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

obvious response

[mal808]

I, for one, welcome our new French-fry bagging robot overlords

Re:obvious response

[AdamThor]

Can these robots also bag hot grits?

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...

[Andy Dodd]

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.)

Re:If not now...

[boristdog]

And someone on Slashdot will make a 3-D printed, Arduino-controlled version for $250 that also checks the fry temperature and saltiness, and counts each fry for maximum efficiency.

Then someone else makes a 3-D printed, Arduino-controlled restaurant that takes raw potatoes, flour, and meat in big hoppers. It creates a burger and fries in a few minutes and is entirely controlled by a smartphone. And the whole thing fits in the space of a standard minivan. Cost? $8500.

Now McDonalds is out of business because any fool can buy one and put it on a corner.

BFD.

Re:If not now...

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Businesses have risk appetite and risk tolerance. Risk appetite is how much money they want to throw in a hole for a likely conversion to more money; risk tolerance is the point at which they will not throw more money into the hole because the return--whether or not it's coming--is sinking the ship too hard, and they're no longer interested in trying to squeeze out more promised droplets of gold.

Because of risk appetite, different businesses will implement labor-reducing changes at different times. Sure, you have an $8.25/hr employee now, and the machine costs $8/hr; but next year the machine should compare to a $7.25/hr employee, and in three years it should compare to a $5.50/hr employee. It seems to me that, over the ten-year period, you will come out with a higher profit if you wait three years before deploying expensive machines. These are $35,000 machines replacing $16,500 employees, so you need a little over 2 years to get a break-even ROI (replace benefits with maintenance).

To some businesses, switching onto machines right away seems like a good idea. Poor foresight I guess. Other businesses will vary between how they roll out--how long to delay, how fast to carry out the roll-out, etc. That means moving everyone out of their jobs and getting machines in here could take a decade or more if wages are competitive with machines and we believe machines will get cheaper. The risk of moving onto machines isn't offset by the 25 cents savings, and the potential return for paying that 25 cents for the next few years is that you turn it into a 4 dollar savings instead.

This breaks when you suddenly make labor expensive.

Now instead of $8.25/hr vs $8/hr, you're doing $15/hr vs $8/hr. In one year, avoiding the 25 cent savings means $500 per employee per year; but at $15/hr, you're losing $7,000 per employee per year for not going in right now. That's going to hit risk tolerances a lot faster, and jobs are going away much more rapidly in those conditions.

It's even worse if machines are *more* expensive than people: you get the price increase that comes with, say, $11/hr (machine) labor, but you fire a bunch of $8.25/hr human labor. Normally, we replace a high-labor process with a lower-labor one and make cost savings, leading to a reduction of prices, leaving more money in consumer pockets, allowing more purchasing, creating new jobs to make the new stuff we're buying. If the machines are more expensive than wage-workers before the wage bump, then costs go *up*, and consumer ability to buy goes *down*: rather than reacting to the reduction of jobs by creating new jobs, the consumer base reacts to the increase in cost by not being able to financially support the wages of *even* *more* *jobs*.

In 1790, 90% of Americans laborers (in a ~58% labor force) were farmers; we've replaced most of them with machines, and they now make up 2% of the labor force, and about 11% of consumer spending in total goes toward food to cover those farmers, the people building and maintaining farm equipment, logistics and sales moving that kind of thing, chemical companies making fertilizers and pesticides, and oil mining and refining to get the fuel for energy to drive all this. That means 18% of the labor involved in making food is on the farm, and 82% is in supporting infrastructure. You'll notice we don't have an 82% unemployment rate today; and automated fast food won't destroy our job market unless the method by which we transition is damaging--which this particular method *is*.

Re:If not now...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I suspect this article was posted for political reasons rather than for robot tech reasons.

In Slashdot way back in the year 1900, they had similar articles like "Does the latest steam tractor throw one 2 cent an hour + food laborer out of work? They were political back then, too, even though it was News for Farmers, Stuff that Manures.

