alt Hacker NewsI think you'd be surprised then to know that shoes are not generally made with robots.
Factories have made mass production possible, but there are still tons of humans in there pushing parts through sewing machines by hand.
Industrial automation for non uniform shapes and fiddly bits is expensive, much cheaper to just offshore the factory and hire desperately poor locals to act like robots.
Kindof? The final assembly is done by a person.
Making a shoe is a long process and involves making the pieces of the shoe, then assembling them. Literally the only thing a human does at a Nike factory is the final assembly. Everything else is made on a machine almost end to end. The trickiest part of making a shoe, attaching the sole, is just done by putting it in a press with some glue/heat. It takes 15s.
Making a shoe by hand takes 40 to 100 hours of high skill human input, and the skill level largely determines the quality of the shoe. Making a shoe at a Nike factory takes around 45 minutes of moderate skill human input and massive effort is made to make the skill level of the worker as irrelevant as possible.
I think my point stands however as no shoe factories hire shoe makers.