As embarrassing as it is to say, the Domino’s Pizza on Apache Boulevard is in my cell phone contact list. Sometimes I ask myself, “Brian … why?”

My answer is always the same: because I don’t have a job and the 5-5-5 deal is my best friend in the world.

The current unemployment rate in the United States is 9.7 percent, with Arizona’s rate just below the national average at 9.5 percent. Cities such as Riverside, Calif., and Detroit have even higher unemployment rates at 14.3 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. But is there anything we can do about these statistics? Can we really stop our national unemployment rate from rising to double-digits?

Sure, a major cause of the unemployment rate is the recession — the failed sub-prime mortgages, the war, etc. — but what if none of that had occurred? We might still be in the same situation.

Despite how much we may want to sit around and blame different people, we need to consider that the market is evolving into something new, and something that we really can’t control from the outside.

As technology becomes increasingly productive, we have fewer and fewer job opportunities to offer people. As Karl Marx once said, “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal would never work in these times because we now have more machines to do the jobs that people back then would have been doing.

There are infinite possibilities to create online companies that need fewer employees than ever before.

Take Netflix, for example. Netflix generates $1.365 billion in revenue per year and only needs to employ about 1,200 people. On the other hand, Blockbuster is helping to lower the unemployment rate by employing nearly 60,000 people — 50 times the work force of Netflix.

But why would I want to go to Blockbuster when I can have Netflix deliver movies to my mailbox for a cheaper price? Well, people simply aren’t going to Blockbuster anymore, and now the chain is planning to close as many as 960 stores by the end of next year. And we all know that with store cuts come job cuts.

I’m not trying to down-talk these companies. I mean, Netflix is a fantastic business model. I would have done the same exact thing if it were my idea. The problem is it may not be the best thing for our economy right now as far as unemployment rates go.

We can’t just sit back and wait for the economy to revive itself. You want the unemployment rate to decrease? Contact Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, and suggest to him that he open up a few Netflix stores so he can employ more people. And maybe one day, just maybe, I’ll be able to take Domino’s out of my cell phone. Until then, I’ll see you around Apache while I pick up coins from the street.

Send sandwiches to Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu.