Announcer this is on the money, your money, your life, your future. Now, becky quick. We begin with automation. Its knost just manufacturing where machines can replace workers, rapid changes in restaurants are impacting jobs today and will be for the future as well. Its this weeks cover story. Automation nation. Retail stores are closing at records pace as shopping shifts to online and mobile leading the Retail Revolution is amazon with 43 of all online sales last year. Now after disrupting our brick and mortar habits, the giant is doing something surprising, opening its own walkin stores. Six more stores are planned. And amazon is testing a Grocery Store with a twist. No cashiers and no checkout lines. They automatically bill you as you walk out the door. Other retailers are adapting, too. Sams club introduced an app that lets customers scan items on their phone and skip the checkout counter. And its not just retail being reinvented. Restaurant chains are rethinking their model. Mcdonalds and wendys and panera bread has selfservice kiosks and apps that let you order in advance. The biggest and rationale that restaurants will automate is because of the growing labor concern. Not only are labor costs growing but now in a tight economy where unemployment is under 5 , its increasingly hard for restaurants to find good labor. With automation increasing, are jobs at risk . Andy puds der was president trumps nominee for labor secretary, hes the former ceo of cke restaurants, the Parent Company of hardees and carls junior. Andy, thank you for being with us today. Thanks, becky. We were just talking about this automation, things that people guessed was coming but a huge trend has picked up recently. What do you think is causing that . Theres two things that accelerate it. One, the way people are purchasing things is different. You covered that a little in your report. Theres more purchasing online with amazon. Theres more Delivery Services that you can get an app on your phone and order from restaurants at home. The second thing is that labor costs are increasing. Theyre being government is driving them up by mandates, such as the minimum wage and family leave, things that cause labor costs to increase. You have two pressures coming into retail businesses. One, business is down because people are doing things online and, two, the cost of staying in business, the cost of labor is going up. You find people resorting to automation and accelerates a process because we need more time to train our labor force. Were accelerating the pace of automation, obvious from what you just covered. You can take a look at both of those items. Youre not going to stop the way consumers are shopping. Thats a trend to say and i think you agree with that. I do. There are ways to address it. Starbucks dominos has done particularly well. An app put them way ahead of pizza hut or papa johns. It tells you at which stage your pizza delivery is. Its in the oven. Really, their sales are up 20, 25 . On a minute by minute basis, where is your pizza . Exactly. The problem at the retail level is when you increase the cost of labor and accelerate the implementation of automation, its coming but theres no reason to rush it because people need these jobs while we train for a 21st century economy. The department of labor could be a big part of that and its something i would have pushed had i been confirmed. Lets talk, first of all, just about a higher minimum wage. Plenty of people say, wait a second, why shouldnt you have a living wage if you are working a fulltime job. How do you respond to that . A job can only pay what it produces in economic benefit. Its not a matter of people should or shouldnt get a living wage. Wed love to pay everybody a living wage. Certain jobs only pay a certain amount of money and produce a certain amount of value. Entrylevel jobs, i dont know how many people you know who started in the restaurant business. I did. And those entrylevel jobs mean a lot. If you dont raise the minimum wage to a point where you price these kids out of jobs, theyll have entry level jobs and we wont accelerate the pace of automation. So we need to be very careful what were doing here. Were taking a whole generation of kids and not allowing them to get on that letter of opportunity. They are not making that first step and thats going to be a very big problem as we go forward. You said that you have some solutions that you think would be easily maybe not easily but would be something that could help this problem. You thought you could do that if you were labor secretary. Why did you withdraw from the nomination . Well, you could only be confirmed if you have 51 votes. When i lost three i lost three republican votes. I got to the point where some republicans got nervous. One more dropped out. One more said he would probably vote negative. That put me under the 50vote threshold i needed with Vice President pences vote. And i didnt want to tilt at windmills. If i wasnt going to win, no reason to stay in the process. We needed to find someone who would win so i dropped out. What should the government be focusing on right now if there was one thing to try and fix this problem . I think theres two things. One, do what you can to try and keep the cost of entrylevel jobs low so businesses arent incentivized to replace those jobs with automation. If your job is replaced by a machine or some form of automation, the minimum wage is zero, you dont have a job. The second thing is we need to emphasize training. A lot of jobs people out there can be trained for. Computer programmers is a perfect example. Even in manufacturing, where weve lost since 2010, weve lost about 16 of our manufacturing jobs but the openings in manufacturing have gone from about 300,000 to about 350,000 because they cant find trained people to work in plants. Working in a factory now isnt like when it was when i was a kid and you could go in and in a couple of weeks you might be able to be productive. Youve got to learn how to operate machines and very complicated equipment. It may require computer skills. So they cant find people that are trained for these jobs. We need to train people for the jobs that exist. We need to stop pricing people out of the job market, try and make sure that kids get into the job market, get on the ladder of