Slashdot Mirror
After Automating Order-Taking, Fast Food Chains Had to Hire More Workers (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic:
Blaine Hurst, the CEO and president of Panera, told me that because of its new [self-service] kiosks, and an app that allows online ordering, the chain is now processing more orders overall, which means it needs more total workers to fulfill customer demand. Starbucks patrons who use the chain's app return more frequently than those who don't, the company has said, and the greater efficiency that online ordering allows has boosted sales at busy stores during peak hours. Starbucks employed 8 percent more people in the U.S. in 2016 than it did in 2015, the year it launched the app...
James Bessen, an economist at Boston University School of Law, found that as the number of ATMs in America increased fivefold from 1990 to 2010, the number of bank tellers also grew. Bessen believes that ATMs drove demand for consumer banking: No longer constrained by a branch's limited hours, consumers used banking services more frequently, and people who were unbanked opened accounts to take advantage of the new technology. Although each branch employed fewer tellers, banks added more branches, so the number of tellers grew overall. And as machines took over many basic cash-handling tasks, the nature of the tellers' job changed. They were now tasked with talking to customers about products -- a certificate of deposit, an auto loan -- which in turn made them more valuable to their employers. "It's not clear that automation in the restaurant industry will lead to job losses," Bessen told me.
James Bessen, an economist at Boston University School of Law, found that as the number of ATMs in America increased fivefold from 1990 to 2010, the number of bank tellers also grew. Bessen believes that ATMs drove demand for consumer banking: No longer constrained by a branch's limited hours, consumers used banking services more frequently, and people who were unbanked opened accounts to take advantage of the new technology. Although each branch employed fewer tellers, banks added more branches, so the number of tellers grew overall. And as machines took over many basic cash-handling tasks, the nature of the tellers' job changed. They were now tasked with talking to customers about products -- a certificate of deposit, an auto loan -- which in turn made them more valuable to their employers. "It's not clear that automation in the restaurant industry will lead to job losses," Bessen told me.
"Starbucks employed 8 percent more people in the U.S. in 2016 than it did in 2015, the year it launched the app..."
Employees per store is the only valid statistic to support their contention. Otherwise, it's factoring in new employees in new stores.
Jevons Paradox, which has been around since the 1800s, says that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more demand there will be for it. Thus, the more efficiently human labor is used, the more demand there will be for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If this is meant to say that "automation creates jobs", it is an utter fail. What happens instead is that those that automate get more business, a) showing that automation works and b) accelerating automation and c) job-loss in late-comers to automation will be even larger.
Are people really too stupid to see this? Because it is blatantly obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...more valuable to their employers... who, of course, pay them a higher wage commensurate with that increased value. Right?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I used to hate going to starbucks because it took 5-10 minutes of waiting in line just to order a cup of drip coffee. My time is too valuable to piss it away doing something like standing around. Now i place my order from my phone as i am rolling out of the drive way in the morning. 7-9 minutes later when i get there it's on the counter with my name on it. They didn't need a person to take my order and no one had to wait. This is the what innovation is all about folks. On a side note, when i go into starbucks to get my drink now, there normally isn't even a person working the register. Everyone is making drinks for mobile orders and the drive thru. Much more value added use of resources.
Scott
But handling more orders means that others handle less orders, because there's only a limited amount of customers. When those workers go away, it's not a net win in amount of workers for the restaurant industry. It will likely be an overall loss for the industry, because the restaurant workers now laid off elsewhere and their families will have less money to spend at restaurants.
The summary to me read "Increases demand, increases demand, increases demand" and ended with either a stupid joke or disingenuous propaganda
I doubt many people take away that the important bit here is there will maybe somehow be more need for coffee artists. The interesting part is that demand goes up from robots.
A more interesting, accurate conclusion would be "Evidently, people DON'T get coffee at Starbucks or food at McDonald's to talk to employees! WE ACTUALLY ALL HATE INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE IN THAT CONTEXT! WHO KNEW BESIDES EVERY SANE HUMAN BEING!?!"
Do you remember when the industrial revolution first started and power looms and such were invented. Suddenly people could make socks in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take to knit a pair. Unfortunately they made so many socks that all sock makers went completely out of business due to limited customers and to topi it all off their lost wages lead to a complete collapse of the economy in England.
Wait, that didn't actually happen. Instead people bought more socks than ever before because people had long wanted more socks than were capable of being produced. Just like hundreds of years ago with socks, what happens when you increase productivity and you can create more of something, consumptions tends to increase because people wanted more, just not at the previous price. People will keep on wanting more shit even as we find ways of making it ever more quickly and at lower costs and probably will until we find some way to alter our brain chemistry.
