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In the Star Trek series "Deep Space Nine," during the time travel episode involving the Bell Riots, a future is portrayed in the 2020's where the economy has basically collapsed, the rich have horded all the wealth, there are no jobs, and the poor, mentally ill, and criminals are all shoved together in "Sanctuary Districts" where they can prey upon each other and starve out of sight of what is left of the nation. Eventually, riots resulted and the plight of the crushed working class was made know and reforms were made, beginning the slow march to the rather utopic future portrayed in Star Trek.
It is rather frightening how accurately the timeline portrayed is playing out... though I seriously doubt there will be any uplifting ending to the story in real-life. The Wal-mart of the future won't need cashiers, but so few people will be able to afford to shop there it won't really matter.
That was a great two-part episode. I have the Star Trek DS9 Companion that gives insight to every episode and people from the government talked to Ira Behr and Robert Wolfe who wrote that episode after they saw the episode to see what all the writers knew, because the city of Los Angels was going to sanction off a part of the city for those people who were poor and were mentally ill and live in it. This was back in 1995. Ira and Robert didn't know the government were going to do such a thing but said they were shocked by all of it.
Ideally, the ability to travel back in time, as all WalMarts have been closed by the year 2020, when Americans got fed up with their own shopping habits creating the dearth of good paying jobs and the acceptance of outsourced supply.
The requirements will be the same, you will just have many cashiers with BA/BS, and graduate degrees working there.
Reminds me many years ago when I was traveling through Eastern Europe (and other places), I was amazed by the number of bazaar workers, seamstresses, and other low wage workers that all had college degrees; at the time I was thinking "thankfully, the US values degrees and you never will see someone with a degree working a low wage job".
If you are human, you can't apply for the job (irrespective of your academic degrees, spotless record or stellar (prior) work experience), because it's only available for machines or robots (and they require 0 pay and 0 health benefits).
If the "poor" suddenly increases in numbers by a large margin, say 90% of the population, WalMart will likely go under in a matter of a few years, at least in this country. The "rich" will NOT continue to get richer in this situation, nor will they even be able to maintain their wealth. Their wealth will disappear in a hurry as well.
Because there are no societies in the modern world where a small, privileged few have nearly all the wealth while the vast majority live in abject poverty... oh, wait... that would be most of the world outside the so-called "developed nations." No, sorry - not buying it. As is proven all over the world today, the rich can still be rich even if everyone else is living in dung shacks and eating a bowl of rice a day. They just have to hire thugs to protect them, that's it.
If the "poor" suddenly increases in numbers by a large margin, say 90% of the population, WalMart will likely go under in a matter of a few years, at least in this country. The "rich" will NOT continue to get richer in this situation, nor will they even be able to maintain their wealth. Their wealth will disappear in a hurry as well.
As the other poster stated, having a few rish and masses of poor is common throughout the world, and has been so in history.
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