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Wendy's Plans To Automate 6,000 Restaurants With Self-Service Ordering Kiosks (investors.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In response to the rising minimum wage, the fast-food chain Wendy's plans to start automating all of its restaurants. The company said it will have self-service ordering kiosks available to its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year. Wendy's President Todd Penegor said it will be up to franchisees to decide whether or not to adopt the kiosks in their stores, noting that many franchise locations have had to raise prices to offset wage increases. California's decision to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2022 will impact Wendy's 258 restaurants, all of which are franchise-operated. About 75% of 200-plus Wendy's restaurants are run by franchisees in New York, a state that is also on its way to $15. Penegor said, wage pressures have been manageable both because of falling commodity prices and better operating leverage due to an increase in customer counts. The company is still "working so hard to find efficiencies" so it can deliver "a new QSR experience but at traditional QSR prices." The CEO of Carl's Jr., Andy Puzder, is also looking into replacing many of its workers with machines to save money.
That would get the biggest savings of them all.
From what I have understood they are only removing the person that will mishear what I say and pushes the wrong button in the register and instead lets me do the pushing. That almost as much automation as the pizzeria that allows me to select topping online and have it delivered to door.
The thing with junk-food burgers is that every burger and every bread already have industrial-grade quality.
Making the entire "cooking" process automated shouldn't be harder than any other automated manufacturing process.
They could build fully automated kiosks where I enter what I want and out comes a packaged burger in the same way I go to an ATM and enter how much money I want.
America is shedding jobs at an epic rate so that the rich can get slightly richer. The only reason these corps "can't afford" a higher minimum wage is because they need to protect their obscene profits. We're all in this together and we're all headed to the same grave. Let's try helping each other out instead of seeing who can amass the biggest pile of cash at the expense of other people. A revolution is brewing.
So now we will have machines that will try to up-sell fries?
The logical career path is to become a vending machine repairman.
The Liberal solution to this "Loophole" (it's not really a loophole, but they love that term) would be to outlaw automation at food service establishments so these greedy restaurant owners can't cheat people of color out of a fair "livable wage". The cry to get rid of crimes and inequalities is always "There should be a law..."
To tell us how much a raise in minimum wage will impact the actual cost of doing business - and the cost of the product - they need to open up about two things in particular that they skilfully danced around in this article:
Sure, the wage increase has a cost. What we don't know - and I would argue the people interviewed in this story don't know either - is how large is that cost. Will it actually be offset by replacing more workers with kiosks and robots, or is this just a ploy from the top?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I hate these fucking machines that put the labor costs on me. Besides what do I know about the hygene of some stranger who accidentally touched a food stuff I'm going to consume, blech. hmmmm, I like the smell of my ass crack sweat..oh look a bit of lint...I wonder why it is always blue...hey lets get ice cream gross wrong yuk, no fucking way.
If I have to make an *ice cream*, then I want to be paid for making it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What a heap of bullshit. This automation was coming anyway, eventually. The $15/h is just a red herring and an excuse so transparent you could 3-D print it and use it as a window.
For each cashier no longer paid $15 an hour instead of $8, they'll need a kiosk to handle the same traffic flow. Call it $7 an hour savings times 18 hours in a typical store's workday. Let's leave off costs of sickdays, training and uniforms/expenses, and even reduce the savings to $3 per hour. That's a savings of well over $18k per year.
I don't know a bot's cost, but a touch-based panel that accepts user inputs, prints out a receipt, and forwards them to the order-taking board probably doesn't cost $18k. Recovery of costs spent on one of these kiosks is probably going to be less than 6 months if you remove all my simplifications and errors on the side of conservatism.
A few (or maybe more than a few) year ago, Wendys used to be my favourite burger restaurant. Then all the Wendys in London disappeared and were replaced by Taco Bell, now I do not know what their former restaurants are. So any Wendys, automated or human served, would be welcome and better than McDonalds and Burger King.
I've been happily programming away and earning a good salary in IT since the early 1980s, but I'm starting to get concerned over the impact that automation is increasingly having on manual labour/ low skilled jobs, and the fact that this may mean a huge proportion of the population may not have a job and income.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
and you can still afford it if your company has no human employees.
If you were in a mega corporation at C level wouldn't you complain about how anything negative to your business would ruin it?
Wouldn't you try your best to stall any change that ends up causing you to have less profits (even a minuscule reduction) until you implement a process that circumvents the more expensive method?
Minimum wage will drive your business to the ground...like when uhm minimum wage was first introduced?
Otherwise wasn't the future of burger flippers always to be replaced by automation? -we'll only need minimal supervision of a human that can also greet customers should they care for a smiley service person.
Those C-level folk are disconnected from the reality of everyday people. It's all about profit margins, quarterly statements, shareholder meetings, bonuses and so on. It's not about how their business will crash and burn supposedly affecting their poor employees, it's about earning a single cent than they did before and fuck everyone else.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It's not that we don't desperately need a minimum wage increase. But that like so many political actions it's been ignored so long and then makes a drastic change that creates more problems. If the minimum wage had been allowed to increase gradually over the years businesses could have found ways to pass this along in incremental price increases or other ways that could have adopted better to it. Instead, businesses face a shock of absorbing bigger increases over a shorter time, in a market where big price increases in products are not only rejected by consumers. It generally means loss of business. Maybe you say big business is crying wolf here and could easily pay higher wages. But most fast food chains have franchised operations, small owners who operate a few stores. Plus the small business owner that maybe only has one store. Those small business owners will be the ones to fail who have little choice but to cut employee's or simple go out of business.
...It begins.
What did the 'special snowflakes' that keep screaming that they're entitled to a $15/hr burger-flipping job expect would happen?
Well, it's started. Fast-food automation. More than started, it's being rolled out This is only the beginning.
It's even too late to back away from the $15/hr movement, as the gears have already been put in motion and now given a speed-boost towards full automation of fast-food jobs.
Good job, guys! Instead of the $15/hr you demanded or even whatever you'd been making or been offered in the past, now you'll get nothing at all because those jobs will cease to exist. Not gradually over the next 10-15 years with employee/employer cooperation and employment transition plans, but now it's overwhelmingly-likely to occur over the next 5 years or less with just a pink-slip and a "Good luck!" if they're lucky, and showing up to work and finding it locked and due for demolition to make room for serving-kiosk islands if not.
Put the footgun down and (limp/hobble/crawl) away.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
McDonalds Australia has had this for a year or more. It creates more orders on the back end, but for people who want anything customised, they still go to the counter. In my experience as a client, people only check out the kiosk as a novelty, or if there are long lines.
It is a false choice between $15 an hour and $7.25 an hour. If they had kept minimum wages up with inflation they would be about $9.90 an hour. Lets the raise the minimum wage to $9.90 am hour and then automatically index it for inflation every year.