Re:If not now...

[crunchygranola]

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.

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.

Re:If not now...

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

I addressed this. You repeat a line that comes from the thinking that jobs go away forever and no new jobs come. Circa 1790, 90% of American workers were farmers; today that's 2%, and a total of 11% of the workforce (including the farmers themselves) provides all the supporting infrastructure (energy, machines, pesticides, fertilizer, shipping, retail, marketing) to supply our food.

It's not "Hastening"; it's "Compacting." You're creating a situation where people become unemployed at a higher rate--more jobs lost per month--and replacement jobs come at a lower rate. Instead of shaking a little as we push up to 6% unemployment and then come back down to 5% over 5-10 years, we spike up to 30% unemployment over 2-3 years and then require some 70 years to recover--if our economy doesn't fucking collapse first.

You will incur enough injuries and blood loss in your life that, were I to take all that blood from your body today, you would die immediately.

Re:If not now...

[shawn2772]

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.

Robots will replace people in lots of professions. Economically this will be fantastic, but it's going to require a serious restructuring of our economy, and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

Raising the minimum wage will increase the pace of the transition, which will make it hurt more.

Re:If not now...

[adonoman]

This is why we need to completely drop the minimum wage and bring in a basic income. If something can be done by a robot, then there's no reason a human should be doing it. Productivity will keep going up with fewer and fewer workers needed, but we're still going to have people who need to live and consume.

Re:If not now...

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The basic problem with McDonalds is that it's the same generic pseudo-food everywhere.

This generic pseudo-food concept is, actually, once of the keys to their success.

McDonalds' marketers found that a *lot* people often want to go to a place where they know exactly what they're going to get (i.e. familiarity and uniformity) and they've capitalized on that. A place where you order "X" and you'll get "X" just like you do in the next town over, or the next country over.

One time when we were tired and wrecked from traveling we went to a McDonalds in Vietnam....and we got *exactly* the same familiar food we'd have gotten in Seattle or Denver or Memphis. Yes, it was shit food but it was familiar and that was a kind of comfort all in itself.

McDonalds knows this, they understand this bit of food psychology, and that's why they're soooooooo big on everything being exactly the same in every restaurant (food-wise, anyway). You go there and you know what you're gonna get, no surprises. It's one of their keys to success.

Re:If not now...

[Ol Olsoc]

When a burger flipper starts getting $15.00/hr, what do you think my skills are going to cost you? Right now I'm only making 3 times minimum wage, if minimum wage doubles, so will mine, sooner or later and a lot of people think that way. Oh yeah and Business owners are going to want to keep wages at 20% of revenues so you know what that's going to do to the price of a burger, that $6.75 meal deal will go up to $8.45.

Talk to me about hedge fund managers Ken Griffin and James Simon who each made 1.7 billion last year - which is the equivalent of around 300,000 minimum wage jobs. Explain how minimum wage workers are paid too much, and how it is good policy for your's and my tax dollars to subsidize them.

Re:If not now...

[silentcoder]

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).

Math doesn't work out

[rjstanford]

Guess what? Those $35K robots are also cheaper than paying people $8/hr.

Human beings are incredibly expensive. They're also the economic engine that turns a single business into part of a functional economy, but I digress.

There are very, very few positions that could be automated in a way that makes sense financially at $15/hr that wouldn't also make sense at $5/hr. Either a position is automatable, or it is not, and at 4000-5000 hours per year (plus benefits, etc) that's a lot of money for a single position that could be thrown at a robot if that's the way you wanted to play it. Basically, automating that position will either be super-cheap or super-expensive.

Automation is a very important discussion point. Its disingenuous to tie it to the current debate over moving the minimum wage back up to a living wage.

Re:Math doesn't work out

[danbert8]

Either a position is automatable, or it is not,

It is automatable now, or it is not yet automatable. There is no reason to believe that any job is safe from robots/computers in the long run.

