The company is continuing to focus on its oral care segment over other categories such as home care and personal care, although this may hurt it short-term sales growth.

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The lower-wage occupations that grew the most during the recovery include retail salespersons, food preparation workers, laborers and freight workers, waiters and waitresses, personal and home care aides, and office clerks and customer representatives.

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Even as the economy emerges from the recession, more and more consumers are assuming the do-it-yourself, at-home approach to dining and personal care.

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"Robots will be practically everywhere in the near future: assisting the elderly, in home care, as personal and security service providers, and they will circulate within a networked environment of communicating devices in the home and work place, " said Ohad Shvueli, Vice President, Commercial markets, Primesense.

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There are more than 1.5 million nursing-home beds nationwide that provide intensive health- and personal-care services to the elderly.

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It is more than three times larger, when measured in sales, than the next-largest retailer, Carrefour. (Carrefour has more stores.) Wal-Mart is the largest, or among the top three largest, sellers of many categories of goods, including groceries, family clothing, toys, personal care products, home electronics, magazines and others.

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More than 1 million seniors would lose homemaker services and 1.5 million would lose in-home personal care services.

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She said the shift away from home births to hospital births over the last 50 years had resulted in "dehumanisation" and lack of personal care and midwife-led units could go someway to rectifying this.

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