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Jack In the Box CEO Says 'It Just Makes Sense' To Replace Workers With Robots (grubstreet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Grub Street: Per Business Insider, Jack in the Box CEO Leonard Comma told an industry crowd that "it just makes sense" to swap cashiers for inanimate machines in the year 2018. Not because he thinks 2018 will be the year that fast food gets technologized so much as it's the year that Jack in the Box's home state of California increases the minimum wage to $11. In fact, wage bumps hit 18 states this year, with California on pace to become the first $15-wage state in coming years -- a prospect that terrifies industry executives. Jack in the Box has flirted with the idea of installing automated kiosks before. As early as 2009, it tested them out, and apparently found that they increase store efficiency and average check totals -- not bad at all if money's your bottom line. But according to Comma, the chain's executives balked because the upfront cost of converting from people to machines was still too great. What a difference a dollar an hour apparently makes: He told the crowd that with "the rising costs of labor," it's time to start thinking about automating restaurants.
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you attempt to socially engineer a solution that violates the rules of business, in this case, artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value. One hundred percent entirely predictable, and predicted.
Maybe if we just started replacing managers with AI, the real workers could do things without worrying about someone breathing down your neck.
Oh wait... http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or, maybe it's the 10 years of advancing robotics and automation technology that has lowered the pricepoint to one that is acceptable. A decade is a long stretch for tech, and the price per performance is steadily dropping.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
What if workers replaced by machines start stealing food because they are hungry? Security bots?
Didn't we have an article a few months ago that the replacement of low-wage fast food cashiers with kiosks meant instead having to hire higher-wage support personnel for said kiosks?
ok, so i can imagine something like McDonalds automating the food "preparation", since it's basically already "pick up item A, drop on location B, wait for xx time, then drop on location C" type of work, but I don't see machines making my steak-frites in the way a proper chef would prepare them any time soon, or any other proper meal.
They'll be touch screens that everyone smears their dirty fingers all over before eating their food.
They look like human-oil finger paintings.
Guaranteed.
DEY TOOK ER DERP !ç
If you force companies to pay over market for basic non skilled labor they will be motivated to eliminate the need for it.
Which is best? 10 employees at $8 an hour or $15 an hr for 3 workers and $100k for a robot that the three will use?
is that word, "restaurant." Did they call that giant vending machine for cars a dealership?
... who's going to buy the burgers?
If robots are available, less expensive, and acceptable to consumers... the CEO who DOESN'T replace their workers with them is a CEO presiding over a failing company. Because while they're not doing it, others are, and have greater profit margins to work with.
Never try to extort someone for more than the cost to have you killed.
> "...not bad at all if money's your bottom line."
The reason it's called the "bottom line" is because it's a sum of all the lines above it.
If not money, what else would you be summing?
Replacing fast food with home-cooked meals.
Mostly random stuff.
I have a feeling replacing those costly CEOs with robots would be the better option...Just sayin'
"What a difference a dollar an hour apparently makes".
Wiki says this organisation has 2200 locations. I don't know about staffing of fast food restaurants in the US but lets assume that each location employs 5 staff per hour averaged over 24 hours (more during the day but less during the night, more at bigger locations less at smaller locations. Wiki says they employ 22,000 staff which comes to 10 per location but we'll say only half are on front counter to be replaced w/ kiosk). We will also assume that these employees are all at minimum wage, even though realistically they are below this. Each employee gets a pay rise of $1.
5*24 = $120.00 per location per day. 2200 * 120 = $264,000.00. $264,000.00 * 365 = 96,360,000.00. We'll round it up because my assumptions have some error in there. $100M per year. Now remember that's just what employees end up getting. It costs the company more than that, but lets not consider such complexities.
Now lets assume the cost of a kiosk can be amortized over 3 years. That gives you $300M to play with to roll out kiosks to 2,200 locations. That's $135k per location. Assuming you replace each of those 5 staff with a kiosk, that allows you 30k per kiosk.