$15/hour is $31k over a ~2000 work hour year. Are you really going to tell me that a burger flipper deserves as much money as a public school teacher, entry level cop or a more senior enlisted service member? Heck, these workers are also insulting many of their own peers in the food business by implying "I work customer service at McDonalds; I should get paid as much or more than a waitress at many restaurants." Because they're totally comparable in responsibility and work load.
Sheets gas stations have always had kiosks for ordering food for as long as I can remember. However I find the interface really frustrating to navigate. I only keep coming back because this one Sheetz place is in a convenient location.
I also saw a kiosk in a McDonalds last year. Not sure if it was just a trial or a part of a store revamp.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
More work for automated food machine makers. In China.
Reality says you are not entitled to any job and any hourly rate.
Or do you really think SOMEONE ELSE is required to GIVE YOU MONEY simply because you think they should?
You can get all the laws passed you want. How's that working in Venezuela? Oh yeah, they ran out of other people's money.
Everyone will look at this from a "losing jobs" aspect. There's nothing wrong with that view point and it's perfectly valid. However, I will put forth this alternate view. Kiosks in McDonald's while I was in France were a great thing for me. Not speaking French it meant I was able to order without the inconvenience of the language barrier.
In this case, they are actively trying to get rid of employees. And that side is a shame. But I wouldn't mind seeing more kiosk style ordering stations in fast food places. Along with the option to talk to a person.
yvan eht nioj
So will we see a DECREASE in prices since they won't have nearly the same level of payroll and the customers will actually be performing these functions FOR the restaurant? This is the same gripe I have for all the other stores putting this crap in. I'm doing more work for the corporation, they have significantly lower labor costs, but there's not price break (even say, 1% off) for self-service.
I mean come on, we love (well, some love) nostalgia, but not the Automats [1] please :) Might have the old-is-new-again feeling that is in fashion again these days, but I don't think this is the way to go. Although, I don't eat at Wendy's more than once or maybe twice a year, so yeah, who cares :))))
[1] http://www.wired.com/2008/07/g...
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
They have kiosks. You swipe your loyalty card and it brings up a choice to start with a previous order or from scratch. You customize it however you want. If you have free stuff coming, it lets you know and offers the option to get it now or wait until next time. Easy. I almost always use the kiosk, even if there isn't a like at the cash register.
Touch screens have been around since the 1980s. It is 3 decades later, and we are still using humans to take order input. Why did it take so long?
When I saw your comment about flirting, it immediately reminded me of my experience patronizing a particular pretzel chain last weekend. My wife and I placed our order, and we were told, "We make those fresh, so it's going to take about 7-8 minutes." We said alright, sat down, and waited. With four workers behind the counter, all female, I didn't expect it to take too long. But as soon as we sit down, Mr. "I dropped out of high school because I look this good" walked up and leaned against the counter. And all that estrogen ran to him like rats to limburger. Except for the one girl in the back... She did all the pretzel rolling...all the baking...all the packaging...and 15 minutes later, we had our order.
But don't misunderstand me. I'm not at all a fan of Mr. Moneybags replacing all his workers with computers & robots, keeping all the profits, and putting them in offshore accounts until he can repatriate the money at a meager 7.5% tax. I'm also not a fan of Mr. Moneybags not paying American workers anymore who are unemployed and unable to buy pretzels at Mr. Moneybags's pretzel shop, drying up the American economy. What that establishment, and every establishment, needs is good management.
As a software developer and automation fan all around, I for one, welcome our new food automation overlords with open arms.
Self-driving cars, trucks, buses; self-driving forklifts; self-organising warehouses (Amazon is probably secretly onto this); self-cooking, self-serving food... Bring it!
Pure and simple. Wages are likely half of their expenses. This would be a 25% increase from $12/hr to $15/hr. So about a 12.5% increase. The price of a dollar burger goes up 13 cents. No one is walking away from that. If you are buying a $4 burger it goes up 50 cents. If you're going to walk away from a $4.50 low-end burger, then maybe you shouldn't be buying $4.50 low-end burgers. Competitive advantage? Barely. The delta on that window worker will cost you $36 per day. The machine plus the loss from customer frustration and borked orders (see self checkout lessons elsewhere) better cost less than that.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"Robots gotta eat to." As they will be the only ones left with spending money.
If they dont cheap out and half ass it like they already do with their whole restaurant chain. I have yet ot be in ANY wendys resturant that is clean or in good repair. So I am guessing that a complex automated system is pretty much out of reach of the wendys' management as they refuse to pay for upkeep of their current stores.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've never understood those fast food 'restaurants'. Wendy's is probably something like McDonald’s, a franchise that has tried over and over again since the 70's of the previous century to build a profitable restaurant in our region.
The last try was with the help of tax payer money. The entire road infrastructure was rebuild with roundabouts and forcing in and out going traffic along the new site of McDonald’s to make as much exposure as possible to the yellow M. A yellow M which is visible from many kilometres in advance. 350 million euro tax money was used to create the ideal location for a fast food restaurant that never was popular in a region with many, many small to larger high quality restaurants within walking distance.
Three years later the McDonald’s was closed because they didn't become profitable and the building with a 'special' McDonald's architecture is up for sale. The building is only interesting for potential fast food restaurant owners and is useless for anything else. The site has been vandalised the last time I had a look at it. The parking lot doesn't seem a safe place to park your car, I would want to use it for car pooling reasons. It seems that it is the place to go to for your drugs needs. It's remote enough from police control, and there is no restaurant to pay for private security. On top of that it has easy access to the road network to have an easy escape route (for drugs related crimes).
The traffic is now redirected through too many roundabouts to give as much exposure as possible of a failed tax payer funded symbol of capitalistic bad taste. 350 full time and half time jobs where promised. Opposition already told that paying 1 million for every minimum wage job is too expensive and it isn't even sure that the restaurant will succeed after having failed in 7 attempts over 40 years. Jobs, jobs, jobs was the answer. Tax raise, austerity, unemployment, traffic jams are the result. When you look at it, it would have been better to give 350 families 1 million euro, and the money would have been invested back in the local economy giving a short term boost, instead of the faster decline.
Is it the same in the US, where local government are tempted to invest in these kind of restaurants for 'jobs, jobs, jobs'? And are these kind of restaurants always a success, or do they also often fail?
would you like an order of EXTRA BIGA$$ fries!
has been doing this for years.
Best Slashdot Co
Slashdot is an American site, I don't know where it went but they used to have an entry in the FAQ about this. I am not sure where you got the idea Slashdot was an "international" site.
So, they're building machines that replace the ordering and payment part of the process. While they're at it, why not build a smartphone app that lets you order before you even get to the restaurant? How is making a dedicated kiosk the exclusive way to place an order a good thing?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Are the kiosks going to clean themselves, prepare the food to sanity and safety standards, answer customer complaints, fix themselves, clean the shitstains from the bathroom, deal with the unusual orders, deal with the drunk guy in the drive-thru, etc.?
