Extensive production automation is really expensive. You'd probably be surprised how much electronics and consumer goods manufacturing is still largely manual. In particular, high automation gets you into pretty extreme retooling costs whenever you change your designs.
There has been a large amount of automation that most people don't think of much anymore . Factories that used to employ thousands in the 1950s now only have hundreds. Assembly might be manual, but cutting is all automated. The factory I work in got rid of 200 employees just by getting Lazar cutters for sheet steel. And many other machines.
