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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.
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.
We saw the same thing with Subway and Papa John's CEOs telling us how the Affordable Care Act was going to bring the sky crashing down on their empires, yet both are doing just fine.
Subway is not, actually...
How much of the cost of the product is actually labor? This one is a big - and difficult - one to answer.
No it isn't... labor is generally just as expensive, if not more expensive than the cost of the food... These are well known costs within the food business...
A lot of corporate types like to live in the fantasy where doubling a worker's salary means everything they make or do is now twice as expensive, but we know that is not the case.
No one believes that who runs a food business... but it will cause overhead to rise about 16%, give or take, for most such places.
That is their existing profit margin, they don't have 16% to give.
The human cost of their product is likely 10-20% at most.
Then you are misinformed, it is at least double that...
When I worked in fast food, our store seemed to hover at 20-25% of revenue for labor cost. I've been told that that is fairly low, and that 30% is the industry average. California has a current minimum wage of $10 per hour. This would mean that $15 would be a 50% increase. If a fast food location there were to give everyone a 50% raise, that would result in needing to increase revenue by 15% to make up the difference. I don't feel that 15% over six years is a very large increase.
walmart has self-service lines and they are usually faster than the cashiers. YMMV
Aldi on the other hand has the fastest cashiers anywhere. They start them at $13 an hour plus bennies. They usually only need 1 in the store on duty.
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on planet earth Subway overtook McDonald's some time ago as the fast food chain with the largest number of locations world wide. They are continuing to open new locations - in the US and around the world - at a much faster clip than McDonald's as well. Even with most of their locations franchises, how would they be able to keep opening so many new restaurants if they were not doing well? They would have a hard time convincing franchisees to put down the capital to open a new location if they were doing poorly.
Are you sure about that? http://www.wsj.com/articles/su...
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
What you don't have the right to do is force them to comply.
But it is perfectly acceptable to elect officials to carry out that task for us, to force others to comply. Right?
Well, that was one way to force people stop being assholes enforcing Jim Crow laws for instance. That's another way to force others to stop marrying minors (just another example.) This shit can go both ways, for good and for bad. How good or how bad it goes is a function of education, political participation, and how much the average person in a society indulges in being an asshole.
How to you figure? The local franchise owner opts to get a few of these, replacing a good part of the staff, and has fewer employees to pay - especially important in high minimum wage states. They can keep costs down, keep prices down to stay competitive. Sure, the corporate side benefits, ultimately, too, but it seems good (in a business sense) for both sides of the equation.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Buys $100 blue jeans.
Solicits sympathy for being short of money.
Pick one.