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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."
... automated post.
after going to japan where many of the major chains had at-table ordering device of some sort and no tips, i cant go back
Unskilled labor is going to mostly disappear except for those tasks where it just isn't possible to automate. A "livable" wage for a task that can be done by a machine is a pipe dream. That's just reality. All the kicking and screaming and class warfare rhetoric isn't going to change it or delay the outcome.
So to that I say, please do go ahead and keep raising the minimum wage. That may actually accelerate the process. The displaced workers will either skill up or you'll see a reverse migration to places where the cost of living and level of automation will make it possible for unskilled workers to survive.
In the restaurants I've seen, the kiosk spits out a receipt that you can use to pick up your meal at the counter. If there's a problem, it can be resolved there.
The same as ever - the human employee you deal with today you have to go around to get to the single manager in the place, and in the robot world there may still be a single human 'manager' running the place.
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.
All these people whining about minimum wage increases causing more automation like it's a bad thing. You've all got it backwards. Human labor has been undervalued, so nobody bothered to put effort into being more efficient. If anything, this suggests that we need to raise wages globally so we'll actually quit wasting so much human effort.
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If someone wins the lottery you say 'wow good for them! All their needs are met!' But if someone were to work for 1 hour and meet all their needs for a whole week, suddenly this is 'wrong'? Or, conversely, someone works for one hour and their needs are met for a whole week and you say 'they deserve it'? Our goal as people should be to improve our lot, and toss aside ideas that hamper us from improving our lot. This applies to people who get all sanctimonious about 'living wage' (as determined by a bureaucrat in Washington D.C.) as well as someone who idolizes a billionaire...
Minimum wage has only in some cities, it is absolute 100% crap that this has anything to do with the minimum wage. With the current administration there is 0% chance the federal minimum wage will go up.
Sure businesses would like to use this as an argument against higher wages but they will 100% do this because it saves money *now*. Not as a hedge against some future increase. Businesses don't spend money unless it makes sense to do so, and in this case they believe this is the best choice.
Libertarians would have us live in a dog-eat-dog society. They ignore the rule of law that allows them their freedom. And they'd like everyone armed to the teeth to defend their property.
They'd like everyone to have the right to be bankrupted due to medical issues. Social Security and Medicare keep Grandma off the Libertarians' front lawns. In Ayn Rand's world, airlines could allow for a certain number of plane crashes a year consistent with their profit margins due to customers deciding not to fly and employees finding alternate jobs. Smog and pollution would exist only up to a threshold number of deaths due to pollution. Mercury would not be a controlled pollutant; if you ingest too much, it be your own fault. What? You didn't know you were eating it in that seafood? How come you didn't pull out your home chemistry kit and do your own testing?
What Libertarians do not get is statistics. If you ignore statistics, then you get the every doofus for himself mentality. If you pay attention to statistics, a lot of government programs make sense.
What they need is an app so you can prepare your order on your phone with a quick pick menu that consists of things you've ordered before.
What Libertarians do not get is statistics.
Just taking a good look at the Prisoner's Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons should be enough to understand that you need government programs to enforce cooperation for the benefit of all.
Libertarians tend to weigh everything in monetary terms, and tend to overvalue the contributions of people with higher wages, which allows them to dehumanize low wage earners.
As a libertarian, I value freedom and liberty. I think you have a fundamental right to live your life free from outside meddling to the greatest extent possible.
When I talk about choices, it's easy to talk about possible outcomes in terms of dollars. But that's not the only important measure. Individual happiness and satisfaction are the real end goals. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and I'd prefer you let me make my own decisions about that, thank you very much.
My experience lo these many years shows that increasing liberty and trusting people tends to lead to greater happiness, serenity, and wealth for the most people. Meddling seems very frequently to be motivated by moral/ethical judgement, paternalism, tribalism, fear, and greed. At this point, I just don't trust anyone who's saying they need to butt in for someone else's good. I'm always looking for their ulterior motive and too often, I find one.
