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McDonald's Hits All-Time High As Wall Street Cheers Replacement of Cashiers With Kiosks (cnbc.com)
McDonald's is expected to increase its sales via new digital ordering kiosks that will replace cashiers in 2,500 restaurants. As a result, the company's shares hit an all-time high, rallying 26 percent this year through Monday. CNBC reports: Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald's calls "Experience of the Future," includes digital ordering kiosks that will be offered in 2,500 restaurants by the end of the year and table delivery. "MCD is cultivating a digital platform through mobile ordering and Experience of the Future (EOTF), an in-store technological overhaul most conspicuous through kiosk ordering and table delivery," Charles wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. "Our analysis suggests efforts should bear fruit in 2018 with a combined 130 bps [basis points] contribution to U.S. comps [comparable sales]." He raised his 2018 U.S. same store sales growth estimate for the fast-food chain to 3 percent from 2 percent.
Seriously, this^
Wall street is the only part of the country that would cheer the loss of jobs.
Ontario has a $15 minimum wage coming in. Last time I was at Starbucks, all the employees were panicking they're going to lose their jobs.
Then we could get rid of all the tellers at banks!
Someone should make this.
Personal service (and food presentation/quality) can certainly be a large part of why people go out to eat and drink - at proper restaurants.
At fast food (aka "gimme my awful, disgusting tasting, but dirt cheap burger right now!") - not so much.
We've had the kiosks in Canadian McDonald's for at least a year now and:
- It's a much nicer way to order, no lines and no shouting to be heard
- No worries that the clerk screws up your order
- There doesn't seem to be less staff behind the counter, just more of them filling orders rather than taking them
Overall, it works well enough that we prefer going to McDonald's.
When it comes to dining payment technology, it seems like Canada is light years away (as well as well into the future) than the US. Payment is made at the table with chip reading cards that take debit or credit and we have had the McDonald's kiosks and Canada's economy hasn't collapsed.
Yet when these things are talked about in the US, it seems like they are job killing ideas coming from the devil himself.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
look up the performance of the test stores and see that they've actually hired MORE people due to the increased workload.
This is analogous to the way that ATMs increased jobs for human tellers.
Increased efficiency leading to greater demand is known as Jevon's Paradox. It is one more reason why zero-sum reasoning about economic issues is almost always wrong.
..and if the day comes when only a small percentage of the population is fit to task for the remaining jobs?
As jobs are automated, their cost of production drops, meaning money is freed up to spend or invest elsewhere in the economy. This means that not only is there no net loss of jobs, the additional production means that the same income can buy more goods and services. I know that this is hard for some people to believe, but higher productivity and more affordable prices do NOT cause poverty.
If automation caused poverty, then America, Europe, and Japan would be starving, while countries that avoided the "folly of efficiency" such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Afghanistan would be rich and prosperous.
Who are these companies going to sell to?
Just for the sake of argument, let's say that "this time is different", and greater productivity really does lead to mass poverty. Then when the rich refuse to hire the poor, the poor could just MAKE STUFF FOR EACH OTHER. Since grocery store pies will only be available to the rich, I can grow apples in my backyard, and barter with my neighbor who can make them into pies in her kitchen. Perhaps we could even use little metal or paper tokens as a medium of exchange to facilitate these transactions.
We could just build a parallel economy. But the difference is that the rich will use automation, while we will do everything manually. But the joke will be one them, because in this alternative universe, automation CAUSES POVERTY, so soon we will be rich while their efficient production will lead them to the poorhouse! HA HA HA!!!