I was very impressed with the statistics because it supports my hypothesis that only business model transformation will protect American economy against technological shifts and offshoring. So I thought of doing an article on the subject to show that what has happened in the banking sector might very well happen to other sectors (e.g. manufacturing or IT) if we could retrain Americans to focus on high-value business process. But I wanted to dig more data on teller employment over the years so that I could draw a chart showing how employment was going up. I had a hard time finding yearly data on number of bank tellers (I could only access some old studies conducted by various Fed economists and other tidbits of information from various Department of Labor publication) but I was still able to come up with seven data points for the period mentioned by Floria. So let us review the data in the table below:
Yes, the number of tellers did go up by 55,000, but the US population grew by 53 million. In effect, the number of tellers did drop, which was something I had expected considering that you see fewer of them and use them even less often. Several articles that I reviewed indicate that more branches are being opened (and more tellers being hired) in neighborhoods with large number of immigrants (who prefer going to a branch to do business with a live person). I was sincerely hoping that Florian were right.