Seasonal Jobseekers in Trouble? & Waymo Will DoorDash Your Burrito

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0:42Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, holiday retail jobs are drying up just as everyone is clamoring for one. Then prepare to get your Pad Thai Sands human. Waymo is getting into the food delivery game. It's Friday, October 17th. Let's ride.

1:03Good morning and happy Friday. Did you hear about the governor of Illinois cleaning up at the blackjack table? Yesterday, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker released his tax returns, which showed$1.4 million in gambling winnings. Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel's fortune, said the windfall came from a single trip to Vegas while playing blackjack, calling it incredibly lucky. Pritzker didn't divulge any juicy details like whether it happened in a single run, how much he wagered, or whether it took place at a special high roller table. His spokesperson said the money would be donated to charity.

1:38But, Mr. Governor, I got to ask, who do you like in the Red Wings lightning game tonight? I mean, that is a heater of all heaters, but he's worth$3.9 billion. So$1.4 million, kind of like you or me winning$100 at the table. Entirely plausible, especially at a high roller table where you can bet$25 ,000, hundred thousand dollars a hand but the new york times talked to a pro gambler to see what his take was on the whole situation he said i quote oh my god someone actually declared their gambling winnings because most people do not do that they just say i probably lost more than i won in the past year or so they just leave him off entirely but maybe pritzker wanted to disclose it so someone would ask him the question about his heater of all heaters at the blackjack table 5d chess but But congrats to him, I guess.

2:25Didn't even know government officials were allowed to gamble, so you learn something new every day. And now a word from our sponsor, Remarkable. Neil, when did you last feel like you had a truly productive workday? Hard to say. What was your start date here? Very funny. But if you want to be productive, you should get the Remarkable Paper Pro. When there's nothing to distract you, when you're organized, it's just easier to get ahead at work. Remarkable Paper Pro helps users to slow down and achieve more by being productive with their time spent working. This thin, minimalist tablet is designed to feel and sound just like writing on actual paper.

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3:29That's Remarkable.com. This holiday season can see a lot of job seekers being left out in the cold. While interest in seasonal positions is spiking, fewer employers are looking to bring them on board, leading to potentially the worst Christmas hiring environment since 2009. A new report from Indeed laid out the glaring imbalance in holiday job interest and holiday job availability. Searches for seasonal jobs rose 27 percent at the end of September compared to last year and were 50 percent higher than in 2023. On the other hand, seasonal job postings were up just 2.7 percent. Indeed's senior economist told Bloomberg it's a microcosm of an American job market that's frozen over.

4:10What we're seeing in the seasonal hiring market is what we're seeing in the broader market, he said. People are going out and looking for jobs and just finding fewer of them going around. A separate report from Challenger, Gray and Christmas adds to the worries. They found that retailers intend to add fewer than 500 ,000 seasonal jobs this winter, which would be the lowest number in 16 years. Of the companies that announced seasonal hiring plans, Bath & Body Works is looking for 32 ,000 workers, 700 fewer than last year. Michaels wants an extra 10 ,000 employees, 5 ,000 fewer than in 2022. And Santa is hiring 800 elves, half of last year's total.

4:46So bottom line, if you're looking for a holiday retail position, as so many of us have done, start your search now because the competition is going to be fierce. I'm aiming for that elf job up in the North Pole. But this is indicative of the broader job market as well, the low hire, low fire environment that we currently find ourselves in because inflation has constrained margins a little bit. It's pushed down discretionary spending. You are seeing these things filter through the job market at this point. I think back to our conversation with Fed President Austin Goolsbee yesterday. Great interview.

5:19You should listen to that if you haven't. It was on yesterday's show. But he basically said that we are at this equilibrium point where these businesses do not feel comfortable laying off workers, but they don't feel comfortable hiring workers either. They kind of just want to stick with the people that they got. So when it comes to the seasonal workers, the Christmas period, the holiday period, we're seeing that exact same dynamic play out. It didn't change that there's not suddenly this massive rush of need for workers because everyone just kind of wants to stay put, stay where they're at, stay in that equilibrium zone.

5:50So the forecast is for 500 ,000 seasonal jobs to be added this winter, which would be the worst since 2009. But where are those jobs coming from? That's a decent amount of jobs. Well, half of them, 250 ,000, is coming from Amazon itself. Amazon said it was going to hire 250 ,000 seasonal workers this holiday season, as it does every year. It hires many hundreds of thousands of people to come to the warehouses so they can package all the gifts that you got for your family. So half of all seasonal hiring is coming from Amazon specifically. And that's not any growth from the past few years. That's the same as they've done in 2023 and 2024.

