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

If not now...

[Memophage]

And in six months buying a $25,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $12/hr...
And in a year buying a $15,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $9/hr...

They're going to replace employees with robots anyhow, I don't buy that increasing the minimum wage to whatever has anything to do with it.

Re:If not now...

[lorinc]

Yup. This isn't really a valid argument against increasing the minimum wage.

At worst, it merely hastens the inevitable by a few years, but this is going to happen.

This is relevant to the current election cycle for multiple reasons - free trade agreements are a major source of contention, and Trump talks about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US - the problem is, as the recent massive Foxconn layoffs proved, the majority of those jobs are NEVER coming back no matter what you do, unless you enact a New Jersey-style law against automation. (New Jersey requires all gas stations to be full-service, you cannot pump your own gas. One of the reasons for this rather unique law is to create jobs.)

But then you won't be able to compete with countries that do not enforce anti-automation laws.

I think the game is already over. A significant fraction of the population is already useless to the economy, and in 30 year it will be the vast majority. Let's face it, for the past 40k years, we built our societies based on the value of human labour. Today, human labour is worth almost nothing. It's decreasing so fast, we will see it reaching 0 in our lifetime.

Where do we go from there? Do we fight barbarian style to survive while the 0.1% enjoy the robotic enabled leisure society utopia? It seems so inevitable, it's extremely sad. Look at what happening right now in France: it's obvious all these guys will be replaced by cheaper and more docile robots in less than a generation, what will they do when that happens? Riots, civil war.

The sad part is, while a few will be happy, the vast majority will not, whereas it could have been to other way around thanks to technology if the right political decisions were taken in the 70s.

All talk

[jandrese]

Last time we had a discussion about raising the minimum wage (decades ago) McDonalds actually demonstrated a fully automated restaurant. It promptly went back to wage slaves once the talk died down. Now they're so lazy they're not even bothering with the proof of concept store.

If these robots were practical at the price he is quoting they would be in use today. Payoff period would be 2/3 of a year instead of 1/2 a year, but that's barely any difference. This is a scare tactic pure and simple.

Nothing to See Here...

[WheezyJoe]

The only news here is a former McDonald’s CEO got some air-time on FOX Business Network’s "Mornings with Maria", saying something that happens to dove-tail with Fox's anti-everything that keeps its audience agitated and receptive to ads for Cialis (for daily use) and other products directed to the aging demographic that sits at home watching cable news all day.

Flash: There are already automated order-taking machines in McDonald's restaurants throughout Europe. And automated check-out lines in Supermarkets throughout the U.S. And robots welding cars together throughout the world. Progress marching on, regardless some barely adequate minimum wage.

OTOH, whether people LIKE robot-made-and-served food remains to be seen. The only thing that's certain is robots are far more sexy in the Board Room than people. Nobody gets props anymore for motivating people to be more productive, not when there's a guy with a fancy suit and a toothy grin from Acme Robots showing fancy color pamphlets to a hungry Vice President who wants the Big Promotion.

By the time the dust settles and McDonald's is shelling out support contracts to third, fourth, and fifth-party vendors who show up as reliably as a Comcast repairman, the VP with the great idea will have moved on, maybe to run HP (another nail in that coffin). And who keeps the McDonald's running when the robots break? That same tired assistant manager you always see picking up the slack at the fryer or turning the key when the cashier fucks up. At least he'll be making $15 whole dollars an hour for his trouble.