At most these things will take orders. But most of the staff will still be needed.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I came here to the comments section expecting some intelligent discussion on wages, profit margins and hoping to find some intelligent projections into the future.
I was Extremely disappointed. So here.
https://ycharts.com/companies/WEN/profit_margin Wendy's has a profit margin of 18.4% this quarter, but has been averaging 3-5%. the increase in profits is from them foisting company owned stores off on franchisees, and moving all store related costs to the franchisee. ( http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wendys-profit-revenue-beats-expectations-2016-02-09 )
Wendy's employs some 31,200 employees ( https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/WEN--Number-of-Employees )
they have revenue of ~494 Million dollars, and profits of ~84 Million dollars ( see marketwatch link above)
84 million dollars is a lot right? so let's divide that equally between all 31,200 employees: 84,000,000 /31200 = $2692 per employee. divide that into bi-monthly paychecks, and that's $112 per pay period. pre-tax.
assuming federal minimum wage (they pay more, but whatever) of 7.25 an hour, and 32 hour workweeks that's 232 per week, or 464 per pay period.
Some of you may already be ahead of me on the math here, but now for the part i came here to see (and didn't)
112/pay period is $56 a week. divided into 32 hour workweeks that's $1.75/h wage increase.
That's Right. A wage increase of $2/h would push wendy's into bankruptcy or force them to raise prices / cut hours / cut employees.
A wage increase of $7/h? Where exactly do you think that money's going to come from? Not corporate profits, they can't support it.
About half the cost of fast food is labor (40-50%, depending on how efficient / how few selections the company offers) So if a burger costs $4 now, and that provides enough profit for a $1.50 wage increase, then a $6 burger would provide enough profit for a $3 wage increase. and a $10-$12 burger would provide enough profit for a $6-7 wage increase.
Are you going to go to wendy's and buy a $12 burger? (that's a ~$15-17 combo for one person)? Let's say You specifically make enough money that you can drop $30-35 to get you and your partner a cheap hamburger (Quality would NOT be going up, you get the same burger for $12.) But i certainly can't. a hardworking mother and father of four couldn't drop $75 on four kids meals and two combos either.
Pick a fast food joint. the math works out the same for all of them.
In the movie it was Carl's Junior, but Wendys seems to want to get there first.
automation and lower costs will NOT translate to lower prices... companies and businesses are far to fucking greedy. once the prices are up, they rarely go down.. and when they do, it's very little and very slowly.
if mcdonalds 'automated' do you think they'd bring back the real $1 double cheese burger. and not the wussy smaller half-cheese mcdouble (which isn't even $1 anymore either.. $1.69 here)?.. hell no. if bk 'automated' would they bring back the 1/8th pound juniors and 1/4 pound double cheese? nope. not a fucking chance.
consider in 2001, the big macs, jumbo jacks, whoppers, and more were easily found for 99c every day at most locations.. now you're lucky to find them for under $4.. $4.09-$4.29 here... at pace with inflation, those things should still be under $1.50.. and those $2.99 'meals' from the same time frame, under $4.50 today, not pushing (or over) $7.
At least there'll be something at Wendy's that's now one step closer to passing a Turing test.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
When everybody has been outsourced or automated, then what?
Who will have the money to buy overpriced Wendy burgers?
All the McDonald's and Quick restaurants in my area in France have already implemented that.
There is much more ordering machines than ordering counter with humans.
And I have to admit that the customer experience is much better because this is much less stressful at least at crowded hours:
- all the available options are visible in front of you, along with prices (instead of having to search for them displayed far away or to hear about them in a noisy environment)
- you can take your time when interacting with a machine
- all machines are equal
- no slow rookie cashier
- no crazy cashier who speaks too fast
And we can even have our order directly delivered at our table.
Except that a kiosk still doesn't solve the problem. Matter of fact in majority of the mishaps isn't caused by the person taking the order even at a drive-thru in my experience. For instance I walked in to dine at an east Nashville located Hardee's where they had a kiosk on the far right side where they normally have a regular register. I placed the order on it for a 1/2lb bacon cheese thickburger meal, opted for an extra paddy, and round up the final bill for charity and get a cookie, cause why not as I had skipped breakfast and was having quite a late lunch that day.
After about 8 minutes the order was ready, went back to the register counter, got the meal, and sat down back at the table I had chosen after placing the order. I was about 1/4th-way through the burger when I realized this is just a regular single paddy no-bacon cheese burger and the cookie wasn't provided either. Come to find out the teenager who was mostly busy goofing off behind the counter doing practically nothing by standing idly around most of time, and talking with his friends who were trying to do their jobs by making the meals in the back, was responsible for fulfilling the orders by assembling the food on to trays for dining-in customers or into paper bags to give to the customers at the drive-thru. Well this kid had swapped my order with a drive-thru customer's order because he wasn't paying attention. And of course the manager wasn't around to resolve the situation.
I haven't been to a Hardee's since then. Mainly because their restaurants are far away from where I live and I only stopped by there because I hadn't had their burgers in a long time and doesn't motivate me to go the extra mile to eat there again cause I remember the last aforementioned dining-in experience.
This space is not for rent.
That'll be awesome. Now we can have a Wendy's with all of the ambience and allure of a gas station rest room.
You know? As clever as people can be, we're still amazingly bad at "thinking outside the box" at times.
There's this entire universe out there, yet we're all assuming we have no way to ever go anyplace but this one planet we're on.
For the first time in history, we've privatized space travel and we have multiple competing businesses working on the problem. By the time we've developed enough A.I. and robotics to "take most of our jobs away", I'd sure hope we also figured out how to colonize at least one other planet. That sounds like a rather big project to me, creating a LOT of new job opportunities and eliminating "overcrowding" on the current planet.
The industry saw this trend happening as far back as 2005.
Restaurants may be willing to pay $15 for a cook. But not $15 for an order taker.
It then makes sense to replace that person with automation.
So all you fans of $15, you just eliminated the bottom rung of the ladder and will put millions of people out of work.
Congrats.
Please come back when you can afford to make a purchase.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
should be taxable legal entities and fund our social security
The core problem with "wealth redistribution" is it's an idea that's inherently unfair to those who work to earn their money under a system that exchanges currency for labor.
In a true "post capitalist" economy, where the need for labor has largely been eliminated? Sure, it becomes an obsolete concern. But there sure are a lot of socialists out there trying to pretend we're actually IN this post-capitalist economy today, in an attempt to use FUD to tear countries like the United States away from Capitalism prematurely.
LONG before "the machines take all our jobs", we're going to see raised expectations of what a human being should do to earn pay. Automation will slowly weed out the "mindless work" that pays you to use your body but not your brain. And as I commented in an earlier post? I think technological advances that enable this robotic and A.I. takeover of jobs will also enable space exploration/travel. It should become a very real option to "move to Mars" or some other planet we've picked to colonize - and there will be PLENTY of new jobs created by such an undertaking.