opportunity so we can see Economic Growth and calm some of the tension were seeing in our urban communities. Andy, always a pleasure talking to you and youre right, these are great chain jobs. Borels restaurant in indiana, i was salad bar girl. I was baskin robins. Thank you, andy. Heres a look at what is making news as we head into a new week on the money. The biggest week for earnings season with more than 400 Companies Set to report. Among those, 12 of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial average including boeing, cocacola, mcdonalds and procter gamble. The nasdaq closed at a record high. Stocks rallies on optimism from treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin about possible progress on major tax reform. At the close on friday, stocks were lower. Google makes most of its money from ads but the wall street journal is reporting that the company will introduce an ad blocking feature in its chrome web browser. The feature will reportedly filter out things like popups and audio playing mobile ads from desk top chrome. 307,000 Wireless Retail contracts lost in total. The company said that most infections occurred before verizon brought back the unlimited monthly data plan in middle of february. The giants acquisition of yahoo is still pending. Up next, were on the money. Home safe home. The technology that allows senior to be independent and stay in their homes longer. And later, Car Insurance 101. What you can do to cut the bill right now. First, look at how the stock market ended the week. Market ended the week. Theres no place like home. As you get older staying in your home safely can be a major issue. One company is using technology to try to help. Joining me is zachary watson, the president and ceo of honeycomb homes. Honeycomb is a software company. We utilize off the shelf hardware to integrate the home for older adults. Yes. The Smart Home Adoption has been pretty lackluster. Great innovation in the space but there hasnt really been a software thats interpreting the information for people in the home. And monitoring if somebody comes into the house or if i go out of the house, something along those lines and trying to figure out all of those things out . Sure. Theres two major categories here. One would be personal safety and the other one would be home or asset safety. What we do is we look at the information that the devices are giving us and make a determination if it looks like there might be something of concern. So that could be in terms of home safety, yeah, so are you actually knowing where im going when im going to the bathroom . You can follow me around the house like this . Yeah, exactly. We do it without cameras or imaging software. But you can maintain privacy . Yes. Obviously this isnt something that were watching every day, but as you can see on the right there, thats what it looks like for a caregiver who is checking in without checking in. Who gets alerted if theres a problem . That will usually be a Family Member or a professional caregiver. How does it work for an alert . Do you call me . Do i receive a text . Is there a beeper or something . Yes. You get an alert through the honeyco application, the mobile app, and you also get a text message. On the text message, were an Interesting Technology company insofar as we want to drive our engagement to zero or almost zero. Hearing from you is a bad thing. Yeah, silver lining. But you have youre at least aware of whats happening inside the home. So, yeah, really we dont want to take up mind share of people looking after their loved ones and they want to get that peace of mind so when they hear from us, they can respond appropriately. The one thing that strikes me, if im in South Carolina and i notice my mother may not be in the right place in nashville, what am i supposed to do at that point . Do i have a resource that i can call . Is it a neighbor . Is it up to me . Can you guys help me with that part of the equation, too . Yes. What weve done is set up a triage response. So we run through the alerts that a caregiver or Family Member would receive. And we essentially create a care plan of how to handle each of those. So if you know, if the resident were to leave the stove on and then leave the house, what how we want to handle that . Do we want to turn the stove off immediately . You can do that, too. Exactly. Thats the amazing thing about this, is that all of this technology is out there. Uhhuh. But its not being stitched together to make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. It might actually come in handy. Exactly. How much does it cost to get a home set up this way . The service is 59. 99 per month. Thats if you purchase the equipment upfront. The equipment is around 500 for the standard package. Uhhuh. But if youd rather pay over time, we can do essentially 149. 99 per month over the life of the contract so that you dont have to, you know, take that hit up front. All right. I like this. I can see some other potential uses for it. What if i want to check on my kids after school . I think that right now the biggest value is going to be to older adults and their Family Members having difficult conversations. But you can see this being something that is useful to well beyond that population . Oh, absolutely. I have it in my house, yeah. Zachary, thank you for your time today. Thanks for having me. Up next, were on the money. Looking to save money on your Car Insurance . Find out why your credit score could be key. There were about 100 u. S. Brewery breweries. And today theres more than 5,000. Has the craft beer craze tapped out . Car insurance isnt something you should just set and forget. There are lots of ways to save money if you know where to look. Joining us is toby stanger, Senior Editor at consumer reports. And toby, i feel a little hypo critical. I think i bought my Car Insurance 16 years ago and havent looked at it since. What should people be doing . Believe it or not, its not a bad idea every two or three years to shop for auto insurance. You would think, oh, well, ive been with my company for a long time, there must be a loyalty discount. Consumer reports, we looked at more than 2 billion premiums and theres not much of a loyalty discount. You should shop around. Part of the reason ive done it is if youre with state farm and they