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Fast-Food CEO Invests In Machines Because Regulation Makes Them Cheaper Than Employees (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, has been inspired by the 100-percent automated restaurant, Eatsa, as he looks for ways to deal with rising minimum wages. "With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says. "You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants." Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive -- this is not rocket science," says Puzder. What comes as a challenge is automating employee tasks. This is where he draws the line and doesn't think that it's likely any machine could perform such work. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder in regard to replacing employees with machines.
Hope those machines buy his crappy food...
Remember how they told us that there would be no IT jobs left in the US because everything can be done so much cheaper in India?
Now it's that there will be no burger flipping jobs left because machines can do it cheaper. Let's wait and see how these burgers taste and whether I don't like them over there at [other burger joint] better even if they cost 30 cents more but taste like a burger and not like the bag it came in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's inevitable less qualified humans will be replaced by machines. It's inevitable over time more qualified humans will be replaced. It's extremely short-sighted (or disingenuous) to blame government regulations for doing something that is inevitably going to happen just a few years down the line anyway. As machines catch up to and surpass humans in more areas the percentage of humans who cannot be profitably employedwill approach unity. In my opinion the reasons to reject these changes tend to be bad ones.
You have the traditionalists, who just don't want anything to change. You have the sour grape connoisseurs, who believe positive change is undesirable because they see it as unlikely. Then there's the worst of them, the people who believe experiencing unpleasantness like working is intrinsically valuable. It's happening. The list of things humans can do that robots and computers cannot do is shrinking... and that list never grows longer. It's time to look to a future free of involuntary employment. It's time to make it happen as soon as possible.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Puzder doesn't believe in [the progressive idea of] raising the minimum wage.
Square brackets are used to modify the original statement only when it would provide contextual accuracy, not when you want to add bias to a statement. If you add bias this way, I instantly think you're a moron, regardless of your views.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
That shouldn't be amazing. No matter what happens in other businesses, or society as a whole, Puzder is still making the optimal choice for himself.
He's arguing against raising the minimum wage because it's pricing human employees out of the market. Okay, so what's the plan in 5 years when the machines cost half as much? Or 5 years after that, when the machines cost half as much again? Are we going to lower the minimum wage to one dollar an hour?
More than that, if minimum wage employees get pay cuts and job losses like he is threatening... who does he think will have the money to buy his robot-made burgers? Cutting the minimum wage means you spend less on payroll, but your customers are somebody else's employees and they got a pay cut too.
This is why basic income is inevitable. Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work. There will be no personal income to tax if people don't have jobs. The only thing left to tax will be the corporations.
And the corporations, while they might not paying taxes to give people a basic income will need to. For without the people getting that basic income there are no consumers to consume what the corporations are producing and so they will go out of business.
The corporations will leave and go somewhere else, like China and India you say? Of course they will and they will just do to China and India what they did wherever they moved from, putting everyone out of work and forcing the government to make them pay for a basic income.
What of the country that all the corporations left that now has an unemployed work force but no corporations to pay for their basic income? Probably there will be a new tax to "sellers" of goods and services, so the corporations will pay the tax to keep people in a basic income one way or another. But more likely, a new economy will rise up.
So yeah, keep up the good work you corporate bastards. Looking forward to sitting on my ass while you support me. Well, in fact, I won't be sitting on my ass, but I will be spending my days doing something *I* want to do instead of wasting away 1/3 of my life in your factories.
And unless you continue to support me in that endeavour, you will be unemployed (out of business) too.
Greed is awesome.
He's not arguing anything. He's making a threat - which means he doesn't have a plan, because if machines were cheaper he wouldn't need a jab at minimum wage. He wouldn't need anything - he'd just do it.
I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital.
I'm always amazed that people think their "capital" has any sort of meaning unless the mass of society can benefit from it. Guess what, the only thing preventing the masses from stringing you up and taking your capital is the basic social contract that allows you to get rich as long as standards for the masses don't fall too far. You violate that social contract no amount of funny money or gold bars or factories is going to save your head from getting blown off as the police officers and military you depend on to live find it expedient to slay you.
Monstar L
Actually you've got that backwards, fighting against minimum wage laws illistrates economic and historical ignorance at the highest level.
