Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just make it a chatbot that responds to key terms "bacon" or "cheese" with "yes, more please" and you've got a winner!
I think you meant "Leverage Synergies" "Core Competencies" "Stockholder Value" "You should be happy to just have a job here"
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.
It's exactly double that by most measurements I've seen. So companies will have to raise prices? There will be more people able to afford them which will only help their bottom line. Henry Ford acted with a great bit of social responsibility by paying his employees enough to where they could afford one of his cars. The least a fast food place could do is pay its employees enough to afford one of its shitty meals.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
You are assuming that there are other jobs for these people to find. Automation will out-pace job growth at some point. What do we do when there are only 80% as many jobs as people? When there are only 10% as many jobs as people? There is only so much trash to pick up.
How about everyone who wants basic income all get together and make it happen? There is nothing stopping you all from pooling your money together, and letting the ones that don't want to work live off the humongous surplus of cash your system is bound to create. I mean if basic income is feasible, that is.
Firstly, deduct expenses (health insurance, housing etc.) and that $31k will melt away like a snowball in an oven.
Secondly, the fact that we pay many professions insultingly low wages is not an argument against paying burger-flippers $15 an hour. It is an argument for paying other undervalued professions more.
Thirdly, whether someone spends 40 hours a week transplanting hearts, laying bricks, nursing the elderly or flipping burgers, none of those is a leisurely stroll in the park. Anyone working a full-time job deserves to be able to afford a modest standard of living in my book. Otherwise, what is the point?
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
You have no right to tell others what they should think is right.
Sure you do. You can tell others anything you want to tell them. What you don't have the right to do is force them to comply.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Civil unrest and war. When you have robotics and AI that render people functionally obsolete on a planet with 7.4 BILLION people, there's only this logical conclusion. It's what will happen when one group of people don't want to support an endless growth of people that consume vs produce to their benefit. This is not my position of course; I'm a Christian. I'm just simply telling you what will occur based on human nature. Question is, once super AI sees our destructive nature on full display (World War 3), I can only conclude that the future of our species will be planned for permanent exit from the evolutionary tree of life. God help us all.
Life is not for the lazy.
But socialism as a political system requires high levels of taking at the barrel of a gun.
As the taxation systems of all government types are enforced by their armed police forces, your statement is completely content-free. Do you have a point to make?
Every political system requires taking at the barrel of a gun.
At the end of the day, that's the ultimate authority behind any political system - if you don't follow the rules someone has the means to force you. Every capitalist transaction is finally backed up with a gun. Don't pay, we'll sue you / arrest you. Refuse to be arrested we'll shoot you.
I would throw the concept of Mazlow's Pyramid into this. If basic food and security are not present, you will not get much from people in the way of advances. By a guarenteed basic income, which would let people focus on other things than trying to eke enough for food, it would allow people to spend time doing research, making stuff, designing cooler items, and advancing the arts and sciences in general. The Renaissance is an object lesson to this, when people had time to do something other than toil in the fields.
It sounds "cool" to tell people to just go eat cake, but that philosophy has its blowback. Look at how the US has stagnated, while countries that guarantee some means of knowing where one's next meal is coming from are advancing. A population that is barely existing is not a population that is inventing and advancing science.
You have the general premise wrong.
He's not telling them they are making too much money. He's telling them that due to outside regulation, keeping them around is more expensive than automating the job. You even nailed the 'why' when you said that Wendy's doesn't exactly cater to the wealthy - they need to keep the average selling price down, so they can continue to exist.
What we are seeing is the inevitable consequence of increases in levels of technology, and outside regulation forcing wages up on jobs that have traditionally not been viewed as a career position, but rather a stepping stone for someone starting out in the labor market. The company is going to do what is necessary to keep sales up and expenses down, and some governmental entity just made automation cheaper than people. The consequence of that shift is that those people are free to look for higher paying opportunities elsewhere.
The upside: we've had self check-out in supermarkets for some time now, and there's still plenty of standard check lanes open any time I go to the store, because that shitty scan robot isn't fast enough for anything but a few items, and doesn't give a level of customer service that you can get from another person. The market will decide which model it likes better - a computer that you place your own order on and then use SamdroidplePay, or talking to a person who can be friendly and courteous at the going regulated market wage, and not enraging if you have the gall to pay with cash, because we still haven't figured out a machine that accepts cash properly.
TL;DR: All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Are you similarly pissed off that your car wasn't hand-welded together by some guy named Burt that is still staggering around from pounding cans of Pabst the night before?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If that's true they need to get better accountants.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're a drama queen. I was in Finland last summer, and I didn't see any "high levels of taking at the barrel of a gun".
When mentioning "socialism", why do people like you immediately jump to North Korea or Mao's Great Leap Forward without acknowledging that there are socialist countries that have better outcomes, more economic and social mobility, greater liberty and more stable economies than anything that capitalism has ever produced?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Capitalist transactions only work because of the threat of violence. Otherwise, what's to stop me from just promising to give you money (or some other item in trade) for your item, and then taking the item and refusing to hand over the money? Social systems like this only work because there's a governmental system that ends up resulting in violent force if you don't play by the rules. Otherwise you'd have anarchy.
It's weird how libertarians are so dense that they can't understand this. They're a lot like the ultra-naÃve loony-left people who think that everyone is just going to behave and play nice because it's human nature, if only you just reason with them and plead with them. It's not.
Your question should be, "Why do people say that capitalism/socialism is a binary, one-or-the-other choice?"
This happens every time socialism is mentioned around here. People try to argue that you can either have socialism or capitalism, but not both, when there are very successful countries that have found a way for the two to co-exist and work together.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Basic income is a concept created by people that want to stifle capitalism and devalue education and personal initiative to better one's self.
Er... not really. Some of its advocates are famous libertarians, such as Friedrich Hayek. And if there is one thing one can never say about libertarians is that they want to stifle capitalism.
The thing is, the worst for capitalism, far worse than taxes, is all the interference by big government itself, and basic income works against this. It allows us to downsize and dismantle entire governmental sectors by simply giving the money that would have gone into them directly to the people, who in turn would use it by purchasing from capitalist companies. Additionally, as more and more of those governmental bodies were dismantled, we could start transferring to the people part of the taxes that went into them, thus also lowering taxes overall. In the end, you get a small government, more freedom, and a functioning society that, while still relying on money from taxes, does it in a most definitely "non-welfarian-statist" manner. Also, less crime, because those who want to use cocaine, crack, heroin or whatever will have the money to engage in that and will be able to do so at home in a manner that would be safe for most everyone.
There's no practical downside to this proposal. It diminishes government, it lowers taxes, it lowers crime, it incentives business, it provides welfare without being actual big government-style welfare, and it requires just a small chunk of all the surplus generated by an exponentially-growing economy. In fact, wealth for those who work will continue expanding exponentially, just a little less exponentially than it might otherwise. It's cheap, and it's effective.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.