Since we live in an imperfect world of scarcity, it seems inevitable there will be those who aren't happy and aren't wealthy, for many reasons. As someone who likes to think of himself as caring and compassionate (and I know I'm fooling myself), I get great fulfillment helping those people out.
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.
In the restaurants I've seen, the kiosk spits out a receipt that you can use to pick up your meal at the counter. If there's a problem, it can be resolved there.
Probably because that's the way it's built already and this is a trial. If they're doing away with the ordering and that's a success I'm sure they'll put it in vending machine style cubes, you get an order reference number and it'll light up, scan the receipt and collect your tray/doggie bag/burger. In fact if this is the standard production line you could just do it in an app, just grab a seat and punch in your order. Or if you know there's free seats or it's to go you could even order it on the way over to pick it up. For the foreseeable future there'll probably be some kind of customer service rep there, but that's more the complaints department.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If someone wins the lottery you say 'wow good for them! All their needs are met!' But if someone were to work for 1 hour and meet all their needs for a whole week, suddenly this is 'wrong'?
Of course it's wrong. When you look at the lottery winner, you're forgetting about the 10 million or so other people who bought a ticket and lost. There's no free ride. The lottery company made a profit. The winner keeps a bit of money. And all the losers paid for it.
Hey don't get me wrong I would love to live in a world where I could meet all my needs by working 1 hour per week. However it doesn't work that way. Perhaps one day, when automation has reached a point where everything basically runs itself and all people need to do is a bit of tweaking here and there. But not yet.
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yet fast food prices keep going up and up and portions keep getting smaller and smaller
And yet people keep getting fatter and fatter. You'd think that lower wages, higher prices and smaller portions would lead to the opposite.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Good. Robots don't spit in your food. Or worse.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Humans are far too smart, innovative, aspiring and complex
You need to meet more humans.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How terrible! We should stamp out morals and ethics right away.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Iin places like Australia they pay $14+ per hour to fast food workers, and somehow the price of a value meal is the same there as it is here.
It's kinda sad, IMO, that this has to explained. Even once.
It's actually kinda sad that it has to be explained -- even once -- that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The reality behind your misleading statistic has been well understood for years now:
To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald's struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they'd make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia's Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country's fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald's relies heavily on young workers in Australia.
The next time I go to one of these food establishments, I'm going to do my bit: I'll use the kiosk to order some Soylent Green.
Funny thing, they're putting in robots even in places that did not change the minimum wage. Almost as if the decision has nothing to do with increasing the minimum wage.
Nah, Tragedy of the commons is a red-herring.
The simple (simplistic) answer, including the Libertarian one, is to not have a commons. That is - everything privately owned.
Of course in the real world this would leave to massive inequality and unchecked externalities, resulting in extensive pollution and death on a huge scale. Huge!
The real issues are more complex, and mostly have to do with externalities. Using a court system to manage these as opposed to legislation and regulation is the stock Libertarian answer. However all that does is shift regulatory and legislative capture to judicial corruption.
TLDR: Real life, in particular dealing with externalities, is very complex and requires multiple trade-offs.
No I don't think so. When you go to a restaurant part of what you're paying for is the service you can't get at home. Creating a full robot-based restaurant isn't really why people go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant.
And for that, I'd go to a real restaurant where the chef prepares a full course for you (like this French restaurant which my wife and visit everytime we go to Tokyo), not the Olive Garden or Cheesecake Factor or Red Lobster or whatever.
For that, shit man, give me a tablet and let me pick and choose (which as the OP said, most restaurants in Japan have it.)
