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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.
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.
Yes, because white people don't work fast food.......
You're an idiot.
"Ideology I don't like will advocate something dumb because of course they will because I'm on the other team". Then "it's a race issue cause I want it to be"
The only loophole here is that the "idiot branch" of conservatism gives you a loophole to feel insightful.
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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.
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.
Minimum wage or not, automation would have killed low paying jobs eventually.
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.
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.
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
No, just the massive amount of technology and resources we have. Why are you still thinking like we're in the jungle? Your brain didn't evolve past that?
You mean the corporations ran away with the people's money? Yeah.
Mostly random stuff.
So you'd like your food served to you by people living in poverty?
A major change up is coming in terms of how we see human labor. A change in labor costs in favor of labor in the short term is humane and only helps improve quite a few people's standard of living. In the long term, it is only speeding up the inevitable long term question of how we spend or society's wealth. Our wealthy can continue to pretend to live in a self righteous void and be slaughtered like French royalty during the French revolution wondering why the common folk can't just eat cake or it can decide that maybe their wealth is owed to the societies they live in and cede some of it back to everyone.
Would Bill Gates be anything if he was born in Somalia? Would any of the world's billionaires? Every hugely successful person owes a debt to the society they live in and we are getting closer and closer to the need for them to pay some back.
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It is doubtful that the march of automation would have gone much slower, even without the increase in minimum wages.
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.
So because school teachers who (while I agree are under paid) get 3 months off every year might end up making the same as "burger flippers", we shouldn't boost minimum wage?
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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.
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.
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."
The average teacher salary is around $45k and entry cops make around $50k. Plus they get to retire after 20 years on the taxpayers dime. That is why cities are broke.
I think it's more a case of where on the spectrum of private vs public ownership of property you want to be.
All taxes (including and especially UBI) are basically saying that, no, you can't really have 100% private ownership, some of it has to be owned by the public. The recent advances of technology and increasing calls for UBI are basically saying that we should be moving to a higher percentage of public ownership of capital than we currently have.
But it's slightly worse than that; things like taxes and UBI try to give the benefit of capital ownership to the public, but they don't put any of the responsibility of capital ownership on the public. This is why you hear people talk about "freeloaders"; it's about the public not sharing in any of the responsibility. True, technology and automation makes that responsibility easier, but the argument is about removing the responsibility entirely.
So if you replace the word "work" with the phrase "responsibility for ensuring production occurs", I think you'll get closer to the heart of why there is so much controversy over concepts like UBI .
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"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.
has been doing this for years.
Best Slashdot Co
So you'd like your food served to you by people living in poverty?
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.
I trust fully that people incapable of basic math are also incapable of basic layering of condiments.
Would Bill Gates be anything if he was born in Somalia?
This is a nonsensical, bullshit question.
Every hugely successful person owes a debt to the society they live in
This is bullshit reasoning. For the fact that people happily bought and still buy - yes, in spite of Slashdot's amateur hour dollar-signs-as-esses bullshit - Microsoft products, Bill Gates does not owe society a damned thing. In spite of this, Billy G has done more for the world at large - not just the 'society' he lives in - than all the clamoring nerds here put together.
the need for them to pay some back
Re: "I deserve free stuff."
In the face of the worst example you could possibly choose - Bill Gates, really? The guy with a massive altruistic foundation? - that's what you're saying.
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.
Minimum wage should be tied to some sort of living index of where the business is physically located.
$15/hr working 40 hour weeks, 52 weeks per year is still only $31,200, before taxes. How would your life be making that money? What if you made that much money while trying to live in NYC, or LA?
Get over your notion that people wanting a living wage is somehow the problem. If minimum wage kept up with inflation over the years, wouldn't we already be at or past $15/hr? Prices for goods keeps up with inflation but labor wages don't? Hmm..
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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.
Total straw man argument. This is no more accurate than to say that the conservative plan to close the "loophole" is to replace all workers in every industry with cheaper overseas labor when possible and domestic machines where it is not possible until there is no one left in the US to be able to afford a Wendy's Hamburger.
Imagine a world where society can afford to have more artists and scientists because machines do all the grunt work.
When everybody has been outsourced or automated, then what?
Who will have the money to buy overpriced Wendy burgers?
To be honest, in the end I wasn't sure about this guy either. I mean, he even made a song about it!
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.
Minimum wage should be tied to some sort of living index of where the business is physically located. $15/hr working 40 hour weeks, 52 weeks per year is still only $31,200, before taxes. How would your life be making that money? What if you made that much money while trying to live in NYC, or LA?