Historically they were associated in a huge increase in the middle class. What you're arguing for is the creation and maintenance of an underclass to keep the wealth centralised in the current upper classes.
But you said it best
Your superstitions need to die out, sadly this is taking a long time.
Your assumptions are based on conditions that dont exist in the real world because of a little economic principle called "externalities". Keynesian and Libertarian economists love to ignore externalities because they 1) Aren't immediately apparent on a balance sheet and 2) completely screw up their chosen economic dogma. OK, so lets allow businesses to decide what is the minimum wage, the first thing they're going to find out is that fewer people can afford to buy they're product. This alone will reduce the available workforce because unlike companies, workers can pick up and leave when they cant make a liveable wage. As a result, anyone with any skill, talent or worth will move to a place with wage laws so all that CEO Stingy-pants will be left with are the most uneducated employees, literally the people who cant get. a job anywhere else.
A good historical example was Henry Ford. Instead of paying the lowest wages possible, he paid the highest and what he saw was a huge uptick in sales because his own workers could now afford to buy his cars. It wasn't just Ford that benefited from this, his workers could now afford other luxuries like a refrigerator.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So now that the optimum situation is to have no employees
It's the optimum for the business that Puzder is responsible for. Your questions are good questions, but they are questions for society as a whole, not questions for Mr. Puzder to answer. If society allows people to run businesses with no employees, and it makes sense from a business perspective to do so, you can't blame individual business owners for making that choice.
Companies hate their employees. Labor costs are a barrier to higher profits. Employees are treated as liabilities.
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
And no other jobs come to fill their places?
By your logic, we'd be at 75% unemployment (figure pulled out of my ass, admittedly, but just making a point here...) right now with all the technological advances since the 1970s. What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? Are all those file clerks and bookkeepers still out of work or did they find something else to do?
People made the same arguments you're making for every technological leap forward. The net result has always been people thrown out of low wage, miserable jobs have found higher wage, less miserable jobs, given enough time.
It's called Structural Unemployment. It is a problem for workers who are too old to retrain - think people in their upper 50's trying to sprint to retirement - but for the vast majority of the workforce, it's a net benefit in the long run at the cost of a little short term pain.
The only problem with this idea that the unemployed will find work is that the number of people required to design/operate/maintain technology is much smaller than the number of people required to do the work the technology replaces.
We've gone from 95% of people doing agricultural work to less than 5%. Yet people found new jobs: almost everyone did. Same thing with manufacturing. But somehow not with burger flipping jobs? Those are magic? Seems unlikely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We didn't have cell phones in the 1700s.
There's population versus technology, there's people spending less on food and clothes while buying bigger houses, the increase in non-necessity expenditures as a percentage of income, and all kinds of other data showing we actually do increase the number of people in the economy.
You're right, though: The number of people needed to do a job doesn't increase. That's the point: technology *decreases* the number of people required to do a job, freeing their labor time up for other tasks. That's why we've moved people out of agriculture and manufacture and into construction, medicine, retail, and business services. Somebody has to sell those products from China; somebody has to handle the logistics, the distribution, the shipping; somebody has to drive the trucks; somebody has to run the involved IT systems.
Even after we've reduced the share of labor per product in *all* of these types of jobs, we create more jobs by buying more products. You buy 3 times as much shit, you need 3 times as much logistics. Maybe it takes 1/5 as much labor to provide those logistics, so you have 60% as many people doing that; the other 40% are running Spotify and Netflix.
We don't create higher-class jobs; we reduce costs and improve the standard-of-living of the lowest income earners. We may create more or fewer poor people; those poor people will be objectively wealthier than last generation's poor people, but they're still poor because literally everyone else has more than they do. Some of the replacement jobs are higher-income-class, some are lower-income-class, and we wind up with more things produced per wage-labor hour, more stuff per-capita, and more luxuries in the hands of everyone as their basic needs become cheaper.
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And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
If you disagree, can you explain to me how stringing up, say, the Walton family would meaningfully impact society? Would we be lost in a world incapable of conducting retail sales operations without the Waltons? Would the lack of their high-volume low-margin retail empire really result in a world where nobody produces anything, farmers stop farming, cats and dogs start living together? By what mechanism?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Or maybe they'll just shoot you and take your wallet. Desparate people are dangerous and social security nets keep the crime rate low.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap