who has trained to scan items quickly and has memorized the produce codes.

I never use self check out because I don't work at the grocery store and would rather just wait on my phone than take an active role in an activity I have no interest in ever becoming good at while giving the company more money over all for the shittier experience. I'm also not afraid of the cashier asking me how my day is going.

renewiltord2• 9 months ago

Indeed. Big tragedy has been ATM. Invention of ATM was end of prosperous five bedroom house on single bank teller job. We used to go Disneyland every month on teller job. But now ATM have take job. All bank tellers out of job. Impossible for bank to tell anything except through faceless borgcreature beeping at me.

lesuorac3• 9 months ago

I'm kind of surprised this is legal. Just using an internet feed as a workaround to not having a work permit just seems like easy fruit.

These workers wouldn't be allowed to do that role in-person, why are they allowed to do it remotely?

Tade04• 9 months ago

Why shouldn't they be? They're not competing for local resources, which is the main point of contention regarding immigration.

free_bip• 9 months ago

But they literally are... Instead of hiring a Japanese person, they're hiring someone from the Philippines.

gruez5• 9 months ago

They're not competing for local resources, which is the main point of contention regarding immigration.

Isn't "competing for local resources" just a fig leaf for "I don't want to lose my job to some foreigner"? That's a far better theory because it explains both anti-immigration sentiment as well as anti-globalization/offshoring sentiment.

lesuorac3• 9 months ago

Could you load up a 747 and fly them in for the day and then fly them out for the night?

Why is that so much different than them controlling a robot remotely?

If you want people to be able to immigrate into your country and work thats fine; just make it the law!

gruez5• 9 months ago

Do you think offshore call centers are also "workarounds" for work permits? You can make basically the same argument against them as well.

Frieren• 9 months ago

Do you think offshore call centers are also "workarounds" for work permits?

Yes. And I hope that call centers were forced to be in the same country that the recipients of the call. If it is not worth the cost, then they should not be doing the call.

pjmlp5• 9 months ago

Actually they are, in many cases operating in gray zone as they work on projects that in theory should not leave the country of origin, and having a VPN or SSH is useless when the actual computer screen is on foreign soil.

emsign• 9 months ago

The Japanese think having foreigners in their country is worse than no workers right. I'm not surprised.

veidr2• 9 months ago

That doesn't make sense, at all. Why are you allowed to pay a foreign person/company to write software, or marketing copy, or legal documents, or... whatever?

They are doing the work elsewhere, and it would be suicidal for any economy to mandate only using domestic contractors to do all work. (Also, just a side note, even though logically irrelevant: it's not at all the case that these foreigner+robot combos are taking local jobs; I live in Tokyo and have seen that the convenience stores are desperately seeking staff, even 1 day a week, and paying more for it... they just can't find enough (yes, partly because immigration is pretty difficult here).)

lesuorac3• 9 months ago

What's the point of a work visa if you can just bypass it with a robot?

IIUC, typically you don't hire foreign individuals for "your company". "your company" sets up a subsidiary in that foreign country and they work "locally" for the foreign subsidiary. And so the difference is that your local company would _import_ the work products from that foreign company and pay any relevant tariffs (see Nintendo of America paying tariffs from Nintendo Switch 2s produced by Nintendo of Japan). Now, IIUC the tariffs for digital goods are typically 0% so it's pretty simple to import them but you're still following a law allowing for the importation of a digital good.

renewiltord2• 9 months ago

Yeah, it’s weird but sometimes we buy foreign banana and sell it here rather than make banana here. Maybe this is loophole around worker laws and we should only be allowed to buy local banana.

Sometimes I wonder, am I commit immigration fraud for buy Fuji apple from China? I have not get work visa for apple picker man. Maybe a crime.

I will confess ICE. We need to sort this out. We’re in a crisis.

quantumcotton• 9 months ago

Imagine how many clever loopholes her discovered with a 100k Visa. We essentially just don't make the money now lol.

RA_Fisher• 9 months ago

Competition is good and makes us all better off, don’t be afraid.

rootsudo• 9 months ago

Tbf many convenience store jobs in Japan are already run by foreigners. So it’s just outcompeting local based foreigners .

Japan does feel a bit behind, only this summer have I just noticed the Amazon go equilivant in Tokyo. It very much felt like something that would’ve happened in Japan first then Seattle.

AndrewKemendo4• 9 months ago

Expect more of this as transfer learning from demonstration becomes easier.

Ultimately there’s no social barriers or even awareness that human labor is going to increasingly be used as training for robotic labor.

binary1323• 9 months ago

I think it’s more like people will take whatever work they can get to avoid becoming homeless and less like they just don’t care about the consequences.

AndrewKemendo4• 9 months ago

That’s a losing strategy unfortunately when looking into the infinitely deep maw of robotic labor capitalism

imtringued• 9 months ago

Ah the wonderful contradictions of the AI era where human labor is cheaper than AI.

ticulatedspline• 9 months ago

Was wondering when we'd start to see this, seems like the natural evolution. Have highly automated systems that work 99% of the time and have remote-in capabilities to utilize a pool of humans to bridge the gap.

I suspect that will be a growth sector for jobs (though likely oversea jobs like we already did with support centers). Robo Taxi unsure what to do? human remotes in and drives it till automation picks up. Service bot stuck in a loop? human to the rescue.

Probably eventually see merging like we did with tech support. instead of dedicated support a single center where people basically "pick up a call" to any number of automated things and look in the book to see what to do.

ratelimitsteve• 9 months ago

I wondered when someone was gonna realize that the model behind the Amazon "AI" store is actually quite sustainable. Put your stuff on a belt, the belt runs under a camera operated by someone half a world away for 8 cents an hour who totals up your stuff and sends it to a local cash register, then you settle up w the cash register. Augmented self checkout.

Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines

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