I tend to agree; my wife and kid like Chili's (see what I gotta work with?!?!); but the kiosk idea is acceptable. Our server comes and takes our initial order, if my blood alcohol level drops below the "Ohhhhhh this is great food! Better than I can make level" I simply order a new alcoholic beverage and my server or someone else on staff drops it off. Yes I am a food geek snob :)
At the higher end of the dining out experience, where there is a chef and not just a "cook" and those eateries that actually require a certain level of personal attire to be seated, the experience tends to be different, which is why it is called "fine dining". The chains and lower scale eateries have never attempted to emulate this model despite the advertising hype and why would they? They are selling price point to your average customer, they are selling a laid back attire so that if you are out and about, out of town, don't feel like preparing a meal at home, or want to hang out with family and friends for a gathering where someone else takes care of the mess.
Also at the lower scale, being able to swipe your card and pay your bill is awesome!
Now this is an example of an economic and social issue that our countries are going to have to deal with. More jobs are going to be replaced by automation at every level in society. Computers simply are better at paying utilities, vendors, predictive analytics and so much more than humans. How we deal with people not working and being able to live should be one of humanities top priorities.
is brutal repression of those people. That's what's going on in Mexico & South America. But good job making yourself feel better by suggesting the problem will naturally and painlessly take care of itself. The best part? There's an excellent chance you'll get caught up in that repression too as the government expands it's powers to do nastier and nastier things to it's citizens in the name of keeping order.
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I called that damn robot a tin can of malfunctioning sprockets and he motor oiled into my pizza.
As a libertarian, I value freedom and liberty. I think you have a fundamental right to live your life free from outside meddling to the greatest extent possible.
Individual happiness and satisfaction are the real end goals. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and I'd prefer you let me make my own decisions about that, thank you very much.
Sure, but an independent (for lack of a better word) arbiter, like the government, is needed to ensure that one's freedom, liberty, happiness and satisfaction doesn't unfairly usurp another's. Even your own decisions about your own affairs can have external affects. Perhaps government is required for the cooperative iberty of all it's people.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yes! People in contrived situations frequently need contrived answers. They should teach young people how to avoid being a character in a simplistic parable.
Well, look. If you keep them around, you get poorly taken orders and poorly prepared meals. They get a wage. You get inconsistent, often poor, meals that may or may not be exactly what you ordered. You aren't grateful to them or particularly appreciative of what they do.
If you let them go off and exist on welfare, they still get a wage. But you get a properly taken order, and a meal cooked in a consistent manner, minus spit and incompetence.
Now I ask you -- where is the difference that concerns you? These are people you don't care about anyway. Why not let them sit at home on the dole? Your life is clearly better if that's the case.
Me, I don't want them to starve, even though I don't particularly appreciate the (cough) skills they bring to the table and the kitchen; but I'd prefer -- by far -- to be delivered the meal I asked for at some consistently acceptable level of quality. And I really don't care if the government sends them a check or not.
I simply don't have the urge to tell other people what they must do to have "worthwhile" lives. But I know my life is more worthwhile if my meals are higher quality.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can you provide an actual statistical analysis of your conclusion
Are you serious? Do you also need "statistical analysis" that the earth isn't flat? Look at any measure of economic freedom, such as the Ease of Doing Business Index, which measures the burden of government regulation and corruption. The top ten are: New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Norway, United Kingdom, United States, and Sweden. These are all prosperous countries. The bottom ten are: Haiti, Angola, Afghanistan, Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Venezuela, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia. These countries are, economically and politically, the worst of the worst.
If you look at measures of social tolerance, and rule of law, such as the Human Freedom Index, you see the same pattern. Free countries are prosperous. Repressive countries are dirt poor.
Clearly we need regulation for things that have no market solution, such as pollution and enforcing contracts, but if you build a system where the government is "picking winners", handing out subsidies and tax breaks, controlling prices, and building "national champions", then you are going to end up with a corrupt and inefficient system.
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
"Enforce" being the key word there of-course. Obviously you believe that the 'benefit of all' can be achieved by enforcement, by taking the individual rights away and by putting the collective above the individual. I disagree that the collective has any precedence over an individual.