If they can't put kiosks in for less than $30k each maybe they should hire an R&D team that deserves more than minimum wage. And remember we're only calculating what they could do with the cost of the payrise, which is ~1/15th the employee's total cost.
you could pay them .99 cents/hr and the machine would still be a better deal. The reason it's happening now is cheap, reliable microcontrollers and big, high res touch screens are finally widely available. Software is also a lot better. Most of these run some kind of unix (android/linux/etc). They'll have uptime measured in decades.
10 years ago these systems were too unreliable to replace humans. They ran XP and crashed all the time. Business is all about reliability, repeatably, and low risk. A living wage didn't doom the jobs, better tech did.
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Just bought a copy of "Manna" for kindle, the first few pages are good! http://marshallbrain.com/manna... Fiction is a great way to explore possibilities.
reliability. That's why everyone ignores. Open source means cheap, super reliable software. Tech advancements means the same for hardware. LCDs last for decades now. You can run these off a $20 64 gig compact flash and unlike a hard drive they last decades. Modern touch screens just work, they don't need to be recalibrated as the display ages. And the screens don't fade in a few years as long as you keep 'em out of direct sunlight.
They had these kiosks in the 90s and early 2000s. 80% of the time they were dumped to a BSOD or a command prompt because the software crashed or the hardware failed.
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For automation, outsourcing, and layoffs, thanks to the massive reduction in the corporate tax rate that Trump and the Republicans pushed through.
Corporate boards aren't interested in a CEO who thinks about the welfare of his or her employees. They want big earnings so they can get big dividends and/or stock price appreciation.
How many meals will these new cashiers purchase.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
A touch screen ordering kiosk IS NOT a robot! Very different animal and an order of magnitude easier to implement that the food preparation side. I'm all for this technology though. It'll do wonders for food consistency and order accuracy. The food prep side is not trivial from a mechanical perspective and is likely another decade or two away from real implementation. To do it efficiently requires a lot of special purpose equipment. The kitchens will also need to be laid out differently to allow the proper flow of raw ingredients to finished product. Cleaning all those moving parts isn't trivial either. Not to mention the flexibility to add new menu items and adapt existing equipment. And if even a simple part breaks... well who's going to make the food?
Scott
outside of $100 a plate high end restaurants it's all very, very regimented and repeatable. Got to any cheaper restaurant and you'll find the core of the menu is slabs of meat. That's because any fool can cook it acceptably. And if a fool can do it, so can a machine.
A $30 a plate place would need a few specialized robots and a few dozen programmers to run the chain (and they'll all be chains, since any restaurant with these resources will put the mom & pops out of business). And a $20/plate place? They won't even need the special robots.
A few of these chains might keep one guy around for a bit of custom stuff to spice up the menu. Maybe too. And that guy'll never make more than minimum wage. Heck, he might not even make that if we keep up with this 'gig economy' thing. Because put even 70% of the cooks out of work and the 1% will have so much leverage they can pay subsistence wages. Just like they do in massively overpopulated countries like India & China...
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You'll go to these restaurants because their prices will be lower. You'll need the lower prices because your wages aren't keeping pace with your productivity, meaning your labor is worth less every year. So to keep your head above water you'll shop at anti worker businesses because they'll treat their people like crap and pass a portion (a small one) onto you.
You're not destroying the working class and following your fellow men and women to a new gilded age like lambs to the slaughter, you're saving money, living better...
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Once we've all been automated out of work...who's going to buy the burgers?
Reminds me of this oft-quoted aphorism, about a UAW official being shown some early auto-plant automation:
(Apparently it wasn't really Henry Ford II. But Ruther confirmed the exchange occurred, with a high Ford official and words roughly equivalent.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Literally the first thing that sprang into mind when reading the headline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... If you can't afford to pay your workers, who can afford you product when you are near the bottom rung of services..... Long Live Jack-in-the-box. Meat the new Jack-in-the-box
That's right, just go ahead and sack your customers, I mean workers. Workers don't need to eat right? Get ready for another GFC. Seattle clearly showed that raising the minimum wage to $15 meant more money circulating in the economy. That meant more jobs, more spending, more jobs... What happens when you pay more to people who don't have enough to start with - they spend it. when you give more to people that don't need it they store it away in some off-shore account. I only hope that the CEO gets replaced by a Robot with AI as well. That would be social justice!
a prospect that terrifies industry executives.
