Converting Campuses For Fulfillment Centers

Moving on to tomorrow’s tech and the decisive trends that will power your tech portfolio, you can’t help but think about what will happen to the American university system if we are slammed with another delta dropkick.

A bachelor’s degree has already been massively devalued with each subsequent “wave” knocking off an extra 20% from a 4-year achievement.

Another unstoppable trend that shows no signs of abating is the “winner take all” mentality of the tech industry.

The virus was a great catalyst for U.S. tech companies and U.S. asset holders in stocks and real estate to cash in with a smash and grab of the century effectively leaving the rest of the uncompetitive global economy in its wake.  

Remember this is all while China is destroying their own tech companies with zeal because they perceive them as too powerful at this point and a legitimate threat to the interest of the communist party.

Now, tech giants will apply their huge relative gains to gut different industries and have set their sights on academics and the buildings they operate from as their next exercise in destroy and conquer.

Recently, we got clarity on big-box malls becoming the new tech fulfillment centers with the largest mall operator in the United States, Simon Property Group (SPG), signaling they are willing to convert space leftover in malls from Sears and J.C. Penny.

The next bombshell would hit sooner rather than later.

College campuses will become the newest of the new Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), or Target (TGT) eCommerce fulfillment centers, and let me explain to you why.

When the California state college system shut down its campuses and moved classes online due to the coronavirus in March, rising sophomore Jose Antonio returned home to Vallejo, California where he expected to finish his classes and “chill” with friends and family.

Then Amazon announced plans to fill 100,000 positions across the U.S at fulfillment and distribution centers to handle the surge of online orders. A month later, the company said it needed another 75,000 positions just to keep up with demand. More than 1,000 of those jobs were added at the five local fulfillment centers. Amazon also announced it would raise the minimum wage from $15 to $17 per hour through the end of April.

Antonio, a marketing and communications major, jumped at the chance and was hired right away to work in the fulfillment center near Vacaville that mostly services the greater Bay Area. He was thrilled to earn extra spending money while he was home and doing his schoolwork online.

This was just the first wave of hiring for these fulfillment center jobs, and there will be a second, third, and fourth wave as eCommerce volumes spike.

Even college students desperate for the cash might quit academics all together to focus on starting from the bottom at Amazon or launching an e-store.

Even though many of these jobs at Amazon fulfillment centers aren’t the plush office job that Ivy League graduates covet, any job will do for the bottom 40% of hardworking Americans.

The rise of ecommerce has happened at a time when the cost of a college education has risen by 250% and more often than not, the price rises don’t live up to the value accretion.

Many fresh graduates are mired in $100,000 or even $200,000 plus debt burdens that prevent them from getting a foothold on the property ladder and delay household formation and there’s been no indication President Biden is about to cancel this colossal debt.

Then consider that many of the 1000s of colleges that dot America have borrowed capital to the hills building glitzy business schools, $200 million football locker rooms, and rewarding the entrenched bureaucrats at the school management level outrageous compensation packages.

America will be saddled with scores of colleges and universities shuttering because they can’t meet their debt obligations.

The financial profiles of prospective students have dipped by 50% or more in the short-term with their parents unable to find the money to send their kids back to college, not to mention the health risks.

Then there is the international element here with the lucrative Chinese student that added up to 500,000 total students attending American universities in the past.

They won’t come back as well.

The college campuses will be carcasses with juicy meat on the bones allowing Jeff Bezos to choose the prime cuts.

The coronavirus has exposed the American college system for what it is, and not every college has a $40 billion endowment fund like Harvard to withstand today’s financial apocalypse.

The only two industries now big enough to quench big tech’s insatiable appetite for devouring revenue are healthcare and education.

We are seeing this play out quickly, and once tech gets a foothold literally and physically on campus, the rest of the colleges will be thrust into an existential crisis of epic proportions with the only survivors being the ones with large endowment funds and a global brand name.

It’s scary, isn’t it?

This is how tech has evolved and certain parts of society are now diminished while others supercharged.

This is also part of how the world is changing so rapidly now because of a combustible mix of geopolitics, health scares, and accelerating technology that average people can’t recognize the world we live in anymore.

When this happens, close your eyes and buy tech stocks since most of us don’t run pharma companies or can’t extract largesse from dollar or euro-denominated governments.

 

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