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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...
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 work in automation. It isn't so much that minimum wage matters... sure if you have really, really low minimum wage and people willing to work for it then you might just throw labor at a problem, but typically we automate for a variety of reasons: improved accuracy/quality, better throughput (a robot loading a machine can often keep up better than a human, which means I get more throughput out of my expensive machine), more consistent process. We *want* to automate everything, and when we look at what we *can* automate, it's always the boring repetitive jobs anyway. So it doesn't matter that much whether someone's making $6 or $8 or $10 an hour, if we can automate it we will. Certainly we are growing more concerned with the fact that a growing percentage of the population isn't going to be able to find the easy put-nut-A-on-bolt-B type of work anymore, and there's definitely a portion of those people who may not be able to be retrained to do something that a robot can't do. That's a societal problem, not an engineering problem. First is understanding that this isn't the same thing we saw in the industrial revolution. If I gave a laborer a steam shovel I made them a lot more productive. If I just say "stand aside while this robot does the job" that's different. And no, you're not going to take someone who works on an assembly line and retrain them to be a robot programmer. That's absurd. They won't get a job assembling robots either, as Fanuc apparently has a "lights out" manufacturing facility for their robots - it's a completely automated line. Minimum wage is doing a good thing: encouraging factories to automate by making the payback look better. Automated factories are better. Automated restaurants are probably better too. The fact that we have a very low skilled portion of the populace is a separate issue that needs addressing... maybe a guaranteed minimum income, I don't know. But coming up with make-work jobs for them is no better than putting them in prison and having them dig holes and fill them in. Also relevant to this discussion - has everyone seen the short story, "Manna"?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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.
Pretty sure in the bronze age a horde of barbarians would kill him and take his "capital", possibly also raping him and his family. Beginning mostly with feudalism a group of very low wage earners protects him militarily while a group of other low wage earners and machinery designed by other low wage earners takes his capital and gives it back to him with interest. Those people, while unquestionably delivering more to his (and each others) bottom line than he is compensating them for, refrain from barbaric behavior because their pathetic wages are still better than raping and pillaging. In the modern age there has been a push to realize that simply possessing money is probably not a contribution to society and such people are effectively the same useless parasites their poor non-job seeking equivalents are, unless they are also capable of using that money effectively. Due to the need to maintain the semblance of a meritocracy and stability in society, we do not simply take their money away and redistribute it, this might undermine the productivity of capable and motivated low wage earners ambitions. Regardless, devoid of income and hope the low wage earners that do produce a better world are likely to return to the bronze age or earlier when it becomes the lesser of evils. The latest fashion out of paris suggests a return to togas and horned helmets.
Getting sick every time, while most people are fine, kind of localized the problem to you.
Try washing your hands with soap before eating. Obtain good from the counter - not the trash. Don't drink a bottle of Jack with your burger. Eat your food while it's hot, as opposed to keeping a burger in your pocket for a few days before you eat it. Don't lick tables and windows.
Yes, the typical fast food restaurant is full of machines that need cleaning.
But who's going to do this when the minimum wage goons are gone?
Are you really this stupid?
It will be two guys in a little white van that says "Carls Jr" on it that drive around and do these things, covering all the locations on the "west side" (maybe 8 or 10 of them)
There might be cameras and "manual steps" to take over a machine run out of Phillipines to fix minor glitches. That will be 8 people covering 120 stores corporate wide.
But in general, two moderately paid employees will drive around, clean, re-stock and troubleshoot machines. A regional tech group will be on call for big problems. There will be a dozen people per shift taking the place of three hundred droolers.
They could pay those dozen people 100k per year and still come out ahead.
"Paid for by the corporations through taxes because they put all of the people out of work."
Corporations simple pass any added taxes and costs on to the customer. Thus if you add taxes to a corporation they simple raise the price and pass that added expense on to the customer.
A CEO I worked for once said "People are idiots, they think they can raise minimum wadge or add taxes to a company to pay for some social benefit. Corporations pass the added expense on to the customer. Thus they never realize they are the ones paying the taxes not the company.
A corporations job is to make money, that means that we take what ever expenses we have including taxes, add them up, attach a profit margin to it, and sell it. Otherwise we would not be making money."
Consider this alternative future:
1) Wealth and control of resources concentrates in the hands of a few.
2) These people stop considering the rest of humanity "humans", or just believe that what is theirs is theirs and no one else has a right to anything. They also don't need labor very much at all because it is automated. So people who have only their labor to offer are frozen out economically.
3) The owners use automated weaponry to enforce their rights of ownership
4) The power of the few snowballs and they eventually own the entire planet and all means of production, and the rest live in misery on whatever pittiance is allowed them or is outright exterminated via automated weaponry.
To see this in its infancy, look at Detroit. People there can't sell their labor, don't have means to leave, and have resorted to subsistence farming. However, if a "landowner" comes along with the means of ejecting the "squatters", they won't even be able to subsistence farm.
Societies that *do* what you say is inevitable (basic income) will avoid this. Societies which allow ever increasing concentration of wealth into the hands of a few might not. The USA's trend on this is pretty scary, witness the almost complete capture of the political system by money.
-PM
You're talking as if this is all theoretical. But you do well to remember a few things:
1) Masses don't string up producers, they string up the wealthy. In a typical society the people getting rich are not the producers but middle men. Suzie can still flip burgers just as well as she used to, and best of all she and the other employees no longer need to share their wealth with a fat CEO.
2) Farmers are not the ones getting strung up, they will be lining up with strings in their hands right along side the rest of the lower class.
3) Society doesn't break down when the top are axed.
4) This isn't theoretical. This has happened many times in many governments in history. Google Peasant's Revolt for an example. Society will live on because the people who society are built upon ARE the middle-lower class.
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.
What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate?
What happened is that the powers-that-be pulled a fast one on you and you're too foolish to see it. You've been hand fed a statistic that is false on its face but you didn't care to look into the truth...
Check out the population-employment ratio numbers and they speak a much different story. You see, the unemployment rate that is mainly touted is the U3 rate. The U3 rate is made up of people with no job who've actively tried to find one in the last month. Today we have a good number of discouraged workers* and a vast number of people who have no intentions of ever being employed again. And these numbers are likely to continue to grow. And this doesn't even take into account the underemployed either.
That 5% number you're kicking around means nothing in the real world but keeps the sheep voting under the illusion of what is good/bad in the economy.
*Discouraged workers are people who want to be employed and have looked for work in the last year but have stopped looking due to poor prospects.