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.

Comments

Re:no sense

[cdecoro]

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.

Re:Math doesn't work out

[PopeRatzo]

Did people just start making more money at their existing jobs, without an increase in cost of living?

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.