I actually look forward to a world with raised expectations about the level of thought/education people are expected to have to do something constructive in society for pay! If you can't function at a higher level than a machine designed to repetitively do a limited set of tasks, you probably need to challenge yourself to aspire to more.
I am extremely excited for this and have been bugging fast food places for over a decade (via their receipt surveys) to do this. There is nothing more frustrating then sitting down to enjoy your meal only to find they got your order wrong. This gas been happening to me at Wendy's in particular the last 2 months. It's like they completely forgot to train people what "only ketchup" means when ordering a burger.
My concerns, however, are that these kiosks will not allow for full customization and there will be no smartphone app to order from either. Ideally, I would want an app on my phone that let me fully customize an order and to pay for that order using ApplePay for increased security. I've tried using Taco Bell's app a few times for ordering food but they require you to manually enter your credit card info each time and the staff were never trained how it works. They're #2 on my list of places that consistently screw up my order. Just last week I ordered a #7 and they gave me a #2?!?!?!? That's what you get for hiring illegal immigrants.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Will this mark the return of Automats?
That's all it will take to make up that minimum wage bump. Yes, I am serious. Do the fucking math. How about you do that instead of eliminating jobs and pocketing the savings?
Touch screens for self-service have been very common in Europe for many services, including tickets, hotel check-ins, and restaurant ordering. Likewise, jobs like busboys and shopping cart retrieval have been largely eliminated. The reason is simple: high labor costs and minimum wages.
The people who ought to be taking those jobs and getting started in the labor force, namely young high school graduates, frequently end up unemployed (youth unemployment in the EU area is 20.4%, compared to a US rate of 11.6%) or railroaded into useless tertiary education for a few years. A few countries in the EU have avoided this trend, for example by exempting apprenticeships and many entry level jobs from minimum wage laws.
Progressive legislation makes the US more like Europe, just like politicians promised. Is it everything you hoped for?
As "devil's advocate":
This is probably what we want!
If wages are just increased with no change in output and little redistribution of wealth, then you just end up with inflation and no increase in real wages.
If you continue to raise the minimum wage, you will literally force more people into poverty. As you raise minimum wage, cost of living will also increase. It has happened EVERY time minimum wage has increased in the past and it will continue to happen. Increasing minimum wage doesn't actually help the people who make minimum wage since the increased cost of living eats up all of the increase. Now add in the people who were previously making an amount equal to the new minimum wage. In most cases, they will not get an increase in wages. So, now someone that was previously making what was considered a decent amount of money for their location is now making minimum wage and since their cost of living has increased they are now living in poverty.
Now we have to add in the people who lost their jobs because whatever company they were working for doesn't have a large enough profit margin to absorb the increased labor costs. Increasing their prices would be one option, but in most cases increasing prices results in less business. This leaves reducing the work force so that they can continue to operate.
In the end, what you have is higher unemployment and higher cost of living and more "working poor" people.
The US is on a downward spiral and increasing minimum wage may sound like a good thing, but in reality it is simply going to increase the speed to the bottom.
I've always felt cheated with this, and it reminds me of the self checkout at the grocery store. One way or another, my groceries have to get from my cart through the register, I have to pay for them and walk out the door. I always felt like, by going through the self checkout, I was being coopted to do a job that they use to pay someone else to do, and now I was contributing to their bottom line. I feel the same about this. For twenty some odd years, the registers at McDonalds have shown pictures of food rather than the names for the cashiers. I don't know, but can't imagine Wendy's was much different. So all we've done is swing the register around to face me, and suddenly I'm back to doing the same job I was doing in high school... typing in someone's order at a burger joint, but the difference is now I'm doing it for free. It would be different if I knew I was getting a better price on the food, but I suspect we'll see an increase in profits for the companies before we see a reduction in prices...
Seriously, we need to automate many of the lower end jobs, and focus on building the automation instead. This is also the reason why we need to solve the illegal issue. Many of them simply send the money back home, which is effective outsourcing. As such, we need to send those back home.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is probably more about the unionisation rather than just wages. The later is just the current hot button issue. The increase over the next 5 years is truly minimal and will not even make a dent for the people it affects. Unions, however, could force wages even higher. The recent gains in this area by fast food workers are the true threat to the corporations.
Minimum wage increase will cause a bump in inflation, which is good for low income earners since they tend to carry more old debt. Bad for middle and upper class income earners since more of their earnings will go into purchasing products.
Every fast food chain spends all of its time trying to figure out how to lower costs. This is one way to do it.
This has nothing to do with minimum wage raises. After all, McD's installed self-serve kiosks around here in spite of no changes to minimum wage.
> and now I was contributing to their bottom line
That's nothing, here in Ontario the government adds $2 to your license renewal if you use the machines, for the "convenience fee". Admittedly, $2 is a small price to pay to avoid looking into those dead, self-important eyes...
remember when people were complaining about $0.40/hr minimum wage and gas was $0.15/gal, car cost about $1k, rent was $60/mo.....then they raised wages to $.75/hr and gas rose to $.18/gal, car were to $1500, rent went to $80.....then we complained and they raised wages to $1/hr, gas went to $.25/gal, car to $2600, rent to $100....etc....etc....etc.
Right now, large number of ppl on Food stamps and other forms of gov subsistence are actually working 40 or more hours / week. Problem is, that America's minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. So now, we already pay out to ppl who work at Target, McDonald's, burger King, Walmart Sam's club, and yes Wendy's. With this, many ppl will be laid off, but if they buy American made equipment, they can point to providing better jobs. And if America will deal with the illegal alien issue, and send home those that have no families here, or whose families are nothing but drains on society, then we open many lower end jobs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That is why cities are broke.
how does a city full of idiots generate revenue?
Good question. First, good management would have three workers who don't have any customers to serve clean up the establishment and organize the kitchen. Second, good management would be able to determine that, on a Sunday afternoon in May at 3pm, you maybe don't need four workers behind the counter. Third, good management would quickly apologize to a customer who was kept waiting by flirtatious, irresponsible workers. And fourth, a good manager would make sure the customer experience is of a high enough quality to ensure the customer will want to come back.
When you're talking about return-on-investment, I think a good manager is worth paying for. Though, in a fast food establishment, a good manager can replace at least one general worker. A great manager can replace at least two.
Frozen bread taste like the contents it was frozen with or near. It looses that "fresh bread" texture that makes most crap fast food patties taste "better".
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
You know? As clever as people can be, we're still amazingly bad at "thinking outside the box" at times.
There's this entire universe out there, yet we're all assuming we have no way to ever go anyplace but this one planet we're on.