Re:Math doesn't work out

[JoeMerchant]

In the 1980s, $3ish minimum wages were also not living wages.

Re:Math doesn't work out

[93 Escort Wagon]

Automation is a very important discussion point. Its disingenuous to tie it to the current debate over moving the minimum wage back up to a living wage.

I'm old enough to have been through multiple debates regarding raising the minimum wage - some national, some state-wide (Washington), some city-wide (Seattle and environs).

The bogeyman of massive unemployment always gets trotted out whenever anyone mentions raising the minimum wage. And guess what we've seen when the minimum wage goes up? A few isolated businesses will lay off a few people (which is trumpeted loudly in the media), but that's the sum total of it - there are no mass layoffs. Prices may go up a little, but that's about it.

The real "issue" here is that upper class people want to hang onto as much of their money as they can. That's certainly understandable, but it's not a particularly compelling argument.

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.

McDonalds won't be 1st, but they will be 2nd

[blueshift_1]

Whoever does it first is going to cause a PR nightmare, but once that settles down - all of the competitors will be soon to follow the new norm.

Re:McDonalds won't be 1st, but they will be 2nd

[110010001000]

You just need voice recoginition:
"I would like to order large fries".
"Do you want fries with that?"
"No, just large fries"
"Two orders of large fries. Drive to the window."

Re:McDonalds won't be 1st, but they will be 2nd

[Registered Coward v2]

My guess is on Wendy's. But the real trick will be how to make the drive-through person obsolete. Either through an app that produces a QR code that you scan - or a drive up touch screen - or something.

Why doe that person have to be at the store? Link multiple stores together to a central call center that then transmits the order to the proper store.

The minimum wage isn't the trigger

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Also on the front page is how Foxconn is replacing manufacturing with robots. I can guarantee they're not paying $15USD/hr to employees. The talk about minimum wage is just to cut costs until the robots can replace the guys making $8/USD/Hr.

There's a fundamental conflict in capitalism. As an owner, you want to cut costs, including wages. But wages are also known as "purchasing power". We've gotten past this by growth. Capitalism requires growth. But we're cutting so fast, im not sure we're growing fast enough to cover all the lost purchasing power. We'll see

It's all about who subsidizes whom

[taustin]

Even at $15/hour, it's not a livable wage in most places. You can't survive on it when your pre-tax, gross income is less than the average one bedroom apartment costs per month, as is the case in Los Angeles. So what happens is that people making minimum wage doing scut work jobs are subsidized by family, friends, or, far more often than not, the taxpayer. They can't afford a car, so they go to work on subsidized public transportation. They can't afford medical insurance, so they get subsidized by the taxpayer, or go to the emergency room they can't afford to pay for. They can't afford child care, so they sign up for subsidized versions of that, or their children grow up feral, and the taxpayer pays for keeping them in prison.

All that so we can buy a cheap, mass produced hamburger for 99 cents.

The problem isn't paying employees $15/hour, the problem is paying McDonald's a quarter of the true cost of making a Big Mac, so that the corporate investors can get richer.

All big, national chains are heavily (if covertly) subsidized by the taxpayer. Sam Walton became a billionarire on those subsidies, while his employees were living on food stamps.

If you can't afford to pay your employees enough to live on without subsidies, then your business model is broken, and you should be driven out of business by pitchfork wielding mobs.

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[BarbaraHudson]

Except that it's not a straight-up comparison between the employee and the machine. When the machine doesn't make fries, it's idle. When the employee doesn't make fries, they're cleaning, etc.

Automation is a GOOD SIDE EFFECT of minimum wage

[Robotbeat]

Automation is a good thing. That a livable minimum wage encourages some companies to automate is also a good thing. We MAY need to use other policies to maintain full employment, but at this point, I don't see why anyone should be making just $15/hour.

A big criticism of a minimum wage is that it's "not a free lunch" and just causes inflation. But if a minimum wage encourages automation, then it actually increases per-person productivity, thus partially paying for itself and keeping a minimum wage from being purely inflationary (there will, of course, be some amount of inflation due to a minimum wage increase, but nowadays a small amount of inflation is actually a good thing).