Mine wasn't bad, and I was making even less than that. Of course, I don't live in overpriced hellholes like LA or NYC, or even in the overpriced "hip" areas in the town I do live in (Atlanta, specifically metro Atlanta). I was making about 27k a year(slightly over $13 a hour if you include differential), but lived in an affordable apartment in the outer end of the metro area and had a new car with a 3 year note at $125 a month and had no issues. Of course, now a few years later I'm married, my salary has doubled, I bought a house even further out in an up and coming area (15 y/o house for under 200K while new construction in the area starts in the low 300s for townhomes) with mortgage payments that are as much as rental payments for much smaller apartments, and the car is paid off, and I add to savings and 401k every month. Because I live within my means. Too many people get themselves in trouble when they try to live a lifestyle way outside what they can afford, then complain when they find themselves underwater on a mortgage in debt to 3 credit cards, and can no longer afford the $350 a month lease on that new Lexus/BMW/Mercedes. If you choose to live in an expensive city/area and are making less than $15 an hour, you should probably consider cutting back your lifestyle. Get roommates, buy a used or basic economy car, or just straight up move to a cheaper area.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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 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.
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.
The difference of course is that there are maybe a few thousand people qualified to transplant hearts but pretty much anybody at all without major disability can flip burgers. Not all jobs are the same, not even close. I hire people and I would hire many more if they cost me much less. Unfortunately the people I hire after a while become productive enough in my industry, that I have to pay them a competitive rate. Now to reduce my costs I hire most of my people in places that have low standard of living, where I can pay less than in the western countries. Actually my employees have very good wages compared to the rest of the population where they live, but from my point of view they are much more affordable than people in USA or Canada or Germany or France or the UK, etc. This makes me more productive by being more efficient, thus more competitive compared to some other firms in the business. Some of my employees make less than minimum wage in those countries and it helps me to hire more of them.
Why do I need more employees? Because then I can produce my stuff faster. Why do I want to produce it faster? Because then I can sell more. Why is that good? Because I want to grow the company and make more money. That is the point of course - to make money for myself. Unfortunately this requires hiring people, training them, renting space, paying utility bills, taxes (where cannot be avoided). All these things are needed and all of it has to be managed to make money. When I was a contractor I made much more money than when I started my own business. 6 years later I am still making much less money than while contracting, but not as bad as it was 6 years ago. Hopefully at some point I can make a return on all that risk and investment, otherwise what is the point (to paraphrase you there).
Incidentally some people got their jobs by working for me, but that is not the point. I am not doing any of what I am doing to provide jobs, but to make money for myself. If people would work for me for free I would take that, but they do not. I had people starting with me who had no experience at all. I do not pay them in the first weeks while I am training them, but once they are useful to me I have no choice but to pay or they would leave and with the training they would find a paying job. But I am not in the business of providing anybody with any form of standard of living, I do not care about that. I care to build a profitable business whatever that takes. Nobody is entitled to receive anything from me and of course everybody is free to leave. So no, I don't see at all that anybody out there is entitled to any 'standard of living' regardless of the type of the job they are doing. But if they are competitive they will build their standard of living.
You can't handle the truth.
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...
We shouldn't "boost minimum wage" because the consequence of "boosting minimum wage" is that people end up on the street. Why do you want young and vulnerable people to end up being out of work?
Who said they're replacing all their workers? They're replacing *some* of their workers, which is saving them money. How is that bullshit, exactly?
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.
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
What I would like is for Slashdot to just stop posting this shit, because it generates all kinds of rage-inducing stupidity from people who don't understand economics.
Let's start with demand-side economics. Jobs come from consumer purchasing power. That means the consumer has a certain pool of buying power (we represent this with "money"; don't get too attached), and everything he buys is made by labor. When that labor costs more (more labor or more wages), the amount of money required for a product increases. If the consumer can buy fewer products--for example, due to spending more on some product--then there are less products made, and the jobs associated with those products goes away.
A lot of people say, "Oh, but the money transfers to another consumer!" Yes, and that's all well and good, and you still have that consumer capable of buying fewer products with that money. It iterates: in cycle 1, fewer products are bought; in cycle 2, fewer products are bought, although some of the things being bought are being bought by *other* *people* who now have a higher wage; in cycle 3, repeats. It adjusts down, and you end up with those fewer people who can now buy more things, and a bunch of other people unemployed, and a bunch of people who were richer who are now slightly poorer.
The next big topic then is technological growth. Technological growth is reducing the *amount* of labor required to produce a product. When we improve technology as such, a smaller amount of buying power can then buy the given product. We create unemployment in that way, and the reduced cost of the product translates to a reduced price, which leaves more buying power in the hands of the consumer. The consumer buys other products (in the current decade or two, that's been more and better healthcare, along with smart phones, video games, and other electronics), which require labor for production, which creates new jobs to replace old jobs.