I odin't know why you have to paint such an emotional response on this, when to the upper level it's all just numbers. If minimum wage is too high to staff a location, they can simply close down and move elsewhere where labor is cheaper, or as the article notes switch to using automation. Even if they can't move and just have to close, it's just another factor on a spreadsheet and does not "terrify" anyone.
If anyone should be worried it would be teenagers or seniors, minimum wage laws are driving low-requirement jobs away in droves that they would otherwise be able to seek.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those Robot CEOs would come to the same conclusion.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Could the robots make tacos that look like tacos?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
sometimes it doesn't... even if it appear to be cheaper, it might not always be the best solution... sometimes humans like to interact with humans for example... and if you replace all humans with robots, why do you need humans again?
the theory goes that if the rich don't pay people there will be no one to buy things. It ignores what it means to be truly rich. Like, member of the Aristocracy kind of rich. You control all of civilizations wealth. You don't need people to buy things to get more money because you already have all the money. Everybody is falling over themselves to do your bidding because if they don't they starve to death. And the few who rebel get beaten down by your knights (or militarized police if you want to modernize it).
What I'm saying is, don't kid yourself. The rich don't need us. On the other hand, we don't need them either.
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I haven't seen one of those in several decades.
I've heard we can't raise minimum wage because doing so would be devastating to our economy. But then I hear that only teenagers and bored old people work for minimum wage.
So which is it? Are minimum wage employees the bedrock of our economy or a completely superfluous bunch of kids and seniors. They can't be both.
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These machines are only replacing cashiers.
That's 1-3 people (depending on time of day) not 5.
I'd average it at 2 (which is honestly high I'd suspect), so you're 2.5x the amount saved.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It also "just makes sense" to replace most CEOs with someone paid much less. Funny how that doesn't seem to be happening though, no matter how logical it might be.
Make robots pay taxes.
That is all. Discuss.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
How is this different than an ATM? It serves the same function of replacing a person with a kiosk.
Zoid.com
That will change his tune.
...for a head! Maybe he IS actually a robot!
It just makes sense to form co-ops so that WE control the means of production https://medium.com/@PrestoViva...
.. do they buy fast food?
..but will never buy one.
A lot of cheap burgers, which very few can afford.
If Jack in the Box decides not to decide to support the local community, then perhaps the local community should decide not to support Jack in the Box. I know I won't.
Usually when I walk into a fast food restaurant there is exactly one person working the register. If business picks up, a manager will open a second register. Assuming the restaurant is open twelve hours a day for walk-in business, the gross cost of labor is ~48k at 11/hr before payroll taxes for having a cashier up front. Oh, wait, we would still need that cashier up front to assist customers. Whether it's helping the user navigate the UI, or correcting bad orders (customer meant to hit no pickles, not extra pickles), or simply greeting customers, running orders to tables, bussing tables, dealing with jammed cash kiosks, etc. So really the worker was never eliminated - they just became more efficient at their job. I'm sure the business owner (not the corporation! The franchise isn't giving away free kiosks!) would see a return on his investment in a kiosk... Eventually. And don't try to tell me that these kiosks are bullet-proof. The McDonald's down the street from me has one, and it's been down for months now. I guess they can't afford the maintenance cost.
Australia has had decent minimum wage for a long time, McDonalds have added ordering machines, and they are hiring more staff than ever before.
A minimum wage you can live on is not the problem.
Can you spot the PR bullshit in this statement?
No, it's the not the part where replacing people with machines is cheaper and more efficient. Of course it's more efficient, and will get cheaper every year. Indeed it's the cheap shot at the minimum wage rising that's bullshit. They were going to replace cashiers anyway, whether it rose or not. Watch them do it in states with rock bottom minimum wage. But hey, if you can try to repeal minimum wage laws while deflecting potential bad PR from firing people then that's just a double win.
