Businesses prefer ATMs to worker because ATMs are exempt from ObamaCare

If you are running a business, you structure it and design your future plans based not only on the world as it is today, but also on what it may look like in the reasonably near future. You must prepare yourself for likely worst-case scenarios. The one relating to employment is that ObamaCare will survive legal and electoral challenges. Facing that possibility, you avoid hiring people. When looking at “man vs. machine” decisions, you choose the machine if it’s at all affordable. You do everything you can to squeeze productivity out of your current crew, even larding on extra duties and overtime if they can handle it.

Additionally, companies are run by human beings who, especially at smaller businesses, really hate to have to let people go (and of course, they, like their larger brethren, also must worry about unemployment insurance costs, wrongful termination lawsuits, and the like). If you believe that having additional employees around will become cost-prohibitive in 2014, you avoid hiring them today. Combine all of this with historically weak post-recession economic growth, and you have the perfect recipe for what has resulted: lackluster hiring, heavy use of part-timers and temporary help, and the aforementioned bias towards automation.