Its not an assumption. This is exactly what physics tells us.
seems to me like colinization would mostly be done by machines at that point, building us structures to live in, growing us food on a new world, and so forth... why should we work harder or mars than we do on earth?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Let's say, optimistically, having these kiosks could reduce staff by 2 at a 24 hour restaurant, with $15 wages, that saves like $262K per year. So, that's a ton of money for your typical franchisee, I believe. Sounds like a no brainer, heck even if wages were $7.50, it's still $130K in savings. So... why aren't they already everywhere? My guess is in practice they can't even reduce staff by 1 except for maybe the busiest times of the day when you've already got maybe 6 or 8 (or more even?) staff on hand. Anecdotally, I went to a McDonald's recently with 2 self-order kiosks inside, nobody was using them. I'm sure they get used when it's really busy and there's a line to order, but I bet most of the day they don't get used at all. But still, as a customer, I wonder why they don't have these things for the drive-thrus at least, already? Maybe they can actually slow things down with people feeling less pressure to hurry up and decide already? What these restaurants really need are robotic assembly lines that can cook and assemble burgers, but that's going to be really expensive up front I guess.
Automation isn't bad or good. Trying to make every job pay enough to maintain a single adult's life is idiotic and ultimately will be bad.
At their Be Our Guest restaurant in WDW Magic Kingdom, they have multiple self-service kiosks to pick your entree & dessert, it kicks out a ticket and you pay at a register. There are staffed kiosks for those uncomfortable with using screens. My assumption is that this frees up more staff for the kitchen and handling tables.
Now they will have lousy food and lousy service. Soon I won't be able to blame People for anything!
Damn machines.
Let's take look at what we know...
Federal politicians, and state politicians to a lesser degree, greedily amass wealth and power.
Federal politicians, and state politicians to a lesser degree, do little or nothing to promote domestic jobs.
Federal politicians, and state politicians to a lesser degree, promote offshoring jobs.
Federal politicians, and state politicians to a lesser degree, ignore the U6 unemployment rate to soar (the accurate U6 rate, not the sugar coated rate) which is hovering around 10% currently.
Menial jobs were never intended to support families.
Families, more and more, are relying on menial jobs to support families because there are not enough substantial jobs for low and low-middle incomes. (see items 1-4)
We are now experiencing the terrible results of massive job loss which, in effect, is similar to problems associated with over population.
For menial jobs automation is becoming sustainable with unrealistic, so-called basic wages taking hold.
CEO pay, if divided among workers, is typically a small increase in worker pay. Do the math bitches.
Fail society.
Universal Socialism is a natural consequence of inter-spacial colonization.
If the food service industry thinks they can do this, they are correct. I will take my business elsewhere 100% of the time. ANY fast food establishment that sheds workers and opts for a 'self-serve' order system will NEVER bet a penny from my pocket ever again.
PEOPLE first.
It also makes the remaining workers more marginally productive. This opens up many, many possible scenarios, some of which are dystopic, others of which are not.
Consider this question: do you think the phone companies would employ more people if they still relied upon low-paid labor (i.e., women) to route and direct calls? Or would they simply sell far less service at far higher prices?
I think many low-paid workers will in the short term, but not quite as many as the hoped-for force-multiplier effect of the technology would suggest. I think the restaurants will be more financially efficient, as as the cost of the investment is recouped additional restaurants will get opened. A lot also depends on the ability of competitors to field similar systems. Do you put them out of business, or does competition expand?
The geography of store-siting complicates matters too.
Basically, I think the result of this is beyond the ability of any armchair philosophe to predict using his personal toy model of the world. It requires serious economic study, and even that is only as good as it's ability to predict human ingenuity under pressure. That pressure is important, because people don't innovate when it's easy to make money.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I would welcome them, just so my order goes in right. I think they still need the burger flippers for the time being, though. However, the cashiers aren't always the dumb one in the transaction. I can still screw up my order at the kiosk and then yell about it not being my fault. They will need to properly design the user interface, because the average fast food customer isn't going to want to have to take a class to order lunch. Kiosks won't prevent your food from spitting, though. There's still that possibility at the cooking/wrapping stations. That said, an Elbonian CEO would probably do at least as good a job at half the price.
The Franchises are not generally "these corps" and the Mom and Pop eateries are not "these corps".
(And the Franchises are not the cash cows that they were 20-30 years ago.)
The rising to $15 hourly wage for $5 worth of work will bankrupt many (but not all) franchises and the Mom and Pop eateries.
Your vehemence against "these corps" will have very bad unintended consequences.
You are cutting off your nose to spit your Face.
And now many of those people that demanding a higher minimum wage will have no wage at all. I love irony. Truth of the matter is, as things stand now in the socio-economic side of the world, we cannot have people in these unskilled positions making these wages, all that happens is prices go up and things go back to the pre-raise. I don't know how to fix this issue, though I agree it should be fixed. The having too low wages to live part.
Lets have Febo
Have gnu, will travel.
If you are going to compare CEO pay to the total corporation in order to make it look tiny, you could at least be a little more honest and use PROFIT instead of total sales!
What kind of idiot to you take people for? Obviously the total sales will dwarf any expenses unless bankruptcy is around the corner or it is a non-profit.
A fair comparison would be CEO or upper management vs other employees. Even then, one is leaving out the fact that these businesses were growing decades ago when the minimum wage had not been severely ravaged by inflation.
From 2014: "ground beef prices are at a record high, after rising 76% since 2009." -- Your 4 Favorite Things to Eat & Drink Are Getting More Expensive as one of the many things much more expensive.
Meanwhile, from 2015: "Between 2007 and 2012, a number of cities have seen at least a 50 percent increase in fast food restaurant outlets." -- Tracking Fast Food Restaurant Growth on the USDA's New Food Atlas as one of several indicators that overall fast food restaurant growth is booming.
Further, in 2009: "As it turns out, Wendy's really isn't cutting corners with its signature square burgers. If you can find a Wendy's location that's selling this item for 99 cents (some have bumped the price up to $1.49), you'll be sinking your teeth into the most beef you can get for less than a dollar." -- Top 5 Fast Food Value Menu Deals vs in 2016 "Double Stack $2.09" -- Wendy’s Prices
In short, suck it your short-sighted, obviously wrong idea that (1) price increase are something unabsorable by the industry, (2) price increase will cause a shrinking of the fast food industry, or (3) there's a 1:1 correlation with cost increases and price increases except in the obvious direct sense (the breakdown of the cost of a burger shows that the cost was basically 100% passed to the consumer). Yet (3) obviously doesn't override (1) and (2). If anything, as others have noted, the simple fact that the money is being effectively sucked OUT of the local economy and yet the fast food industry thrives would indicate that wage increases that "reinvest" in the local economy would actually make things even better.
So, yea, fuck you.
That sounds like a rather big project to me, creating a LOT of new job opportunities and eliminating "overcrowding" on the current planet.