6:27for. Yeah. Amazon is essentially the seasonal job market at this point. It is a monoculture when it comes to it because they're just so much bigger. I mean, you're talking about Bath and Body Works hiring 700 less people. Amazon is 250 ,000 people. So this was not always the case during the 2000s, 2010s. No single employer represented more than 15 or 20 percent of the total holiday hiring. Now, one company basically drives the entire seasonal workforce at this point. The one thing, a data point I'm also looking at is the lack of data point coming out of companies like Target, UPS, Macy's, Kohl's.

7:02They haven't disclosed seasonal hiring targets yet, which is a big difference because last year around this time, they had already done so. So they're being a lot less transparent this time around. So sometimes no data is worse than some data because how bad must it be is if you want to read between the lines, if they're not saying anything at all, are they not going to hire any workers or did they just not want to disclose lower amounts in the previous years to set off alarm bells. They're definitely going to hire workers, but yeah, I think the fact that they're not saying anything is indicative that they're certainly not going to hire more workers than in years past.

7:35So it's going to be a tough seasonal job market out there. Moving on, Uber wants its gig workers to pick up more gigs in between trips. Later this fall, the ride-sharing company is introducing a new job category called digital tasks that will allow U.S. drivers to earn money for completing small online assignments. No, they're not handing out math homework and said these mini assignments are things like uploading restaurant menus, recording audio samples in different languages, or other data-related micro tasks that take just a few minutes to complete and yield small payouts. What's the method behind the madness?

8:08All roads lead back to AI. As AI companies run low on material to train their models, Uber is marketing their AI solutions arm as a way to get high-quality data and model training tasks all completed by Uber's vast network of independent contractors. You know, you can almost see the boardroom meeting where this program came to be. For Uber, it gets to monetize its workforce during downtime. For AI companies, they get more high quality data and gig workers are the ones left doing the axle work for a little extra dough. Yeah. Maybe your first thought as mine was, was, are these drivers going to be fidgeting with their phones, filling out all of this, you know, data labeling stuff while they're driving or while they're waiting.

8:47But no, Uber says that it will be away from their cars. This is just another way that they're trying to leverage their army of freelancers. Drivers wouldn't say they're freelancers, but in order to make some more money and also help Uber in the data labeling business, which has absolutely boomed in the past few years because AI, large language models, need a lot of data. And they don't just need a lot of data. They need a lot of data that is labeled and cleaned up. You can't just force feed it, you know, some raw, huge data sets because it won't exactly know what to do with it. Thinking back to Meta, which bought Scale AI, which is probably the biggest data labeling company out there, paid$14 billion to bring Scale AI on board.

9:29Now that's valued at$29 billion. And it's not just related to large language models, but also robots. They're these robot AI startups that are paying up to$150 an hour for you to do physical tasks in the world, like folding laundry, loading dishwashers, or making an espresso. because the robots need to learn from humans if they want to make humanoid robots. So it's not just happening. Uber, they're probably not paying them anywhere close to$150 an hour, but this data labeling business is absolutely booming. It's going to come to maybe you or I, if we want to make a couple extra bucks, we can start folding laundry.

10:03But you are correct. It is, buck is actually probably a better term than bucks at this point because the example that Uber gave when they rolled out this new program was uploading a menu yields you a single dollar. So again, it's not life-changing money, But again, Uber's sort of messaging around this is it is another way for our freelance workers, for our contract employees to make money during their downtime. And they're not the only ones doing this. You can go on Upwork and find data labeling jobs right now on other freelance platforms. And then also, this is not the first time that Uber has experimented with extra gig work for its gig workers.

10:40Remember two years ago, it tested out this program where you could hire an Uber driver to come do a household task for you. assemble furniture, something like that. So they're always looking for ways to utilize this workforce and give them more opportunities to earn. The big question mark here, too, is are drivers actually training their replacements right now? Because whenever you talk about AI, it leads to autonomous driving, which leads to a world without any Uber drivers anymore. And Uber said that, no, this is separate from it. They say that the data obtained from driver tasks will not be used to develop driverless vehicles.

11:14So that's just a little bit of a PR landmine that they're trying to skirt around saying, we're not making you train your own replacements right now, which would obviously be a bad look for them. Uber isn't the only one shaking up the gig economy. Waymo is also trying to deliver more than your drunk self home after a night out. Yesterday, it announced a new partnership with DoorDash to test out an autonomous food delivery service across the Phoenix area. Customers will be able to choose a Waymo option in the DoorDash app to get their grocery or meal delivered by car, just car. That means no tip either, unless you want to tip car.