So which is it? Are minimum wage employees the bedrock of our economy or a completely superfluous bunch of kids and seniors. They can't be both.
It is absolutely both. If younger people cannot gain work experience, if older people cannot supplement social security, the whole system is devastated - the earrings potential alone that is lost to the younger generation is staggering.
But beyond that you are ignoring the cost increases that have to pass through businesses always running close to margin - namely restaurants. Any increase will almost always get passed along which means poor people are the worst screwed by the whole thing - they lose jobs they could have worked for some money, but then they cannot even afford to eat. I'm pretty sure you don't mean to screw poor people over, right? You'd be against that I assume?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As "brilliant" as this idea is, so far McDonald's go at robot cashiers is a bust. Rarely used, too slow, and too retarded to accept custom or special orders, unable to give customers their drinks cups, and unable to answer questions about the menu, they stand idle despite the cashiers trying their best under pain of extermination to herd people to them.
Adding that to the electronic speed-read menus, the customer experience is shittier than ordering at a cheap greasepit.
This idea is worse than grocery robot cashiers, which are really awful.
Wow... you are incredibly naive. So much so I'm not sure where to start.
You'll never read this and wouldn't let anything from it if you did so the tl;dr version is:
Millennial child, go to school, get a degree, get a real job. Then you'll understand why your theories about who has what value and does what is completely moronic.
Remember Henry Ford? Yes, him, the inventor of the automobile for the masses. (By no means the inventor of the automobile, of course.)
Henry had a silly idea, which arguably made his automobile a success. He paid his workers sufficiently well that they could afford one of the products they manufactured. For a success any business must have a potential customer base large enough to keep the company going. There is something to be said for keeping lowly, inefficient, organic, and unreliable human beings on the payroll. If there is no customer base the whole mercantile house of cards collapses. If all the fast food stores mechanize, especially the low end stores, how does that affect their customer base? Have they thought far enough ahead to factor this in or the Wall Street demands for every 3 months profit increase blocking vision of a fairly dismal future for us and for these companies?
{^_^}
How many CEO's and managers are left after AI's can do their job. Think of the cost savings to the shareholders.
My only other observation is self service checkouts in supermarkets.
I avoid them like the plague if I have more than 5 ot 6 items, because after that, it's not faster, or more convenient than a cashier. Supermarkets will need to come up with something way better than what they have now, or pay me to do my own checkout.
Hmm
Links, there were supposed to be links and urls and stuff. https://futurism.com/experts-a... I predict that Slashdot post will be replaced by AI yesterday.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
1. We should tie the minimum wage to a maximum wage for executives; this will actually force trickle down economics.
2. Automate fast food; I'm so tired of my orders getting fucked up
if you keep paying people less and less and replace them with robots? All your profit maximizing won't help you, if there isn't anyone to pay for
your products. That is why trickle down does not work. When rich people always get richer, that implies that the money stream goes from poor
too rich. How will that turn around if you give more money to the rich?
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I know a kid who makes about $12 an hour, I told him if he does some Mail in rebates I have from Fry's he can have the rebates when they came in. I think he thought an hour of cutting UPC and filling out forms would was not worth the ~ $50 worth of rebates.
Whereas his younger brother was willing, but not sure he would have gotten it right.
It also just makes sense not to eat at Jack in to box.
It's in the DNA.
It'll never change there.
Dunno about you guys but my local McDonald's did this a few years ago, as have many others.
Massive touchscreens in the foyer, tap and order from the whole menu, then just wait for the guy to bring it out. Hell, it even tells you how many orders are in front of you, etc. and you can make every tiny change imaginable to the ingredients.
Sure, they still have kitchen staff (we're not suggesting automating the kitchens, right? That's just a food-safety nightmare waiting to happen and how do they clean themselves?). But they have JUST kitchen staff, who get a list, put the food on the tray and deal with the cooker alerts etc.
It's much faster and more efficient than any McDonald's I've ever used, you can order while ten people are dithering over what to have, you can even assign a seat and have it brought over to you. And, at the end of the day, it's the same food.