Wait, that didn't actually happen. Instead people bought more socks than ever before because people had long wanted more socks than were capable of being produced. Just like hundreds of years ago with socks, what happens when you increase productivity and you can create more of something, consumptions tends to increase because people wanted more, just not at the previous price. People will keep on wanting more shit even as we find ways of making it ever more quickly and at lower costs and probably will until we find some way to alter our brain chemistry.
I'm sorry, but that's the manufacturing industry, which operates on a different basis than the service industry. It certainly doesn't hold true for the restaurant industry, because there is only so much people can eat (Americans being evidence to the contrary). You can't sell people five dinners a day, even if you can ramp up production to make it affordable.
I'm sorry, but that's the manufacturing industry, which operates on a different basis than the service industry. It certainly doesn't hold true for the restaurant industry, because there is only so much people can eat (Americans being evidence to the contrary). You can't sell people five dinners a day, even if you can ramp up production to make it affordable.
Yes, you can only eat so much at a given meal but it still holds for the restaurant industry. In the not so distant past, eating at a restaurant was a treat. Now, many people eat out multiple times a week but even today very few people consume the majority of their meals at restaurants. Some of this is time constraints and some of this is price. Call ahead ordering can reduce both.
As a customer I'm also able to pick what I really want without the stupid assumption that I want fries and ice in my soda.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
McDonald's corporate is apparently putting a brutal amount of pressure on franchisees to force customers to use the "self serve" kiosks they've force all the stores to install (and considerable expense), and they apparently measure what percentage of sales are rung up on those kiosks.
One local McDonald's just stopped manning the registers as much, and the service there sucks donkey balls. The other one, clever bastards that they are, simply station a cashier at the kiosk and use it as a cash register. They even had somebody build a little wheeled cart for drink cups. The only difference between that and the other registers is that they don't take cash there - you have to go to the regular counter register to pay.
No difference to the customers, no difference to the employees, corporate is happy, it's win/win/win.
Be careful what you measure, because that's what you'll get.
How is there a limited amount of customers? If I could get my orders faster I would go more often.
It certainly doesn't hold true for the restaurant industry, because there is only so much people can eat
On average, Americans eat out 4.2 times per week. That is 20% of the 21 meals. There is huge potential for growth.
In some cultures, eating out is so common that apartments often have no kitchen.
You can convince a lot of people to never make their own food at home again. And you can sell them progressively more useless food -- say, $5 colored water -- on the basis of convenience and marketing.
This space intentionally left blank
Even McDonalds doesn't put fries in soda. You need to go to a better class of restaurant.
No, it most certainly isn't.
Order-taking is half the interface with the customer. In many restaurants, it involves the customer waiting to have their order taken. Automating this part of the process provides a real feeling of getting things going much faster than waiting in line or at a table without having yet gotten anything done. Then there's the issue of the order-taker having gotten the order right.
For example, McDonalds curbside / online ordering allows you to "favorite" items you like to order, including custom variations like no mustard, extra pickles, etc. This further streamlines the ordering process, reduces errors, and (of course) pleases customers. You can also have the order ready to go, drive up to the curbside slot, and send it immediately, further reducing friction.
Reducing friction — or even apparently reducing friction — at this juncture tends to lead directly to higher customer satisfaction. That in turn leads to more sales.
Right now, that leads to more work. That won't last, because all of these jobs will eventually be automated away. The kind of automation we're talking about here isn't the kind of automation that is the real concern. This phase of the process has simply changed from the employee driving it to the customer driving it: they moved the interface to the customer in a way that actually works and makes them happier.
As the actual food delivery to the store, inventory management, prep, delivery, cleaning and maintenance fall to automation, that is when you'll see human employment in these restaurants fall. We're simply not there yet.
Best not to confuse the one process with the other.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The change here is that fast food restaurants are transitioning from a âoeserviceâ industry to a âoemanufacturingâ business in order to satisfy the large increase of orders.
What I find interesting is how it affected banks. ATMâ(TM)s have replaced many tellers for the mundain tasks of handling cash deposits and withdrawals. But, banks are shifting towards providing other services and products that can, for now, be handled by a person.
Given time, Facial and expression recognition, voice recognition, and AI, that may change. But, for now, people still prefer to deal with a smiling and interactive human when dealing with banking issues and questions.
And History isn't on your side of this debate.
History is absolutely on my side of this debate.