11:50Weibo's spokesperson said the program is meant to boost fleet utilization because the same autonomous cars can serve both passengers and deliveries. It is also looking to capture a portion of the nascent robot food delivery market, which is already seeing tests in the so-called last mile delivery segment. Serve Robotics has rolled out sidewalk robots to deliver burritos for Uber Eats in LA, while DoorDash is also debuting a tiny electric delivery robot in Phoenix that's one-tenth the size of a car. Neil, the trend here is one, blurring the line between moving people and moving goods, and two, the last mile is starting to go driverless.

12:25Personally, I like my food delivered the old-fashioned way, via fork, because I made it myself at home. This is going to be a key test of Americans' laziness, because already they're going to be ordering delivery to their home, but if you live here in an apartment in New York City, you know that delivery drivers sometimes come up to your apartment, or if you live in suburbia, they get out of the car and bring it to your porch. I mean, is our American consumers going to balk at that? Because you are in this case, what DoorDash and Waymo are doing is you have to go out to the trunk of the car, open it and then get your meal and then bring it back into your home.

12:58And I know it sounds so silly that we would be so inconvenienced to leave our house to get a meal that we ordered delivery from. But it will be interesting to see, at least in this Phoenix test case, whether consumers say, well, I'd rather do that than maybe add three or four dollars tip for a driver. And maybe this whole thing is I mean, this whole thing is intended to bring costs down across the board because you don't have to pay humans. But we'll see whether how people respond to that. I was also thinking on the other side, because the restaurant workers themselves are now going to have to come out and put them in the car before, you know, someone would come in, pick up the restaurant.

13:33So there is just some logistical. I mean, we're talking about last mile delivery, but we're now talking about last 30 feet delivery. When you don't have a human in the midst, what does that look like? Which I think is a very valid question. Waymo has also aspired to have a delivery business in the past. Early on in the company, which is – this is a subsidiary of Google. They made deals with UPS, Wayfair, J.B. Hunt, and Uber. They wanted to apply their autonomous driving technology to last-minute delivering, to long-haul trucking. This has always been the other pipe dream. As long as moving humans, let's move other stuff around.

14:05and they kind of slowly sunsetted that program to focus on robo-taxis. Now they feel robo-taxis are in a good spot. Let's dive back into this world again, see if people will, you know, exit their homes to pick up their burritos that were already delivered in a self-driving chariot directly to their front door. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and come back with Neil's Numbers.

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16:26Uprunt payment of$45 required, equivalent to$15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the news that's typically on a Thursday, but we pushed it to Friday because this week's been a little chaotic scheduling-wise. For my first number, the U.S. passport used to be the envy of the world. Now it's about as good as our soccer team. In the latest Henley Passport Index, the U.S. dropped out of the world's top 10 most powerful passports for the first time in two decades.

17:03We're currently in 12th, tied with Malaysia, compared to 7th last year and number one 10 years ago. What does it even mean to have a powerful passport? The rankings reflect how many countries a traveler can visit without needing a visa, a number that's been dropping for U.S. nationals as America increasingly isolates itself from the world. The creator of the index, Christian Kalin, said the steep decline of U.S. passport strength was a sign of its waning superpower status. It's, quote, more than just a reshuffle in rankings. It signals a fundamental shift in global mobility and soft power dynamics, he said.

17:37Nations that embrace openness and cooperation are surging ahead, while those resting on past privilege are being left behind. That's because reciprocity has a lot of influence in passport rankings, as in we let people in from your country visa-free and you do the same with us. But the U.S. doesn't have a lot of that going on. Currently, U.S. passport holders can access 180 destinations without a visa, but the U.S. itself only allows 46 other nationalities to come here without one. As recently as April, Brazil ended visa-free access for U.S. nationals because of a lack of reciprocity. First of all, I've got to clarify, you're talking about our men's soccer team because our women are still doing just fine there.

18:16We are still top of the heap. But also, Americans, how would you react if you started to see your mobility start to fall a little bit? You used to be number one, but now you are seeing yourself not having as much access as you once in the past. So what would you do? A lot of people are seeking alternative residence or alternative citizenship because they want to have that additional freedom that that allows. So 67 % surge, Henley's data found, are looking for those alternative residence programs. That also looks like you are hedging against declining U.S. mobility. You're like, hey, my passport doesn't get me into this place.