I've said for years that restaurants should do this - even posh ones. Tying up waiting staff with orders, corrections, menus, allergy queries etc. is daft when people are quite capable of doing all that themselves - sometimes before they've even sat down. And then BOTH of you have a cast-iron receipt of what was ordered and how. So long as the food delivered tallies, what does it matter?
"So what's in the sea bass?" "Press ingredients, ma'am".
"Can we split this bill?" "Press split bill, sir."
"Do you have any pork left?" "Only what the menu will let you select, sir".
If Jack-in-the-box have already trialled this I can't understand why they haven't been fitting it to all new stores and starting doing it for refurbishments. There's literally no reason not to, even if you don't replace ALL the staff immediately.
1. We know that fast food workers are under paid, forced to work in unfair working conditions, and that fast food workers are commonly exploited.
2. We know that there are and have been sanitary issues with fast food that comes directly from the element of having exploited human labor creating the product. It's an ongoing joke that you might get your burger or pizza spit in, or worse.
3. Writing software that powers robots that replaces these workers increases the speed of production, creates a more uniform product and eliminates both the worker exploitation and sanitary issues associated with fast food production while providing jobs to coders and engineers.
So what's the issue?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
There is no minimum wage low enough to prevent automation once the machines are reliable.
The minimum wage comments are just a cover for the fact Jack in the Box was going to automate anyway.
One robot maintenance worker making $80k will replace 60 employees making $18k to $22k per year. Prices will not be lowered. The $1.2 million in salary won't enter the local economy and won't be circulating in the local economy available to purchase jack in the box hamburgers.
It's not really JB's fault. It's going to happen everywhere. JB just doesn't see the tragedy of the commons which is coming.
38% of jobs are estimated to go away in under 20 years. New jobs won't be created fast enough.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
God forbid anything cut into that $500,000,000 profit margin. How else would they be able to pay the CEO $20,000,000 a year?
Or most of the OECD for that matter. The "Aristocracy" rich mostly exists in developing countries where they control the vast majority of the wealth. In those countries they're big fish in little ponds, and maintain their status not only by being rich, but by preventing others from becoming rich. The economy of these countries mostly consists of (by volume) the rich selling and buying to/from each other. The GDP per capita in these countries typically stagnates at around $15,000/yr or below.
The U.S., EU, etc. grew past this stage around the 1900s. Henry Ford accidentally stumbled upon this when he discovered that paying his workers above the prevailing wage actually resulted in more business for himself (because his workers could afford to buy the cars he was producing). That's what happens when you (1) put a worker in a productive job, and (2) pay them a fair wage for the productivity they're generating. Basically, when pay your workers less than a fair wage, you make money for yourself, but you stunt the economy. When you pay your workers a fair wage, you spend more money, but the economy blossoms. Usually more than enough to offset the extra money you spent paying your workers.
A market economy *wants* everyone to be as productive as they can, because the feedback effect of that maximizes average income. GDP per capita in these countries is typically $30,000/yr or higher because the vast majority of the population is contributing a meaningful amount of productivity to the economy. Consequently, the vast majority of the rich in these countries are rich from selling things to the middle class (who by population and aggregate income are much bigger than the richest 1%*). If the average income of the middle class decreases in these countries, it ends up hurting the rich too.
* IRS tax stats show that the top 1% only makes about 20% of the income in the U.S. So if they began buying and selling only amongst themselves and replacing everyone else with robots, that would result in about an 80% pay cut for themselves. The bulk of the country's income (73%) is in the $30k-$500k per year wage range, and it's in the best interest of the 1%ers in the U.S. to insure those people continue to have jobs.
The McDonalds where I live have introduced automated kiosks for ordering. You can also still go to the counter and order from a person.
After only 2-3 tries, I have to say: ordering from the kiosks is better. It's faster, and there are no more misunderstandings. You get a number, wait for it to show at the pickup counter, and you're done. The whole operation becomes more efficient, lines are shorter, customers are happier. What's not to like?