But at this point robots are better than humans at practically any job - even on earth - so why would there be any job opportunities for humans?
In non-earth environment, humans are non-starters. Humans need some special gas which is highly corrosive (second strongest elemental oxidising agent) to "breathe". The whole body must be surrounded by a gas pressure between 70,000 - 150,000 pascals and even that must not vary fast. Will make huge mistakes in simplest of jobs if done for a 20 hours or more at a stretch. And a million more limitations that robots just won't have - or have much simpler needs.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
colonize at least one other planet.
What would that do? Any job a robot can do on Earth, it could do better on another planet. There is maybe a month of people time on the moon with little to show for it while there's decades of robotic probe experience.
Colonization is possible, sure. However, it doesn't solve anything other than extinction due to a planet-wide event.
According to the World Population Clock the world's population is going up by 150 people per MINUTE. So, let's magically say we can build a new type of space shuttle that could travel interplanetary distances and could perfectly recycle everything, so we need minimal consumables. The shuttle's useful load was 55,250 pounds (25,060 kg). For easy math, we'll say each person - and their luggage - is about 220 pounds (100 kg), giving us a max passenger capacity of about 250 people. So, to keep population EVEN, we need to launch a space shuttle every 100 seconds. Every hour, every day, forever. How realistic does that sound? Remember, I already hand-waved the physics and consumables problem.
So, the short version... We are stuck on this planet, so we should probably work on keeping it in good shape.
What could possibly go wrong?
The much-discussed article about automation that was very good was in The Atlantic a few years back: ...which dramatized the disappearance of manufacturing jobs with the story of young, smart Maddie Parker, who alas, did not get a post-secondary education. Her job was not quite automated yet, but was certainly next to go. She moved a machine part from A to B in the factory and got it set up for the next machine to handle. That job took more than two years of her salary to automate, and that was the economic criterion for it. Her job would go as soon as it got another 10 or 20 percent cheaper to automate.
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag... [theatlantic.com]
And automation keeps getting cheaper to do, for more and more complex tasks. I'm not sure if the rate-of-change is a Moore's-Law-type exponential, because I'm not sure what the metric would be - but there's no question that automation is marching up the value-line, automating harder and harder jobs that pay more and more.
So the "minimum wage" component of this story only changed the outcome by a couple of years. The owners hardly said "we would never have done this if minimum wage were still $8"; they'd have done it a few years later, that's all.
They're just the kind of people to really hate minimum wage laws, and figured they'd take a shot at them in passing, though they're just not relevant to the larger story.
Socialism is bad and evil... unless it can be used to make possible (via food stamps, ebt cards, subsidized housing, illegal immigration) a class of people that can hired for dirt cheap, letting the company maximize profits. Force companies to pay a wage that properly reflects the cost of living so that less people are more dependent on social services, and now we see just isn't acceptable. So they'll just have machines designed by H1B visa holders to be built in Chinese sweatshops and brought in to fix the problem, so as c-level execs can still give themselves million dollar bonuses.
Why are you here then? Don't like a site's content? Go to a different site.
Or, paraphrasing yourself, who cares about your stupid international concerns on a largely US-centric site (which Slashdot has been for a very long time.)
What job can't be automated on Mars?
each time I'min the US I'm wondering how places that obviously don't do more than heat up pre-made food are allowed to call themselves "restaurant"
A TV ad for Steak 'n Shake parodied this, calling the big quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains "workaurants", where you have to work through the line and then work to carry your food to your table and your rubbish to the bin. At a sit-down restaurant like SnS or a drive-in like Sonic, on the other hand, you rest and let the server do the work.
McDonalds has self-order kiosks in certain areas of Canada (mostly eastern). They still have people at the counter and cooking food, but you can make your order on a touch-screen and it basically prints a scannable receipt that you then give to the person at the desk.
I suppose it's useful if you're just ordering something basic and want to verify the slip says what you actually ordered, but realistically it's been more hassle than helpful when ordering anything slightly complicated (e.g. asking for a regular bun,no pickles, etc etc).
Right, because those two things are so similar in many ways. [eyeroll]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wait until you have the financial stability to be able to devote time and resources to raising a child..
If by "financial stability" you mean the ability to provide for a spouse and children despite an extended period of being laid off, then very few people have the resources to retire while still of childbearing age.
I've seen a few fast food restaurants add ordering kiosk around here. Its seems to actually improve service and doesn't impact jobs.
Normally, the person taking your order normally is constantly switching between taking your older and trying to fill your order. They also have to constantly swap gloves as they deal with cash then food and visa versa (or they don't). Allow the workers to concentrate on the main job of making food and they produce a better and more hygienic product. At places with kiosk they seem to have just as many workers, but they are more productive and the lines are much shorter and things move at a quicker pace.
I cannot believe that you are serious. Of course, if you are, you are absolutely incapable of rational thought.
What on Earth makes you think that privatized, of all things, space travel will be used to ship people who are deemed useless on Earth to a planet that is likely to be much less hospitable to human life? If new planets are open to colonization, they will be the destination of the best and brightest, unless life there is one step up from Hell, in which case the colonists will be one step up from slaves.
One of three things will happen:
- the ruling class will find it in its heart to provide some pittance to keep the 'obsolete' masses happy
- the masses will raise up to kill and loot those they view as their oppressors, throwing society back to early industrial times at best
- automated weapon systems will be good enough to isolate the powerful from the unneeded. The resources will stay on the obviously side of that divide.
Space travel will not change the above one little bit. If anything, it will exacerbate the divide between (1) those with power, (2) the people who can serve them, and (3) the rest. If you an in (1) good for you. If you are in (2) lets work together to try and remain useful. If you are in (3) good luck.
No good deed goes unpunished...
I won't argue the merits of the prose or storytelling, but I always recall this post from 2003: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
At my age I find coming up with a witty signature too exhausting.
The purpose of fiat currency is to be able to expand the money supply during war-time without either getting more of a commodity or debasing it. Everything else is a post facto rationalization.
At least, that's the case if we must say that there is only one purpose of money. There are several, as you no doubt know. Suggesting that this one is in any sense a primary function is simply wrong; money would be useful and necessary even if there were no connection to labor at all. All but the looniest post-scarcity economic theories include some form of money.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
And I'll be boycotting them the next time I don't go to Wendy's.
Which I don't.
So, feel my squirrelly wrath!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And wow.... I expected more from the Slashdot crowd than dismissing these ideas out of hand. (I'm glad I'm part of a "Technolibertarians" group on Facebook where there's much more thought-provoking discussion on this topic than anything found here.)
How did colonization work in the past, when people were still figuring out what was out there in other parts of our own planet? Did only the "best and brightest" board ships to take that journey? No! It was the domain of risk-takers and people who felt they had little to lose. It was generally the wealthy who sat at home, in their status quo existence, and FUNDED the explorers in the hopes of a potentially big financial return.
