If the business can't earn a profit at the market rate for the labour required to run the business, then maybe they shouldn't be in business any more?

I mean lots businesses become viable if you only have to pay $1/hr.

In some cases maybe that's the trigger point where it makes it worthwhile to buy the products overseas (free shipping!) and deal with the uncertainty of when you'll receive it.

The current system sometimes seems designed to fail.

There's a lot of options other than simply offshoring.

Consider externalizing costs, almost no one has a servant pump gasoline for them, I would imagine you have to be very old for "self service gas station" vs "full service gas station" to mean anything to most Americans.

Another option is political corruption, I'll donate $ to your re-election campaign if you create a property tax free zone for my business.

Full service gas pumps are still mandatory in some states in the US.

The point is still valid in the states that aren't New Jersey or Oregon. In Nebraska, Washington, California, Iowa, Ohio and Kansas, all the places I have lived in or worked in my memory I have seen no gas station attendants.

This is largely because the cost and labor of operating the pump has been externalized by pushing onto the car operator.

Retail business do this with cash registers. How many of these jobs will simply disappear? What else can be fully automated?

The counter-point to this is that if people remain unemployed due to unwillingness to accept available jobs at the available pay...at what point do they have to re-examine their own market value?

If a significant portion of the population has a market value lower than the cost for them to have a reasonable quality of life isn't that some kind of fundamental failure condition for society/humanity?

Or is it a function of supply and demand simply changing the rate because we've been perfectly comfortable sending millions of jobs overseas?

As soon as the supply of people needing jobs is low enough that businesses have to pay more to hire...they will do so barring alternative options.

If you have to raise your wages it generally means your competitor also has to raise theirs, so yes, businesses can usually remain profitable.

And if your competition is foreign you're usually even better off -- wages in China have been rising a lot faster than wages in the States.

Corporate profits are up a bit as a % of revenue. Similar labor's share of national income is down a bit. A lot of businesses could afford to pay a bit more.

Just a bit though. There hasn't been some sort of sea change like a lot of people seem to think.

That could easily happen due to consolidation and averaging over sectors. In some sectors with high barriers to entry giants earn a lot, in other sectors, it's trench warfare with competition and <1% profit margins.

If not, then you don't have a business that's viable for the current market.

Or you need to invest in robot cashiers to replace the unemployed people who don't want the wage you're offering.

If that were possible, and in the business plan, you would have a viable business.

It's underway. And maybe it's a good plan, but you don't want to take that step, so you go out of business and your competitors fill in your place. (Consolidation is good for business, not so good for workers.)