TCO goes way down -> price of product goes way down -> sales go up because price is lower.
It doesn't always happen that way, but sometimes it does. uber is a good example. By reducing cost of car rides, I pay someone to ride in their car 10X the amount I used to.
If Americans wanted to live a 1916 lifestyle, not many of us would have at work. But we buy a lot more stuff and use a lot more services.
We've automated away nearly every job people did in 1875's America. But we all still have jobs.
BUT, that is where we are at now with our FUNDS miss-allocated to some other task rather than the encouragement of small business growth
With higher rents and lower pay rates for fewer jobs, people cannot afford the consumer goods even though they have become cheaper with the increased supply. That decrease in demand further drives down the prices such that even with maximum automation, that business is no longer profitable. The people maintaining the robots get laid off. What happens then?
That is false on its face. If you buy a robot to replace a welder, you indirectly employ the people who design, build, and maintain that robot. True, and those are higher paid jobs than the welder. But at the end of the day, the person running the factory where said robot is used did an analysis and concluded that it was cheaper to buy the robot than to employ the guy it replaced. That means fewer total man-hours in the workforce, since those man hours are billed at a higher rate and are still lower TCO.
TL;DR - if your TCO goes down by employing higher paid people you have caused a net-loss in jobs. TCO ~= rate*man_hours so if TCO goes down while rate goes up...