One single person being oppressed at the behest of some collectivist 'good' is the death of all individuals. Without individuals having rights not to be oppressed by the collective the individuals have the moral responsibility to completely deny the collective and to destroy it.
Of-course this goes directly against one of my previous post where I explained what systems are and what laws guide systems, however there is no contradiction here. The systems want to survive and they are much better at surviving by fighting individuals than individuals are at fighting the systems to protect their own rights against those systems, so it seems to be a fools errand at first glance.
However I did state there as well that if the fundamentals that the systems are basing themselves on are flawed, then by pushing forward based on the flawed fundamentals, the systems will eventually self destruct and AFAIC the fundamentals here are flawed.
It is Individuals who have rights, collectives do not. Collectives have entitlements that the individuals grant them, individuals have the rights not to be oppressed by the collectives, I mentioned it here many times and I will repeat it again. Individual rights are the protections against the collective oppression, collectivist 'rights' are entitlements that require destruction of individual rights. There is no way around this and thus the fundamental ideology of collectivism will always be long term wrong in a number of ways, morally, economically, societally. Destruction of collectivist societies who place themselves above the rights of the individuals is imminent and inevitable.
You can't handle the truth.
Oh, please. A kiosk in a fast-food restaurant operates what, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year? That's 4,380 hours per year. If they only last for a year and cost as much as $20K to install and operate for that year, they're cheaper than someone making $5/hr. Automation was inevitable regardless of wages.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
True, history shows that private industry is corrupt, will break and bend whatever rules it can, and acts against the interests of society. Lack of an arbiter like the government leads to monopolies, low wages, child labor, unsafe workplaces, and so forth.
The problem is that governments are just as prone to corruption (and democide...more people are killed by their own governments than in wars) and worse, and they have a monopoly on the use of violence. There are the same ratios of 'good' and 'bad' people in both government and the private sector. Government and those in it are not any better than corporations and those in the private sector. In fact, I would argue government is far worse.
Walmart isn't going to send a SWAT team to raid my house and shoot my dog because I embarrassed them on twitter or released politically-damaging information I legally obtained and possessed.
When it comes right down to it, it is the people that must take their responsibility seriously to make certain neither government nor business/industry get too powerful (or become indistinguishable from each other per the direction that the current US trend seems to be headed).
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
You're attacking socialism using the word "collectivism" to bring in shades of Stalin/Mao (which everyone fears) so you can side step the issue I raised, which is that if you abandon the unskilled to their fate you'll get dragged down with them one way or another. So I'll be a little more blunt here: Yes or no: when the unskilled become useless are you OK with them starving to death to avoid "stealing" from the skilled? If the answer is 'no' you better figure out some way to get them food/shelter/healthcare/etc. And "making them skilled" is not an answer. If anyone could just become skilled they'd do it. They're unskilled for reasons. Now, if you've got a magic ray or something that makes the unskilled skilled, well, congratulations, you've just flooded the market with skilled labor and learned magic at the same time...
Oh, and you're also assuming that supporting a decent standard of living for the unskilled is morally wrong. In a post scarcity economy it's pretty obvious that's not true. The only thing that you're "stealing" is the power to control people by controlling their access to food/shelter/healthcare/etc. It's kind of an oxymoron that way. Redistributing wealth creates more freedom as the ruling class uses the carrot & stick of survival they've been beating the ruling class with so long.
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How terrible! We should stamp out morals and ethics right away.
What I meant was more along the lines of "I think X is bad. Ban it!" where X is in "dancing", "drinking", "women voting", "pacifism", "homosexuality", "women's voting rights", and so on.
Morals and ethics are a find thing. They're the only thing which makes society work. Just let's please agree where yours end, mine begin, and what are the ones we agree on.
Most libertarians I know believe in the sanctity of contracts and support having a government civil court system to enforce those contracts. Of course, there are many different flavors of libertarians and some do believe in anarchy with no laws but I don't believe that is the majority.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading