After reading how a 74 year old woman was forced to temporarily live with friends while she tries to find an affordable rental home…

How a 27 year-old who earns more than £30,000 per year and her partner (also earning) is being priced out of their one-bed flat and may have to go and live with her parents…

And how many renters are now searching for properties which ‘include bills’ as part of the rental agreement…

I can’t help but wonder where it is all going to end!

People are simply struggling to live.

I also read that the CEO of US retail giant Walmart, John David Rainey, recently told investors during an annual meeting that by 2026 approximately 65% of Walmart stores will be automated.

Walmart is the largest employer in the United States employing 1.6 million people with a further 700,000 employees outside of the US.

When they eventually automate 65% of their stores, it is safe to assume there will be a lot of people made redundant.

What is happening in Walmart is being mirrored here in UK supermarkets such as Tesco, M&S and Morrison’s.

UK supermarkets are also automating as much as possible and increasing the number of self-serve tills.

I’ve seen city centre stores that were all self-serve tills and only had a security guard and a couple of staff to restock shelves.

Whenever there was an issue with the self-serve tills one of the staff would intervene, other than that, they would focus on stocking shelves while customers served themselves.

Interestingly, the German giants Lidl and Aldi appear to be resisting the urge to use self-serve checkout machines for now.

I really don’t know what is going to happen in the next five years, but I predict that the world is going to be in a bit of a pickle soon if it carries on like this.

If people now are struggling to afford rent, mortgages and energy bills, and companies are pushing hard to automate their services putting more people out of work… there is soon going to be a huge number of people who are not going to be able to afford to live at all.

Are we facing the new ‘industrial revolution’ where ‘machines’ do all the work while we humans enjoy life?

It’s a great idea… but in a world where you need to pay for everything, you are not going to survive if you are not earning any money.

I am all for progress, but when more and more people become wage less and cannot afford to pay their rent and living costs, they are not going to be able to afford to buy much ‘stuff’ either and so automation could be harmful when it ultimate leaves society with less customers.

The world is becoming more expensive and I really don’t know where it will end, but… at the same time, more and more opportunities are opening up to us too.

We now have opportunities that we could have only dreamed of ten or twenty years ago.

We now have access to tools, people and services which when used in specific ways, can give us more than enough money.

Yesterday I saw someone in Pakistan offering their services as a writer (in good English) charging £1.60 per 100 words.

The first thing that came into my mind was that this person could write a 10,000 word eBook for just £160.

For just under £200, you could have an eBook written which you could then sell for the next 5… 10… 15 or more years.

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