If we're paying just, say, $2/hour for people to work menial jobs, which is far below a livable wage, then they are, de facto, being subsidized in some other way. For instance, government assistance through subsidized housing, food stamps, etc. Or perhaps they're living off of charitable organizations. Or perhaps they're living off the good will of their family and/or friends. But paying a sub-livable wage is being subsidized in SOME WAY, perhaps even just being taken from that person's health. It's not a society-optimal solution.

In our society, even low-skilled workers' productivity has increased due to technology. But because there are so many low-skilled workers, their bargaining power is low, and thus their wages don't increase. Thus something like a minimum wage is necessary in order for those people to make a livable wage and to not be on foodstamps, etc.

Again, I see automation in response to a wage hike as a good thing. Ultimately, provided we maintain full employment, this will help everyone. Given our modern technology, human labor is worth more than $5/hour even if the workers do not have the bargaining power to get a higher wage. So employing people at below $15/hour in positions that could be automated if they were paid a livable wage is actually a misallocation of human resources. In a sense, by NOT paying workers a livable wage and NOT automating more, companies are, in fact, having their labor subsidized by the rest of society (government, family, friends, charities).

5$ / hr is not sane in the current economy

[fyngyrz]

government caused this problem by not allowing wages to settle at $5/hour

All wages at $5 an hour do is make the rest of us support the workers via the social safety nets.

And if you take the social safety nets away, then you have people who are earning $200/week for 40 hours labor.

That means no medical care, rent is impossible to pay in many circumstances, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Even as it stands now, we subsidize those corporations with our taxes; that's the only thing that makes the wages they pay now survivable in any real sense of the word in any urban environment. Small town or country living, maybe you can make some kind of sane go of it for less than $10/hour, but it's definitely the exception, not the rule.

For McDonald's and the like, when the cost of functionally adequate automation falls below the cost of employment, they're going to move to automation. We either figure out how to handle the consequences ahead of time, or we take the beating when it happens without any fallback position. My guess is that it will probably be the latter, inasmuch as politics-as-usual always seem to target only the nearest term headlights-in-the-tunnel.

Also... speaking now with my AI researcher hat on: I think it's a slam dunk that the automation that will suit the fast food service industries is going to arrive very, very soon. With other service industries soon to follow. This problem is basically on our doorstep right now. Most people fail to see it because it represents a paradigm shift - things will be as they have never been before in history, and it's just very difficult to imagine fundamental changes in one's worldview that have no precedent.

Grab the popcorn and lock your doors. Show's going to start shortly.

Need to replace CEO CFO with robots first

[WillAffleckUW]

Talk about wasted money. Overpaid senior execs actually reduce the ROI of any business, as numerous studies have shown.

Let's not be fooled...

[lionchild]

Let's not fool ourselves, replacing the minimum wage worker at McDonald's with a robot isn't a new idea. They've been working on that since the early 2000's. The increased minimum wage has been a slight, if not small, acceleration to the plan to do so.

Even when they were paying less than $8/hour, they were thinking they wanted to have a one-time-cost robot to do the work for them.

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[Midnight Thunder]

Sure seems like it would cost a lot more than $35k.

True, but that means the employee(s) would make way, way less than $15/hr. at their new job - stamping out license plates in prison.

Pretty sure that's not what most folks would want to end up doing...

So essentially moving the cost burden from the private industry to the state? Always find it curious that we oppose elements of a social system and then end up paying for it anyhow, but in some other way.

Re:Hold Ma Beer and Watch This!

[ShanghaiBill]

The whole push for a $15 minimum wage will been seen as a "Hold ma beer" moment for the minimum wage activists.

Unlikely. If people were willing to learn about economics by looking at how past policies worked in the real world, we wouldn't be having this debate in the first place. I have never heard an activist, of any ideology, admit they were wrong.