With all of the research on space travel trapped inside the domain of NASA, everything creeped along at the pace of approved funding by politicians (who generally couldn't excite the public enough to agree to pay higher taxes for it). The lunar missions were the highlight of the whole thing, and they only happened because of the motivation to outshine the enemy (Communist Russia) in the "space race".
I think privatized space travel is ABSOLUTELY the right answer for things to move forward today. Initially, sure ... only the wealthy will be able to afford it. But that's how ALL new technology works. Early-adopters pay premium prices to have or do things first, paving the way for mainstream acceptance.
And colonization of a new planet doesn't mean launching little shuttles carrying 200-250 people or so at a time, over and over again, to get a decent number of them to the destination. (Someone above claimed the whole thing was unworkable for that reason.) What you'd probably do is establish a large space station in orbit at a launching point, first. It would probably be tethered to the Earth via a "space elevator" technology. Without the huge fuel costs of trying to make relatively large craft break through Earth's atmosphere, you could easily have transport ships leave and dock with the station in orbit on a regular basis.
There would be plenty of good paying jobs created by this whole new space travel industry, just as the airline industry created MANY new jobs or the railroads before that. I don't really see A.I. and robotics taking over ALL jobs. Rather, it will take over all of them that don't require a lot of thought and subjective considerations when making choices. Self piloting spacecraft still require humans to program the code that makes them go, for example. And I doubt the whole transportation scheme would be thought up and implemented by robots with no human intervention....
Essentially, machines will fly spores, seeds and embryos (or just genetic blueprints) to a habitable planet, do some basic terraforming then raise up some baby humans and teach them how to spread themselves and interact with the machines.
I expect humans to eventually be the virus that gets this sector of the galaxy wiped out.
Whenever government gets its dirty mitts involved in business these are the types of results we should expect. While I sympathize with people making minimum wage flipping burgers at Wendy's is simply not worth $15 an hour. Neither is $21 million a year for a CEO but at least the CEO is a skilled position. When I was a kid my first job was minimum wage. Worked in a kitchen. It was hot, messy, hard work. But I learned a lot. One of the most important lessons I learned was that unless I got an education I was going to be doing this crappy job for the rest of my life. It was a motivator. The low skilled jobs are not mean to be career positions. It is a starting point to learn the business. If you learn it well enough you can become a manager and they make a decent living (six figures in some cases).
Next time you visit a fast food joint take a look behind the counter and see who is working there. My bet is that almost all of them are high school kids and one adult manager. Those kids are learning valuable job skills. If they want to advance they can. If not they can take those skills elsewhere. Forcing these places to pay high minimum salaries is basically forcing their hands. If they want to remain profitable then they will automate the low skill jobs. Either that or they have to start charging $10 for a fast food burger and nobody is going to pay that.
This is yet another example of the government having good intentions but hurting people in the end.
If a restaurant were to set a policy "You must own an iPhone or iPad to eat here", how much business would this decision cause it to forgo?
I'd prefer people who don't think they deserve a house, 2.5 kids and two cars on minimum wage to not serve me food.
If a couple buys a house on mortgage, buy a couple used cars, and have kids, and then lose their jobs, should they sell their house and put their kids up for adoption?
Some numbers
Over all, Wendy's posted a preliminary profit of $85.9 million, or 31 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $23.3 million, or 6 cents a share. Excluding certain items, earnings from continuing operations were 12 cents a share, up from 8 cents a year ago.
Analysts, on average, had expected 11 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.
Revenue slipped 4.7% to $464.4 million, largely due to the ownership of 363 fewer company-operated restaurants in the period. Analysts had forecast $456 million in revenue.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
LONG before "the machines take all our jobs", we're going to see raised expectations of what a human being should do to earn pay. Automation will slowly weed out the "mindless work" that pays you to use your body but not your brain.
That's the whole problem. Half the population's brains don't function much higher than that of a chimpanzee. What do we do with these people?
If everyone is miserably poor there isn't much value in owning a bunch of machines to make things for them.
That assumes people own a bunch of machines and become rich for the sake of owning machines and being rich.
People rarely amass money because they want a Scrooge McDuck vault. They want the power that comes with wealth. The power to buy anything, do what they want when they want, go on permanent vacation, and have the ability to press their will upon the world.
If everyone is miserably poor and can't afford anything they have no power left at all. There will be more value in owning a bunch of machines because they are the only ones that can. The wealthy will have more of what they really want: power over other people.
What people have to remember is that the minimum wage is always zero, you don't have a job. Also, there is supply and demand. Raise the "price" of something (labor in this case) and the demand (available jobs) goes down. I really don't understand why people act surprised when something like this happens, it's simple high school economics.
Lets jack up minimum wage so those people can earn middle class wages. So, what gives? Lay off 1/3 of your minimum wage employees and replace them with automated systems. Now you have 1/3 of those people unemployed. That worked so well.
Basic income and other social safety net programs behave as an investment in preventing crimes of desperation for survival ("gotta eat to live, gotta steal to eat" as Aladdin puts it). Would it be more of a tax burden to provide basic income or to expand the police state? Arguing that the police state provides jobs is a broken window fallacy.
The problem is that there would be more spending (demand) but no more production.
Automation already causes more production with a given amount of labor. UBI would be phased in alongside such increases in labor productivity.
Now if we could only get this kind of technology at a massage parlor
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Businesses have no obligation to hire anyone.
"âoeUnfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force."
â Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
n/t
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
how easy would.that be to drop a latty on a conveyer? no worries about meat temp just go mid well for chain beef, drop it from a fridge or freezer box, staff the assemblers and a machinery tech. seeing a mcds commercial.just pisses me off, i have never gotten melted cheese on my burgers let alone have a i seen a griddle in any modern mcds, death to fast food!
GOOD,
This means more jobs for people with STEM degrees to create and fix these systems.
..my order will be correct.
Organization? You must be joking..
I REALLY through Taco Bell was going to be the first to this particular party...
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
My local wendy's can't even get the screen in the drive-thru to show my order...
I don't think I will go anywhere near them if they try to install automation.
I don't support these corporate overlords. I seek independent establishments or cook my own food and brew my own coffee/tea. I'm not too keen on food made by a robot. There is something to be said for artistry. Artistry need not be expensive either.
Maybe ppl will go out and get a skill for once instead of sitting on their computer butt hurt over innovation and change.
My local Mickey D's has two kiosks.
Amazingly correct. We will discover a race that has manual labor and guidelines contained in "How to Serve Man".
dreaded scurrilous bit-twiddler from Oklahoma
I read an article in Fast Company where the CEO of Taco Bell was talking about their various innovations, including ordering kiosks - he said he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, but he saw people lined up to use kiosks to order their food while there was NO Customers at the counter, all the counter clerks were standing there idle. I suspect the novelty of the kiosk was part of it, the other part was likely the desire to not have to interact with the person at the counter.