If a couple of jobs went lost, well, that's pretty much the story of unskilled employment throughout history. Increases in efficiency through mechanization have been happening for hundreds of years. Meanwhile, jobs have been created for the people who manufacture and maintain the kiosks. If there's a moral to the story, it is: don't be unskilled.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The question is, should we let people keep their jobs but live with below living wages, or make sure that all wages enable decent life while hoping that market will somehow take care of people that will lose their job after minimum wage change.
Obviously both answers are not good enough. We should start planning and preparing to smooth things out when big disruptions happen, but nothing is really being done...
step 1 is eating fast "food"
step 2 is eating fast food prepared by a robot
step 3 is eating shit from the floor
The minimum wage doesn't actually raise anyone’s wage. What it really does is make any jobs lower then the minimum wage illegal. A company then figure out how to do without those jobs if it wants to stay in business.
*Jackass in the box
I love all these automated cashiers, i get a lot of free stuff, you see from the moment you are the sole participant in the process you can make mistakes, and they will all be legit because, you know, you are not a cashier.
No news here.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is, that they won't buy or eat burgers.
So your always going to have low skilled workers. California has the highest number of people on aid already. This might be great for corporation who don't have to provide benefits to low end wage earners. Maybe because robots don't have families, or get sick, or complain. But your going to have more unemployment and your going to have to tax robots to help pay for all that unemployment aid.
Of course it makes sense. They are cheaper, they dont bitch, they done come in late (or not at all). A low wage person is making $15K a year, a single year and most robots pay for themelves
Let’s see how many burgers robots buy.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Where "everyone" really means a little for most, and a lot for the rich.
This is why incomes at the lower tiers are barely subsistence level (and if you consider medical care and decent shelter as included in the definition of subsistence level, then it isn't even that.)
The imbalance is striking, but continuous social engineering has brought the masses around to the mindset that this is generally an okay state of affairs. To change it will require some other major social change as a catalyst.
Pervasive automation might serve, as it is very likely to rather suddenly alter the prospects of a very large number of people in a very short span of time. Getting them to accept that alteration may not be easy, or even possible.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Indeed, robots, even disgruntled ones, won't jack into the box...
What part of "the rich will be the first to be able to afford and emplace comprehensive automation" did you fail to understand before you wrote that?
What they will need - and what they will have - is automation that can both do the jobs at hand, and produce more automation, and repair the automation in place.
The only relevant observation here is that the poor don't really need the rich; the rich, however, will have automated defenses, and so what the poor need or don't need may not be particularly on point.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They could replace the ceo with say Alexa, instant savings!
Get up!
A better idea is to replace the CEO with a robot, think of the huge savings.
Heaven forbid should he consider paying his slaves $11/hr. I think he should remember that JITB is hardly a life necessary business and his workers are part of his customer base, that is till their fired/replaced.
And secondly, if they made glop that was actually edible, and people chose it for quality and taste, JITB could raise the price of a sandwich by a few cents and happily cover the increased labor costs.
The only reason fast food places use employees is that paying humans minimum wage is cheaper than the total cost of ownership of robots that can do the job. Raise the minimum wage and it will make more sense to buy the robots and replace most of the staff with kiosks and robots. It is the return of the automat with robotic food preparation. In fact, it would be cheaper and easier to offer standard fare in an automat style, then computers could monitor sales and stock the automat accordingly as well as monitor for popular variants to add to the automat. Drive through could be done the same way. It would reduce shrinkage too.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The whole point of labor saving devices is to save labor. We shouldn't tax technology that eliminates jobs. Or force businesses to pay more for labor than the market dictates. We should just make sure everyone is taken care of well and tax evenly to cover it. Let us reap the benefits of our labor saving devices. All those cashiers and truck drivers will soon be free to create funny YouTube videos all day while drinking beer and kicking their legs up. That is fine by me. When we automate my job I have some ideas for some metal art I'd like to try. We don't all have to work to eat, but we do all have to eat. So we have to persuade those that do work to feed those who don't.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Because they don't have to come to work, making them very unreliable. Ever been to a Walmart and wondered why they hired someone in their 70s to cashier instead of a young person who could do it 3x as fast? It's because of that 70 year old doesn't show up to work they don't eat.