This technological growth allows population growth and an increased minimum standard-of-living. If it comes slowly enough, it's relatively harmless, holding a low level of unemployment; if it comes *rapidly*, it causes high unemployment. The Industrial Revolution is an example of sudden high unemployment from new technology; agriculture in America over the past 150 years is an example of slow technological growth.
The raising of minimum wage helps encourage businesses to go from low-cost solutions (cheap wages) to high-cost solutions (machines made by more and more expensive labor). The machines may take, for illustrative purposes, twice as much labor time to produce as they replace; which would restrict our ability to produce other things if it weren't for the fact that this cost rolls down to the products, reducing the consumer's ability to buy those things anyway.
The machines usually come when a business determines a strategic entry point based on finances and long-term speculation on the probable reduction of cost of machine deployment (maximizing ROI with risk appetite and risk tolerance considerations); bumping the wages up increases risk, causing more rapid deployment. This rapid deployment eliminates jobs more quickly, creating a higher transitional unemployment rate; and the cost of machines being higher than the pre-raise wage cost reduces consumer buying power, more permanently eliminating jobs. As well, providing new employment requires finding a consumer market capable of paying the wage cost of the humans involved; this is slower when wages are higher, so the wage bump reduces the speed of recovery.
This compound problem is unique to the modern era, insomuch that it's not a trait of the 1900s. Minimum wages were a good and viable strategy for the past hundred years; we have new threats in the system now. As well, technological growth has brought us to a point where non-wage alternatives such as a welfare-replacing basic income are viable *if* implemented properly (and highly destructive if implemented improperly). Non-wage
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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.
I don't know where you live but you might want to double check your numbers. Where I live teachers start at 22 and cops 28. Garbage men start at 24. See, the problem is, these jobs used to be desirable because of the hours and benefits. Pay has historically never been a key factor for civil servant jobs. It has been since Reagan and his drive to the bottom with "trickle down" when this started and the salaries for the more desirable jobs began to slip. Now, they have slipped so far that teachers and cops look like good paying jobs. That is sad and people not realizing it and slamming these profession need to take a step back and re-evaluate some things.
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.
Lets have Febo
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
What could possibly go wrong?
You hit the double-word-score if the domestic machine replacements are built with cheaper labor overseas!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
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.
Where I live, $31k/year would be enough.. probably would have to rent an apartment vs buy a house, but it's doable. The problem with renting long term, you don't build equity.
I'm grossly simplifying the issue but I believe anyone that is working 40 hours per week should have the luxury to not have to worry about paying the bills where they live (obviously living within their means). There is such a heavy reliance on minimum wage service jobs.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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?
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.
Of course the data doesnt support that.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
If you scroll down to the table where they list every increase in national minimum wage and its effect on job growth you can plainly see that minimum wage increases seem to have very little effect on overall employment in a historic context. Some increases lead to job losses, some to job gains.
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I stopped reading after you made the claim that people making more money will be able to afford fewer products. Cost of labor is only a small part of most products cost to produce. The increase in end product cost shouldnt even cancel out a wage increase let alone make the net gain to the recipiant negative.
This of course changes when people start saving their money from wage increases instead of spending it so there is a ceiling to what can be done with minimum wage.
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You didnt actually read my post did you? I called you an idiot for claiming that liberals are trying to outlaw automation. Just because you want them to be (as you clearly want me to be even though i said nothing of the sort) doesnt it make it true
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Now if we could only get this kind of technology at a massage parlor
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
"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.
..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.
Past minimum wage increases have been modest and only affected a small number of people (namely those whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage), so they don't show up in such statistics. In addition, people losing their jobs doesn't necessarily mean that there are fewer jobs, they can simply be replaced by other people entering the job market. And job growth statistics are biased to begin with since the US population is growing anyway.
What you need to look at is not job losses overall, but labor force participation rates for unskilled workers, and that's a hard number to estimate.
Another "experiment" one could do would be to simply raise the national minimum wage to $100/h (with automatic adjustments for inflation) and see what happens to employment numbers. I predict we would see people dropping out of the labor force in large numbers. What do you think?
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.
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.
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.
I stopped reading after you made the claim that people making more money will be able to afford fewer products
I said in an economy where a certain small class of people are making more money, the cost of products they produce increases, causing the buying power of others in the economy to decrease; and that, in cases in particular, this means a total population-wide reduction in buying power.
In other words: I claimed part of the poor class becomes elite-class poor people who get richer, and the other part of the poor class becomes poverty-class poor people who become poorer (via unemployment).
Your distorted interpretation of "people with more money will be able to buy less" is a ridiculous straw man. Be more stealthy at least.
Cost of labor is only a small part of most products cost to produce.
Cost of labor is 100% of what *everything* costs to produce. There is no other cost.
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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.