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Behind the Gig economy.

The battle between push and pull is familiar to supply chains. For ages now, industries have produced goods they thought were relevant for the customer and then used networks of distributors and retailers to push these to the consumers. The apparent outcome of this is the massive scale of advertising that uses tactics to lure a customer base for the product. 
The shift to a pull-based supply chain seems more rational. One is where the production takes in the customer's demand before the show. Not only does that minimize the risk of product failure, but it also captures the market sentiment with greater accuracy. In other words, it caters to an existing demand rather than creating one for itself. This process is lean and profitable, except for a shortcoming; Production takes time.


During the early 90s, when the internet spread like wildfire, people almost immediately expected the internet business to take off. However, it was only after a decade and a massive dot com bubble that today, the technology is ripe for an indeed pull economic model. Now that our complete customer interaction has shifted to an online platform. It's worth the look at how services and products are planning to catch up.
Unlike the customer side, production is mainly a person-machine interaction; a gig economy exists in this niche. In some services like ride-sharing or beauty care, gig workers tend to do most of the jobs. Others, like parcel delivery, are part of the process.

The challenges in this sector are enormous. Since to maintain the level of customer service, gig workers must be in sync with machines. For an example of a 30 min pizza delivery model, roughly 60% of the time is given to the delivery personnel. This implies that the consumable takes less of the total process time than the logistics. Thus, over the past few years, executives have planned out incentives and pay structures that push the gig workers to toil in for those machine-like performances until they find a suitable machine to replace them. All of this makes a gig worker's job unhealthy and risky.

Given the plague of crippling unemployment economies, the gig sector has promising figures for the future. However, the nature of work is demanding and unforgiving. Given that tomorrow, millions will be gig workers, it's time legislation spare an eye to regulating corporations. The gig economy has actually helped many make a standard of living. Since gig workers tend to be from the lower strata of the employee, it is the only job available today for those without an education degree.
And that regulations would only push industries towards automation, making this scarier. It's tough to know when the quality of a job becomes a more pressing matter than having no job at all.


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