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More Fast Food Restaurants Are Now Automating (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Wendy's is adding self-service ordering kiosks "to at least 1,000 restaurants, or about 15% of its stores," reports the Los Angeles Times, while McDonald's and Panera Bread are now planning to add kiosks to every restaurant. "Lots of restaurants, not just fast-food chains, are really trying to mitigate the costs of higher wages," says one market research firm, while also citing a survey which found 40% of millennials willing to use kiosks (compared to 30% of restaurant-goers overall).
But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn't plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread "has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system."
But in some cases this means more work for human employees. Quartz points out that McDonalds doesn't plan to reduce its workforce after installing kiosks, and Panera Bread "has said that at some locations where it has ordering kiosks, it has actually increased human hours to help the kitchen keep up with the higher number of orders that come in through the more efficient ordering system."
There might be more human work at some locations. Faster service using kiosks might bring in more customers in that restaurant, but the total number of meals people eat always stays the same, which means other non-automated restaurants are losing customers. Since the automated restaurant is serving more people with the same number of employees, the overall effect is a decrease in labor.
My family had Chick-fil-A the other day. Placed our entire order on my smartphone through their app. The app can optionally track your itinerary via GPS so that the food is prepared just in time for your arrival.
A friend has opened three (under contract to open three) "specialty" fast food restaurants. His biggest problem by far & he has a lot of problems, is the difficulty in hiring people. If he does get a good worker, he can find himself in bidding wars with other restaurants. All of his stores are in more affluent areas so local kids are not interested. He can't get away with paying any employee minimum wage. It seems that unless a employer is based in a low income, high unemployment area, minimum wage means nothing, they gotta pay more, sometimes a LOT more.
Them lines go out the door but he is not making any money so far because of his labor costs as they are a lot higher than his business model forecasts predicted. But damn does he work his ass off!
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
we have seen a number of top businesses start to hoard cash - the best example of which would be Apple, which is sitting on over $200 Billion.
When a normal person uses the word "cash" they are referring to actual currency, such as coins and paper bills. That is NOT what Apple and other corporations are accumulating. Their "cash" is actually bonds ... which are an investment. So the problem is not that they are "hoarding cash", but that they are investing outside America (because of our idiotic tax laws).
We can hope that automation starts to open up new markets like technological advances of the past did, but we should prepare for the possibility that it won't.
That may be a problem in the future, but it not a problem today. We have a mostly full-employment economy. Although people replaced by kiosks may need to move and/or retrain, there are plenty of jobs available.
there is plenty of neglected infrastructure that we as a country could start training and paying people to repair.
Anything would be better than working as a "wetware-kiosk" that adds no value.
Chefs have always been prima donas, which is why owners keep them in the kitchen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Brutal repression happens in those places because the wealthy there are an exclusive group. They maintain their status by actively preventing others from becoming wealthy, thus others cannot join their group and dilute their economic power (as a percentage of the country's economy). They maintain their big fish in a little pond status by making sure the pond stays small. A side-effect of this repression is that it keeps the average citizen stuck in poverty. This repression results in the average GDP per capita in those countries (a measure of each person's productivity) being mired down around $10k/yr (Mexico = $10,300/yr, Brazil = $11,200/yr).. The wealthy there won't allow it to go any higher. And because they control most of the wealth, most of the economic activity in those countries is wealthy people buying and selling to each other.
It can't happen in the U.S. because the wealthy here haven't been an exclusive group for a long time. Most people in the U.S. lead fully productive lives (by modern standards - $53k/yr GDP per capita). Consequently, most of the economic activity in the U.S. is from average (and even low) income people buying stuff. If you look at the IRS income tax statistics, a full 44% of gross individual income goes to people making less than $100k/yr. 68% by people making less than $200k/yr. If you say "the wealthy" comprises anyone making over $1 million/yr, they account for less than 10% of U.S. income.
This means that in order for those U.S. millionaires (and billionaries) to stay millionaires, people with lower income must maintain their income so they can continue to buy the stuff that the millionaires are selling. If everyone but the millionaires in Mexico and Brazil lost their jobs, it wouldn't affect most of those millionaires' incomes since they're mostly selling to each other. If everyone but the millionaires in the U.S. lost their jobs, the millionaires would panic because 90% of their income comes from selling to those now-unemployed people.
If the U.S. were to fall into brutal repression like Central and South America with widescale loss of jobs, it would result in about an 80% reduction in GDP per capita, meaning those millionaires would lose about 80% of their income. They don't want that. They want to see the lower and middle classes continue to make decent incomes almost as much as the lower and middle classes do. If widescale job losses were to begin among the middle and lower classes in the U.S., the wealthy would start to panic as the loss of customers affected their bottom lines. And you'd see all income classes in the U.S. working together to figure out ways to get those people employed again.
You can see the same thing if you compare GDP (PPP) per capita - the mean - vs the median income. The mean spreads the income of the wealthy across all citizens, while the median tells you how much income the 50th percentile citizen is making. The ratio of the two gives you a sense how much the economy is skewed towards the wealthy. For the U.S., these numbers are a mean of $56,115.7 vs a median of $30,960. A 1.81 ratio. For Mexico it's $16,988.4* mean vs $5,160 median, a 3.29 ratio, indicating a much larger share of each worker's productivity is diverted into income for the wealthy. (And for comparison, since everyone seems to like comparing the U.S. with the Scandinavian countries, the ratios for Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Demark are 1.63, 1.79, 1.72, and 1.77.)
* (Yes $16,988.4 is different from $10,300. Difference between nominal and PPP GDP.)