Mind you big box stores are still labour intensive, the only difference is, instead of a lot of people owning and running their own stores one entity owns and runs the place with low-skilled labour from the poolof people who have been run out of business.
Traditionally, productivity growth has slowed as expansions have matured, with firms obliged to draw less-skilled workers from the depleted pooloflabour.
Other bright ideas include getting local firms to pool information on new markets and to work more actively on fixing problems such as shortages ofskilledlabour.