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Former McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour (foxbusiness.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Fox Business: As fast-food workers across the country vie for $15 per hour wages, many business owners have already begun to take humans out of the picture. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour (warning: autoplaying video) bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe," said former McDonald's USA CEO Ed Rensi during an interview on the FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.3 million people earned the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour with about 1.7 million having wages below the federal minimum in 2014. These three million workers combined made up 3.9 percent of all hourly paid workers.
And yet, fast food workers are earning $15/hr or more in most other first world countries across the globe for a decade and their economies haven't imploded...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Foxconn cuts 60000 jobs, replaces them with robots
That means that robots can be cheaper than a $320/month wage. It's not a minimum wage issue.
But when you increase the labour cost by 25-100%, all in one go, you shock the system so bad that they will naturally look to any and all means necessary to rein in their labour expenses.
Not been tracking this issue in the news have you? Nobody is proposing increasing the minimum wage to $12 (much less $15) "all in one go". The "Raise the Wage Act" being submitted to Congress raises it to $12 but does it over four years. The law recently signed in California reaches $15 an hour, but takes 6 years to do it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
This scaremongering makes zero sense, there are plenty of countries with higher income than USA and they don't starve from unemployment, rather the opposite.
Citation needed.
You're correct only if by "plenty" you mean 3-5. There are 5 countries with higher median income than the US: Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Denmark.
There are 3 countries with higher average wage than the US: Luxembourg again, Switzerland, and Ireland (according to the OECD). (Though this depends on who you ask: according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the US is flat-out No. 1 for average income.)
All but 2 of those (Norway and Switzerland) have higher unemployment rates than the US.
Well excepting the fact that there are such studies
http://www.frbsf.org/economic-...
You don't have to be Milton Friedman to figure this stuff out.
The answer is yes. In every single case (22 times) where the federal minimum wage was raised by law, economic growth and standards of living went up faster than inflation. Every single time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
most workers work 40 hrs/week * 50 weeks/year for 2,000 hours...
Not at McDonalds they don't. The vast majority work part time and there's a reason for that. Hint: it's not to benefit the employees.
Why?
The robot that fills the baskets with fries does not brake down that often.
It is not precision engineering here, it is sticking the right weight of fries in the bag. Ever watch "How It's Made"? They show lots of machines that do exactly that, hundreds of times an hour for things like bagged candy. The only difference is they seal both ends of the bag.
And believe me, they spend a LOT of time training people to do it right, even a 5% overfill makes for losses, 10% underfill makes for pissed off customers who think they were cheated.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Ironically, it's not like McDonalds has ever even BEEN a food company. Ray Koch has given multiple talks in which he spelled it out: McDonald's is a property company. The whole restaurant schtick was just a way of acquiring valuable corner properties right outside city CBDs which would be IN those CBDs a few years later.
McDonalds makes far more from renting out the properties where a restaurant stood decades ago than they have ever made from selling food. Hell the main corporation doesn't even sell any food at all. They sell franchises, and they allow you to buy one by signing over the deed for the place where the restaurant will go and paying the bond on the property. That's how they acquired such a massive supply of valuable properties.
To quote Koch himself: "Every person I've ever met can make a better burger than McDonalds, but none of them are as rich as me, because McDonalds is not a company that makes money from selling burgers".
One side effect is that anything the McDonald's corporation says about labor should be treated as bullshit since they are not in a labor intensive industry at all - they are landlords. The franchise owners care about labor costs, but they are not part of the corporation and the corporation decidedly does not speak for them - they are merely tools the corporation uses to acquire more land.
McDonalds corporation has consistently insisted on that seperation when it came to any and all forms of liability. The case a few years ago in New York where thousands of workers were cheated out of their paychecks by outright fraud (altering their timesheets to lie about how much they worked) ended up having to be pursued against individual franchise owners as the corporation denied any involvement in the management of the franchises nor any liability for anything they do.
Different courts have shown different levels of agreement with that argument (the famous coffee case - which everybody knows only the bullshit corporate-spin version off that has no resemblance to reality at all found the corporation liable for the fuckup at a particular franchise, most cases have not).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can't just design a machine that doesn't need to be cleaned.
but you can design a machine that only needs to be cleaned occasionally.
Everything that touches food needs to be cleaned. Food has to be removed from all the cracks and crevices.
It can be designed literally without cracks and crevices, and with self-flushing systems for any parts where that's not true.
I agree that machines could be designed to reduce cleaning, but cleaning of automated food service equipment is a nontrivial and very important part of the operation.
Taking the humans out of the process is nontrivial, but removing them will actually improve cleanliness and quality! Every leaf of lettuce can be UV-inspected for contaminants before it's used and every slice of tomato can be checked for sugar content with laser spectroscopy and rejected if it's sour, let alone has a discoloration indicative of some defect. A human touch may be beneficial for more complex foods for the foreseeable future, but the sad truth of fast food is that the human touch is often primarily a vector for pathogens.
Most humans wouldn't use a spatula to flip burgers if the spatula was very dirty. They would clean it, or get another one. The machine is going to keep going because that's what it was programmed to do.
The machine will both clean its own spatula and scrape its own grill, and it will sense when the bucket is full and a robot will come to empty it. It's not 1985 any more. These days, we can use visual processing to determine whether a spatula (or grill) is dirty. I would scrape every time, and use visual processing to determine if I had been successful.
The automated burger flipping mechanism may be buried inside the machine where it can't even be seen.
Personally, if I were building an automated restaurant, I'd put the machines where they could be seen, with shutters to pull down to hide them if I needed to perform maintenance. People would come in just to watch the machines work. How very postmodern.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"