With the increase in salaries and young people to opt for other types of companies, there are increasingly Korean traders to have stores without employees and relying on customer honesty for payments. The model is resulting.
It goes beyond midnight on the outskirts of the South Korean capital, Seoul, and wants to snack.
But this is no problem. Just cross the street where your apartment is and finds not one, but three stores that sell food and are Open 24 hours a day.
If you enter a gelary, you find frozer rows with various ice cream flavors, but There are no security guards or salespeople – Only the products on display and an automatic kiosk, where it pays for what to take.
All I need to do is get whatever you want and pay before leaving.
In the same block of gelataria there are stores that sell stationery materials, pet food and even sushi. None of them have a single employee in view.
In the most populous areas of the city center, there are several bars without employees.
“To operate a bar on this scale with profit, I need 12 to 15 employees, but contract only two people“Kim Sung-Rae, founder and creator of a bar without staff named Sool 24-simply,“ 24 Hours ”in Korean.
Kim states that this measure allows you to have time to devote to other trade initiatives.
The businessman used to operate a bar nearby. But the revenue did not achieve its expectations, which led him to move to the staff system without employees. And now, profits have increased.
Less babies
Decades of low birth rates and wage increases are the causes of automation.
South Korea has lower fertility rate registered in the world. The average number of children per woman reached 0.72 in 2023, although it increased slightly last year to 0.75.
To keep the population stable, the fertility rate needs to be at least 2.1. South Korea only exceeded this level for the last time in 1982.
Therefore, the number of people entering the job market has decreased.
Ally to this facto, or minimum wage of the country has increased Stable since 2000. Traders like Kim now need to pay each employee the equivalent of about 7 dollars per hour.
“The main reason that led me not to have employees was the increase in the minimum wage,” Kim explains. “There are two ways to face this situation: robotics or automation – And we can simply not hire employees. ”
Installing robots requires more money and space. Therefore, he chose to keep stores without employees.
Covid-19 pandemic tilted the scale toward automation, which made it possible to save salary payment money and was a way of circumventing the strict social distancing rules in force at the time.
Some people claim that the new generation of workers does not want the calls “3D entrepreneurs“They are considered dirty, dangerous, difficult or humiliating.
This is the manual work in industry, agriculture and now in retail trade, which They are considered undesirable.
“The young generation tries to stay in the metropolitan regions… and they also like to Create your own businessesrisk your capital and try… look for jobs with good compensation in the high-tech sector, ”says Cho Jung-Hun, a member of the People’s Power Party at the South Korean National Assembly and a member of the Permanent Education Committee.
“Unlike other legislators, I do not blame our young generation [por ter] This preference, ”Cho continues.“ Statistics show that we will need to deal with the lack of labor in the coming years and it is better to allocate our workforce limited to sectors ”with maximized value.
Korea’s Institute for Economic Research is a private Think Tank. The institution calculates that 43% of jobs in South Korea They risk being replaced by automation over the next 20 years.
With this, there will be new opportunities for people like Kwon Min-Jae, CEO (executive director) of Brownie, which manages stores without employees on behalf of its owners. Kwon created his business at the end of the Covid crisis in 2022.
“We manage laundries, gelatoria, convenience stores, cafeteria and vaporizer stores without employees,” he told BBC.
Even if the store has no employees, it Need to be replenishedclean and receive maintenance, explains Kwon.
Initially, store owners did this work. Now the Kwon company provides professionals who can maintain stores.
“We have a group of local employees who can visit several of these stores a day,” he explains.
“The biggest priority of owners is not having work with stores and not thinking about them. They prefer spend another 100 or 200 dollars a month with us, to manage the stores for them. ”
Kwon says he started with only two stores, but today manages over 100.
Few thefts
South Korea has a Very low robberywhich increases the success of stores without employees.
“There were even cases where people forgot to pay, but they called me later to pay for the purchase,” says Kim.
“I don’t know about other stores, but here young people feel safe enough to Leave your wallet and mobile phone to keep your tables. ”
Kim admits that there may be some damage caused by theft in the store, but they are not enough to make their business unfeasible.
“In truth, I never do the accounts of what was stolen“Kim says.” In all, I don’t lose money, so it’s not important. “
“Anyway, the cost of saving money is greater than the damage. Hiring security will cost more than the economy.”
With advances in technology, other jobs will become redundant. This is the case of drivers, when autonomous cars invade the market.
It is estimated that by 2032, South Korea will need more than 890 thousand new workers To maintain the objective of long -term economic growth in the country, from 2% per year.
Some institutions, such as the South Korea trade union, are concerned about the future of the labor market. But store owners without employees, such as Kim Sung-Rae, are very optimistic about the economic opportunities that are emerging for them.
