The Pizza Delivery Guy Will Be a Robot at Many Campuses This Fall

Grubhub partners with Russian tech company to roll out food-delivering robots to U.S. colleges

By Georgi Kantchev of The WSJ. 

There are different types of unemployment (seasonal, frictional, structural and cyclical).

Structural-unemployment caused by a mismatch between the skills of job seekers and the requirements of available jobs.

One example of this is when you are replaced by a machine. Another example is when there is a fall in demand for your product, so you get laid off, like with typewriters since people now use computers. A third example is geographical, when the jobs are not in your region of the country.

Excerpts from the WSJ article:

"Delivery company Grubhub Inc. plans to roll out food-delivering robots across U.S. college campuses from this fall, as automation grows in a sector turbocharged by the pandemic.

Grubhub will deploy the suitcase-size rovers built by Russian tech company Yandex YNDX -0.16% NV to some of the 250 colleges across the U.S. that Grubhub already operates in, the companies said Tuesday. The six-wheeled autonomous rovers have been tested in recent years on the snowy streets of Moscow, delivering food, groceries and documents. Since April, the robots have also been delivering orders from local restaurants in Ann Arbor, Mich., as part of a trial."

"The use of robots and drones is aimed at cutting labor costs, one of the biggest hurdles on the path to making delivery profitable. Earlier this year, DoorDash Inc. DASH -1.18% acquired robotics startup Chowbotics, whose technology can whip up salads and poke bowls."

"San-Francisco-headquartered Starship Technologies Inc. has been expanding its U.S. college-campus delivery, while in Sacramento, Calif., Nuro LLC’s robots have been shuttling food, fresh linens and personal protective equipment during the pandemic."

"Grubhub said it expects the technology to deliver cost savings, both for the company and for consumers by charging a lower service fee than for a human delivery.

Yandex said its autonomous delivery robots, which have the capacity to carry as much as 44 pounds of goods, can navigate pavements, pedestrian areas and crosswalks slightly faster than the speed of an average pedestrian. After an order is placed, the rover makes its way to the restaurant, picks up the food and then delivers it to a specific location where the user unlocks its hatch through the Grubhub app."

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Companies were paid to cut off power during February storm in Texas

By Charlotte Huffman & Jason Trahan of WFAA. Excerpts:

"Dozens of mostly natural gas facilities, including some directly supplying fuel to power plants around the state, were paid to have their electricity cut off in an emergency like February’s devastating winter storm"

"locations around Texas, were allowed to sign up for a voluntary “emergency response” program coordinated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which runs the state's power grid.

Of those 67 locations receiving payments from ERCOT, at least five sites “later identified themselves to the electric utility as critical natural gas infrastructure,”"

"Natural gas companies were widely criticized after February’s winter storm for not designating parts of their systems' critical infrastructure so that they would not be cut off in an emergency.

"the state did not provide them the names of the companies that own or control the 67 fuel sites that were taking payments in exchange for being on the cut-off list."

"“If an entity is considered critical infrastructure, then it should not be offering to participate in the ERS program,” ERCOT said in a statement late Tuesday, referring to the voluntary Emergency Response Program’s acronym.

ERCOT would not reveal which companies are being paid through the program because it said it doesn't know. ERCOT, according to a spokeswoman, doesn’t actually sign up companies or run the program in-house. It relies on an outside contractor to take the money ERCOT allocates for the program and actually pay the companies that sign up. ERCOT itself also does not cut power to the participating companies."

Inflation climbs higher than expected in June as price index rises 5.4%

Jeff Cox of CNBC.

"Key Points

• Consumer prices increased 5.4% in June from a year earlier, the biggest monthly gain since August 2008.
• Excluding food and energy, inflation increased 4.5%, the largest move since September 1991.
• Used car and truck prices comprised about one-third of the total CPI increase."

 

One thing to keep in mind when comparing prices now to prices a year ago is that last year the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was lower in April, May and June than it was in both February and March (you can find these numbers at (Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to Present) which is in the list of links on the right.

Even when prices did start to come up, the overall rise in the CPI from Dec. 2019 to Dec. 2020 was just 1.4% (and if we use the overall average for each year it was up just 1.2%). This was partly due to the lower demand during pandemic as people stayed home and did not spend as much as would normally be expected.

From May to June this year, the CPI was up 0.929%. If it does that for a whole year, we will have an 11.7% inflation rate.

Some economists say we should compare the CPI now to 2019. So the table below shows the CPI for all months from Jan.-June for 2019-2021.

	2019	2020	2021
Jan	251.712	257.971	261.582
Feb	252.776	258.678	263.014
Mar	254.202	258.115	264.877
Apr	255.548	256.389	267.054
May	256.092	256.394	269.195
June	256.143	257.797	271.696

Now the percentage increase in the CPI from 2019-2021 and 2020-2021

	2019-21	2020-21
Jan	3.92%	1.40%
Feb	4.05%	1.68%
Mar	4.20%	2.62%
Apr	4.50%	4.16%
May	5.12%	4.99%
June	6.07%	5.39%

So prices are 6.07% higher in June 2021 than in June 2019 (so around 3% per year). But most of that must be in the last year since from last June it is 5.39% (it was less than 1% from June 2019 to June 2020).

Whichever time period we look at, the rates are getting higher month by month. The CPI is up 4.3% from Dec. 2020-June 2021.