18:51Maybe I'll go see if I can snag one from Belgium or a European one. Who's my grandma? Who's my grandpa? Try to get that dual citizenship going. So that's just kind of another trickle-down effect from this statistic of the U.S. falling from its once-high perch. Let's look at the leaderboard just overall. Asian countries dominate the upper ranks. Singapore is number one. They have visa-free access to 193 destinations, followed by South Korea with 190. And the third place, Japan, with 189. In last place at the other end is Afghanistan. They can get into 24 destinations visa-free. But the U.S. is in free fall, so I wouldn't be surprised if we, you know, fell down the leaderboard even more.

19:32Okay, for my next number, if you're headed to London, hold on to your phone till your knuckles bleed. The city has become the European capital for phone thefts, clocking a record 80 ,000 stolen phones last year, a big increase from 64 ,000 the year before. As The New York Times reports, this is no Oliver Twist level pickpocketing, but a sprawling global crime network. New phones nabbed in London sell for big bucks in China, sometimes up to$5 ,000, fueling a multi-layered industrial scale enterprise that has bedeviled police. And it would help if they actually tried to stop it. Law enforcement has been slow to respond to the phone thefts in part because they didn't put in much effort.

20:11British police budgets were slashed in the 2010s and whatever resources were available were directed away from low level offenses and toward more serious violence and sexual crimes. And the phone robbers got away with it. About 106 ,000 phones were reported stolen in London from March 2024 to February 2025. But fewer than 500 people were charged or admitted to an offense. Now the police have decided to crack down, conducting raids to root out the middlemen who fuel the black market for phones. Recently, they arrested two men who were accused of sending 40 ,000 stolen phones to China. They were seen in Costco buying 1.5 miles worth of aluminum foil to wrap around phones so they wouldn't transmit a tracking signal.

20:50There are so many little things that kind of all culminated in this epidemic of phone theft. So one of them is the fact that they figured out that tin foil and aluminum foil was an integral part of this entire system. So one and a half miles, you can literally buy anything at Costco. But the other part that definitely enabled this is e-bikes, actually. Lime bikes were introduced into London in 2018, and they've turned out to be the perfect getaway vehicle for phone tests. They're very easy to ditch. They're very easy to pick up. They're quiet. They're fast, actually. And please say we don't even try to chase these people because, one, it's just too dangerous for us going through crowds.

21:26And, two, we couldn't track them down even if we did set after them. So e-bikes have been a massive enabler for this as well. And then also humans are an enabler too, because you forget that the thing you're carrying around your hand all day, this tool that's always in your pocket is worth a thousand dollars on the black market, a thousand quid. Excuse me. We're talking about London here. So you're not necessarily paying attention when you're just looking at your Twitter feed or you're looking at Instagram and you make an easy target when you're not paying attention. So it is fascinating that you forget that they've just become so ubiquitous, but they still are a very valuable thing.

22:01Some people say you wouldn't count$1 ,000 in cash right on the sidewalk in front of people, and yet we look at our phones without a care in the world. So there are different parts of this from our literal intention spans to e-bikes that create this massive epidemic. make. All right. For my final number, Americans tend to think they're a pretty handy bunch expressing high confidence they can accomplish a variety of practical tasks in a new survey from the Pew Research Center. So Pew asked American adults whether they could accomplish each of 12 different practical activities. And many replied, oh, easy.

22:3395 % they could definitely or probably remove a stain from their clothes. 94 % said the same about cleaning and caring for a wound. and 76 % said they could probably or definitely understand which chemicals not to mix in household cleaning. Confidence scores were particularly high for tasks related to health and food. 88 % said they could make sense of nutrition labels. 83 % could explain what yeast does in baking bread. And 83 % also said they could grow a vegetable garden. So what are the tasks that people need to call in a little help for? The more technical ones, unsurprisingly, 39 % said they could explain a high-pressure system on a weather map, and just 29 % said they could fix a problem with a car's engine.

23:16Toby, I'm surprised at the broad confidence on display here. I wonder if most people who responded thought, sure, I could do this after watching a couple YouTube videos, of course. That is the data point that is missing from this entire data set, is do I have my phone available? Can I look it up on YouTube? Because I would feel confident about fixing an engine if I can look up the exact problem in front of me. Were there any of these practical tasks that you thought were a big delta from your own experience? Or did you think you fell pretty much in line with what most people responded to this?