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Keep up the good work, titty!
As opposed to the European way of making employees so expensive that you have 20% youth unemployment
There is no homogeneous "Europe" with a unified "way", there are no fixed Europe-wide labor costs and there is no meaningful Europe-wide unemployment rate figure.
Most importantly, the tendency is that unemployment in Europe is higher where wages are lower.
And as in every other part of the world, increasing unemployment comes from industry needing less human labor to produce what gets produced. And replacing people by machines is usually just a matter of time, making labor less expensive can only delay the process. When the machine becomes cheaper than the worker, the machine will substitute the worker.
What is the point of having a society that produces more and more things if the bulk of that society falls behind in terms of quality of living. I think there is a general assumption that a society with high productivity will be generally wealthy, but we have already seen that it won't be true as long as the wealthy are given first pick over the spoils.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I wonder how many people who eat at Jack in the box make minimum wage? Perhaps they should start working on robots to consume their product as well: I'm sure a robot would be faster, and cleaner at consuming Jack in the Box product. I envision a 24/7 lights-out Jack in the box automatically making and consuming product at an incredible rate without any human involvement at all. They could even consume the packaging. How awesome would that be?
I wonder what his salary is, and I know that by doing this it would increase. This isn't exactly logic that will appeal to people, and there will almost certainly be lawsuits coming to his wazoo. His foot is already nicely inside of the mouth region.
The same concerns were said about the Industrial Revolution. That was the equivalent of robots back then, and things turned out fine. The newspeak you see in the article is just a smokescreen to protect ultra-high profit margins. Yes, some people will lose their jobs. The solution here is to tax the robots and stop putting billions into non-functioning F-35s, useless wars that murdered a million Iraqis, supporting the genocide in Yemen, etc. This could easily pay for a Universal Basic Income that will allow for people to attain education and learn real skills or tinkering and innovating in their garages and coming up with the next best thing without having to forgo that because they need to hang onto their $9/hr slave wage to get by instead. Yes, for every system there will always be a few shitheads that game it or try to, it is unavoidable no matter what. It would be no different than what we have today, in fact likely even less; you give a person UBI and an opportunity to learn something valuable, they are more likely to succeed than to give them a slave wage at a meaningless job.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Seriously, I would keep cashier's and focus on things like shakes, drinks, fries, simple foods like burger, chicken, etc.
Likewise, I'm amazed that pizza is not fully automated yet. That is one that would allow a start to quickly take out papa John's and dominoes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...there are no Jack In a Box restaurants in my area (Metro Detroit), makes it even easier to not do business with them
they're already campaigning to cut those social programs. That tax cut bill wasn't even signed into law before the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was talking about entitlement 'reform' being needed to stave off the $1.5 trillion hole in the budget it made.
See, that's the option folks always forget: You can just let these people starve. It's what they do in most of the world, and it's what we did for thousands of years. There's no reason we can't go back to it. Sure, there'll be some terrorism and banditry, but if you're rich enough you don't have to live around it, anymore than we do now.
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Costco's doing just fine. So is Quick Trip. Both pay their employees well and treat them well. You don't have to be an ass to be successful. Sure, it helps, but it's not a requirement.
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or the economic equivalent. There are companies like Costco & Quick Trip that treat their employees pretty well, and policies like Single Payer health care and basic income are gaining in popularity (with Single Payer being supported by a majority of voters).
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This is unfortunately inevitable
in the gig economy. It takes time to cook and clean (and if you don't clean you get bugs and get evicted from your rental). I can get in/out of Micky D's in 5 minutes with 2000 calories for $9 bucks. $6 if I eat off the dollar menu.
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England 4.5%. Germany 3.6%. Norway 4.2%. Heck, Czechoslovakia has 3.6%.
Did it ever occur to you that youth unemployment rate is by design? You keep your youth out of the job market and in schools. They don't flood the job market and drop wages. Everyone has a better quality of life and you get an educated workforce who makes intelligent decisions. The only people who 'lose' are the Uber wealthy who can't monopolize all the money for themselves.