The working classes have largely been strip-mined for their wealth
Here's an interesting article: United States governments redistributed more than $2 trillion in wealth from the top 40 percent to the bottom 60 percent in 2012.
How many additional trillions in wealth redistribution would it take, to get you to stop claiming that the working classes are being "strip-mined for their wealth"?
Serious question... would you be so kind as to give me a number, so I can understand what your definition of "being strip-mined" is.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You have fallen for a fallacy.
To the extent that Henry Ford paid his employees above-market wages, he had to pass that cost along to Ford's customers -- and nearly 100% of Ford's customers did not work for Ford.
Ford began exporting to other countries very early in its history, so the general standard of living of people all over the world was reduced by this decision: fewer people could afford to buy a Ford product, and those who did go through with the transaction had less money left over than they otherwise would have.
To pay the employees of any company above-market wages benefits a special interest (those employees) at the expense of the general interest (customers and potential customers who do not work for the company).
What Henry Ford chose to pay his employees was Henry Ford's business. Just don't make false claims that decisions like this are good for society in general. They never are.
As an aside...
paying his employees enough to where they could afford one of his cars
Whether an employee can afford the company's products has nothing to do with anything. Do you think Boeing employees should be paid enough to afford a 737?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You can say that the raw materials in each sandwich is $B. What you can't as easily predict though is how much you will pay to keep the lights on
Actually, the cost of electric power is a lot more stable than the cost of food commodities, such as a bushel of wheat.
Fortunately, there is a futures-trading market, which keeps the price of the underlying commodity more stable than it otherwise would be.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The trend is introducing automation to increase customer flow. Some McDonald's with kiosks have increased their workers. Ditto for panera.
Craig with Kioskindustry.org
We have two choices here: keep buying at their businesses, or turning them DOWN in favor of restaurants that actually value having employees.
It's complete BULLSHIT that a min wage hike is the reason, if they could blame it on newborn children using more air, they would.
Also, if the Min wage HAD gone up with inflation, it'd be around ~20 right now. These laws go into effect over *4* years.
Now maybe they won't fuck up my order every single time.
Know economic history: every time a disruptive technology has reduced employment in one category of jobs, other categories of jobs have been created and/or expanded, for a net increase in overall employment.
Minorly disruptive technologies result in a minor net increase in employment. Hugely disruptive technologies result in a huge net increase in employment. There have been no exceptions to this rule.
There are more people employed today than at any time in history. This is true because of, not in spite of, the modern technologies that put a multiplier on the amount of work each individual is capable of accomplishing.
Not convinced? Then do this thought experiment: if all modern technologies suddenly disappeared, would employment increase? No; not only would most workers be thrown out of work, they would also starve. (But not before fighting horrific battles over the few remaining scraps of food.)
If you want to put humans out of work, there would be no better way to do so than to eliminate all automation, and return the economy to the state it was in 200 years ago, when it was able to support only a small fraction of the number of jobs that exist today.
Conversely, if you want employment to increase, encourage Wendy's to automate. Multiple jobs in other categories will be created for every fast-food job that is lost.
When any company's management deploys new technologies that make employees more productive, they aren't making any sort of statement about how much money their employees make. But they are contributing to growth and job creation in the overall economy.
Isaac Asimov said in 1978. "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." We should feel the same way, even more so, about progress in automation and robotics.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
This will be great since every time I order from Wendy's I don't get what I originally ordered. It seems their employees cannot listen and screw up my order. How hard is it to listen to customers? With kiosks, I have more control of what is actually ordered and don't have to rely on a clerk who doesn't accurately enter in my correct order. If I order a Coke, I didn't order coffee so please don't give me coffee instead. People who are lactose intolerant or allergic to something probably don't appreciate that they request that no cheese (or something else) is to be placed on a hamburger only to end up with a cheeseburger because the clerk didn't listen to your special request or decided you wanted a cheeseburger instead of a hamburger. I'm sure there are more skilled workers that shouldn't lose their job to automation but for some reason the local Wendy's restaurants are the worst at putting in an accurate order. This will be a new trend among fast food restaurants since they have to save money somehow since customers may not purchase their food if they raise prices and automating is better than cutting back on quality such as ordering inferior quality food to save money as they raise the wages they pay for workers. Kiosks will actually increase the accuracy of the customer experience since they enter in the orders themselves rather than relying on a clerk to enter in the order. I'm sure there is lesser need for people to answer phones at Domino's and Pizza Hut ever since they set up a website where you can enter your order online and don't have to call your local store.
With companies making robots capable of cooking and kiosks including ones with voice recognition, an entire fast food restaurant will eventually be run by robots with a worker who visits several franchises throughout the area to maintain these robots. Eventually there won't be any human fast food workers. Currently this technology is expensive but it is getting cheaper just as computers were cost prohibitive years ago but now are inexpensive. Add to this that fast food workers are demanding higher wages and benefits as well as unionizing, CEO's will decide to automate more to save on costs. In addition they can count on robots to be willing to work at odd hours and even open their restaurants 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They also won't spit in customers hamburgers or screw up orders.
Band aids like $15 minimum wage are simply designed to reduce the rebelliousness and discontentment of the population IN THE SHORT TERM while total fascism is being implemented. For instance presently they just need to distract people with minimum wage and transgender toilets while they work towards gutting the middle class financially and funneling the money to banks. Millennials won't see a cent of social security, medicare, or govt pensions but it won't matter because they won't have guns or the ability to even organize in groups once riot-control drones and total surveillance are everywhere.
And they certainly aren't going to make their corporate overlords lose money while all this happens, hence the automation, which they've had in Europe 14 years ago when I visited.
Somebody will have to install them, fix them, update them, write code for them, clean them. The code and update can come from Bangalore, but the trick will be in getting some one to fix them for $15 and navigate those fun CA freeways to get there. Any volunteers? Still need warm bodies to grill, mix shakes, heat prepackaged fries, mop floors, change frying oils and issue drink cups. Bonus may actually got what you order 90% of the time. Don't see them putting one outside for the drivethru. So that will still be a 50/50 crap shoot that all the stuff you ordered is in the bag.
They may actually make a better profit and still whine about the cost of labor is too much.
Take some of the $ out of the pockets of shareholders and C-level staff to pay your employees.
It's not that they need to raise prices to stay afloat or profitable. They need to re-balance where they allocate pay and their working capital in general.
But sure, let's take the people who have the least ability to recover from lost jobs and replace them with computers. Let's take the lowest income earners and put them fully into the welfare system.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
It should be "...not enough to support a household at their current standard of living.
I'll change it further: "at the minimum lawful standard of living in the region." If you try raising your own vegetables in a garden, you get fined for operating an unlicensed garden, as Oak Park once did to Julie Bass. If you give up your apartment and instead live on the street, you get arrested for violating the sit/lie law.