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.

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[Hognoxious]

If the state runs prisons directly it's public expenditure, which is communism and encourages homosexuality.

If the state pays twice as much to corporations which run prisons that's private enterprise, which is 100% American and apple pie and NUMBER ONE!!!!

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[funwithBSD]

Generally speaking, the fry bagger does not replace just one employee for $15, but two, possibly 3. There are many locations where they are open more than 16 hrs a day, and some 24hrs.

And $15 employee does not cost $15 per hour, it is more like $25 with payroll taxes, SS and benefits added on. $30K a year becomes $50K a year.

So that is $50K a year, X the number of shifts.

In reality, having actually worked at a McDonalds, it takes a full employee only during the rush hours to run the fryer and bag the potatoes. So call it 1 to 2 FTEs.

Re:Not apples to apples

[Dread_ed]

Here's how it works from a previous comment (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9101743&cid=52105397):

I imagine that not only customer facing personnel will be replaced by kiosks, but food preparation, waste disposal, cleaning, and restocking will become automated as well. Accompanying this, I can see a wave of new positions available for robotics, IT, and kiosk repair technicians. I can see a busy McDonalds location staffed by as little as 2 people, there mainly for emergencies and "turning the machines off and then on again" as necessary.

Its hard not to perceive the future of fast food locations. There will be an app that allows you to order on the way to the location. You pay from your phone and a robot prepares your meal just in time for your arrival. Timing this is trivial because you share your location with them. Forecasting the next 15-30 minutes of business through the app makes for fresher food and drastically more efficient order fulfillment. A dedicated lane for app-placed orders ensures quick in-and-out drive through service. Customers are served better, orders are machine precise, profits are higher, and the only people that lose are low income workers.

Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.

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.

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.

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[Daemonik]

Here's the thing though, that $15 wage is a strawman. They are already planning on buying the robots, they're just using the wage increase as a smokescreen. If the wage continues to stagnate they will still buy the robots and dump those workers! They've been talking about centralizing the drive thru to a call center so they don't have to staff the window for years.

Personally I think robots are the worst thing they'll ever do, for a lot of reasons.

Robots won't stop teens from coming into the store and spray painting penises on all the terminals.

Robots won't notice when the homeless guy who smells like a tuna sandwich that's been in the sun for a week decides to take a nap in the store.

Robots won't stop the aforementioned homeless person from shitting on the table.

Robots have no idea how to deal with humans who give no fucks and want to be destructive.

On target

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 1950s, Henry Ford II, the CEO of Ford, and Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers union, were touring a new engine plant in Cleveland. Ford gestured to a fleet of machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union boss famously replied: “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”

Re:Not apples to apples

[j-beda]

Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.

If this analysis is correct, not changing the mimium wage delays this type of thing by only a few years I would guess.

Re:And then those employees burn down your restaur

[Hylandr]

There's more to hiring people than just giving them a paycheck. On average, an employer has to pay an additional 2/3's of the employee's pay in taxes, insurance and in some places other benefits.

But lets forget all that for a moment and stick to the numbers we have, while thinking in MAN HOURS:

35k divided by 15 an hour is 2,333 *man hours*
Most stores at peak times have 5 crew members.
That's 466.6 hours of operation for 5 people.
Assuming there are 5 people running a 24/7 store that's 19 *days* of operation that will be required to return on that investment. ( Gross )

But without people the costs of operation will drop also.
- You wont need the space or restroom facilities for a crew.
- Without people Minimal HVAC will be required.
- Robots can certainly run 24/7
- The building size for a drive through only restaurant can now shrink.
- Multiple lanes with highly efficient production will shorten wait time and provide much more consistent quality.

Cons:
- You still need someone to unload trucks, restock machines, and maintain the automated devices. An owner can pay one person minimum wage to do the rounds, responding to alerts for low stock or malfunctioning equipment etc.

Additionally, I KNOW someone won't be spitting or adding any other 'secret sauce' to my food in the back.