insure your car and house and Everything Else you have going, do you get a discount for buying in bulk like that . You do. Its called bundling. You do get a discount. When you go to shop again, you are going to have to do an apples to apples and say to the new insurer, if i bundle this and that, what is going to be my rate . Is this one of those situations where i can call up and say im going to leave if you dont give me a better rate . Does that work with these Insurance Companies . Or no . Its certainly worth looking. On consumerreports. Org, we have lists of the best companies to start with if, say, youre a parent with a teen driver in alaska, d. C. We discovered the companies that are most likely to have the lowest rates. You can go to various websites. Theres one called the zebra. Com. They showed the premiums from the most companies. You can compare and see who will give you the best rate. Is there any company that comes out on time consistently time and time again . Yeah. We looked at our ratings of claims payments, which we also feel is very important. Its not just the lowest cost. Right and theres a Company Called mika which usually comes up towards the top and usaa and new jersey manufacturers for those people who live in new jersey and pennsylvania. There are a few who come out on the top and they are considered the best for claims payments as per our subscribers. Is there anything that i can do to try to boost my ability to get a lower rate in helping my credit score, something along those lines . Thats what is interesting. Credit score, which has nothing to do with your driving record, actually has an impact on your insurance premium, except in california, massachusetts or hawaii where its illegal. Otherwise, it can have an impact. If you raise your credit score, which is good for a lot of reasons, it can have an impact on what you pay. All right. Its all great to know. Thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Up next, on the money, a look at the news for the week ahead. And overall beer sales are flat, but sales from small, independent craft brewers keep rising. Our industry is still pulling in new craft beer consumers. I know im wearing it but no one else will. Always discreet for bladder leaks. Here are the stories coming up that may impact your money this week. On tuesday, we get a read on home prices across the country when the caseshiller home index is released. Also, the Consumer Confidence report will give us a look at how consumers are feeling about current economic conditions. On thursday the durable goods market for march, things that last at least three years. And our National Take our daughters and sons to work day. On friday, well get the advance estimate of the Gross Domestic Product for the First Quarter of the year. Gdp is the broad measure of the economy. It adds up all of the goods and services produced in the united states. And the legislation thats funding the government known as the continuing resolution or cr expires. If congress doesnt pass a new appropriations bill most Government Agencies must shut down. If you bought beer lately, youve probably seen a lot of new brands on the shelves, sales of craft beer made by small local breweries are up. To compete, the big Beer Companies are buying up the smaller ones and others remain fiercely independent. Thats what landon dowdy found out, theres a battle brewing. Reporter brandon skull is one of the many craft brewers making a name for himself in d. C. And his business is growing with plans to more than triple production from the 15,000 plus barrels his company, d. C. Brow, produces a year. While overall beer sales are down, craft brewers posted 6 volume growth last year. And big beer is getting in on the action. Ab inbev in the last five years bought up nine craft brewers. Miller coors purchased four. Whats in it for the craft brewers . It certainly gives them additional advantages in the marketplace, distribution and retailers that they wouldnt have to an independent brewer. It creates challenges for regional craft brewers going head to head in the same real retail channels and the larger ones. Reporter but how does the consumer feel when one of their local and independent and craft brands cash in by selling to a macro brewer . It will hurt their image a little bit as a Craft Brewery that has sold out to a larger brewery. But overall, i think if the beer still speaks volume to what they are doing, i think it is still good beer. Reporter with a record 5,200 brewers competing, its fierce. Consolidating craft brewers is one Way Companies eliminate competition. Skull says the Craft Companies arent going headtohead. A direct competitor is not necessarily or Craft Brewery friends down the street. Its more of the big macro. Its a rising tide lifting all ships. While big brewers have a lot to offer, the question comes one of priority. And for now, skull is staying true to his craft. And since 2009, a craft brewers boom. In 2016 alone, the u. S. Had 826 new openings and less than 100 closings, becky. That makes you think. When you follow the stock markets of things like that, a boom like that, it makes you wonder if a bust is coming. Is it the bubble building or does it feel like its sustainable . Hundreds opened last year. We talked to these brewers and they say this industry is a little different where a win for one is a win for all theyre not like my dads generation where he drinks coors light and only coors light. A craft drinker is going to try a bunch of different kinds of beer. So more room at the table. Exactly. Landon, thank you very much. Thats the show for today. Im becky quick. Next week, is it time for a new credit card . If youre tempted by points, cash back or even zero percent interest, well tell you which ones are best. Keep it here. Were on the money. Have a great one and well see you next weekend. Hey there, we will light up the nasdaq markets on expiration friday. We hope you didnt miss us too much. Heres whats coming up on the show. Well, it comes down to a few moments. Next week is one of them from megacap tech. Well tell you how to profit. Plus, auto stocks have been on the left. There is something in the charts that suggest even more pain to come. Well explain. Its a good time for the great taste of mcdonalds indeed it is, mcdonald shares all time h