First off, when you look back on hundreds of years of history it is easy to think 20 years passed by in a blink of an eye, but if you are living through times of massive change that can be an entire generation lost during times of progress. Even if more jobs are created than destroyed, if history repeats itself you will have tens of millions of people who will never catch up.
Second, humans have always found a way to stay useful in the economy regardless of technological advances so far. The same would have been said of horses in 1900. In the 1900's humans kept up with technology by going to college in record numbers. We went from under 5% being college educated to over 30%. But we are already hitting a limit of how educated the entire populace can get. College currently has a negative return on investment for a third of those with degrees. We are hitting a limit on how useful the median citizen can be in the modern economy.
It is possible that machine and human integration will provide to humans in this century what a college education provided last century. But that is far from certain. The only thing that is certain is the middle class stagnation over the past 50 years is almost entirely caused by technological advances and this type of change has a habit of following an exponential curve. Soon it will be 40 year old's who are as out of touch with new technology as 65 year old's are today.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"If you make 150$/hr, and it takes you 4 hours to shop, travel, prep and package your week of food, you cost yourself $600 on top of your grocery prices."
Often quoted, but never holds in real life. It doesn't matter if you make $10/hr or $50/hr or $150/hr. What matters is whether or not someone will pay you that amount for that period of time.
A lot of people have jobs with salaries, and "saving" four hours by not cooking doesn't "cost" me $600, since my company isn't going to pay me more money for that time anyway.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You need to be a family of 5 before you save any money from buying in bulk. A single person will pay through the nose if they make their own food 100% of the time, due to being unable to balance spoilage with buying in bulk. Pick one food you like to make, and make only that, everything else, go out to eat if you want some food variety in your life.
Nah... If you want to believe that, go ahead. But you state a lot of information that is not true for me. If you are curious, below is what I do and a few reasons why I choose this method.
in 2013, my groceries (single man) was 3066.10 buying from the normal super market a bit each weekend and my restaurant expenses for the year was 1627.07. Total is 4693.17
in 2015, using Costco, my grocery expenses were 1984.32 and my restaurant expenses for the year was 872.44. Total is 2856.76.
I go to Costo less than once a month. My normal trip is $200+. I buy mostly frozen, dry, and canned foods. On the weekend or perhaps Monday evening, I cook up a "dinner". I will often gnaw on this two or three times during the week but also supplement it with things I have cooked the previous weeks and froze. A classic example of this is lasagna. You can make it and freeze it just fine. Come home and in three to five minutes you have a meal that is better than restaurant quality. If you cycle through five to eight things over a two or three month period, you get a fairly wide variety.
Breakfast is usually coffee and something lite: protein bar, trail mix, muffin, etc. Breakfast for me is weird due to various medical issues. If I wanted a full nice breakfast each morning, eggs, toast, etc... I still think cooking at home would come out ahead.
Lunch is usually a home built sandwich or some soup that I either cooked myself or bought from Costco.
Aside from the three main meals, I now have much more snacks like nuts, crackers, health bars -- even chocolate and ice cream.
Most things keep an extremely long time today. I don't have a fancy fridge. Mine is now 26 years old.
Occasionally I go to the normal grocery store to buy some fresh fruit or perhaps milk. But even milk now, the whole organic milk, will last for more than a week. Just check the expiration dates.
Speaking of organic... yea, you can go to the very pricey places and get organic meals but it is far cheaper to buy your own food and cook it. Costco has a lot of organic food -- chicken, beef, bison. Many frozen items are organic. I mention organic only because I've heard folks say that they assume Costco doesn't have any organic food -- but they do.
Rarely do I have something spoil.
As far as time, the trips to Costco I would guess to be 18 hours per year. How much time to you wait in restaurants for your meal? And the cooking part is usually "free". I'm watching a movie or piddling around the house and can cook things as I piddle and play. So, the time argument is not balanced. You do not account for the time you spend at the restaurants. Your time eating is fully wasted just on eating while I can work, watch TV, surf the net, etc. I can eat at home and do what I want to do while you are stuck in a chaotic environment for an hour or so of you time for each meal.
Perhaps you prefer being out so you don't consider this time wasted. I use to be this way but at this point, I find I have better things to do than just sit at a restaurant. Yes, you can read a book or you can probably even surf the net on your smart phone or tablet but why not sit in your favorite chair using your favorite devices in the quiet and peacefulness of your own home instead?
You mentioned "make their own food 100% of the time". I'm not 100% of the time but I'm getting closer and closer to that each year. Restaurants today are just noisy ugly places to me with food that I don't really want.
You mentioned cold cuts. Buy what you want, in bulk. Freeze all of them except what you will eat for that week. They