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There is a significant benefit to using robots to make the food. Consistency and quality.
I can remember the first time I had a Sourdough Jack in SoCal. The toast and the bacon was crispy and the food was hot. Apparently all of it had just been made. It's rarely been as good since. Soggy toast, severely under-cooked bacon (bacon is SUPPOSED TO BE CRISP, DAMMIT!!!). Robots won't get stoned and not care about the quality of the food. They can be programmed on the fly to make things the way the customers wants them. If you want crispy bacon and crispy fries, you program it that way. If you're someone with zero gastronomic taste and want soggy bacon and lousy fries, there's a button for that.
Larger chains in California can spend the time and money to research and test deployments of these kiosks. But what about smaller restaurants? Do they just go under?
McDonalds owns the LAND and decides everything they want for their serfs. Furthermore, they lease and loan like crazy so they control everything without hardly any risks to themselves. For example, they'll own the cows and the farmer gets shafted with all the problems with their farm plus being held accountable every issue with the cattle they don't own, but are responsible for! Piss off McD and they'll take their cows overnight, if not foreclose on any loans you may have. There are so many schemes and McD explored everything and by now has the best possible exploitation schemes possible (if not lobbied to create new ones-- like how they created a new food grade for beef from what previously was unfit for humans.) then you have the illegal worker problem which they handle like many others by hiring contractors and indirectly forcing them into a corner.
McDonalds doesn't want to put their all serfs out of business in an area; they still control everything.
Furthermore, McDonalds makes a ton running a mutual fund like every really successful biz, it's profits become too great and they end up with an investment fund that can rival their core business. (a more traditional version of this is to buyout other businesses and to "diversify" what the business does-- but it's usually really just an investment.)
Self serve kiosks tend to value add and make humans more requires. Lifeâ(TM)s going to be ok move along nothing to see here just like buggy whips and gas street lighters
Minimum Wage laws exist because you have to set a universal bar for everybody so that there is no race to the bottom. Everybody just raises their prices instead of being put out of business by cheaper competition-- ALL the competition must be forced to the minimum standards as well. Safety regulations are similar as are pollution regulations-- it makes for an even playing field-- fair competition.
Even moral people who will not buy slave labor produced products that are powered by incinerating kittens will do so out of ignorance because Walmart will sell it to them cheaper and who has the time to source the whole supply chain for the increasingly sophisticated products of modern society?? Voting with your money is propaganda; do not be suckered like an idiot. I shouldn't have to explain how ineffective it is AGAIN, stop ignoring the pitfalls and clinging only to the benefits - most people know but choose to ignore the pitfalls. propaganda at work...
If a product or service is NOT VIABLE then they go out of business. If JUNK food is too expensive, people can buy REAL food. Remember, we heavily subsidize processed food in the USA which is why Americans spend less % of their income on food than anywhere else... and are fat and sickly. People bitch if prices go up but the reality is that elsewhere they already pay more for better food. Yes, that may mean we can't buy as much shit as we want but don't need... while not realizing we actually need better food.
Take look at the wasted counter space at your local fast food joint. Maybe 2 or 3 registers with only 1 open and then a bunch of empty counter space.
Turn the entire thing into a gigantic vending machine with a robotic kitchen behind it. Walk up, select your food from a touch screen, wait, remove it from an automated slot/window that opens in front of you. Everything is in a bag...eat in or take out, doesn't matter. At my local McDonald's you could easily fit 8 - 10 such slots across where their current 2 registers and empty counter space currently sits.
I have money. And guns. And big dogs. And enough land to see you coming. It's still your problem.
Good luck.
Income inequality is worse now than it was in the 1920's. A handful of billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.
Productivity has been climbing for decades but wages have remained completely stagnant.
And now companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart pay their employees so little that they qualify for food stamps, paid for with your tax dollars. Capitalist Winning!
The reason it's happening now is cheap, reliable microcontrollers and big, high res touch screens are finally widely available.
Yes, but why did anyone work hard in order to produce those cheap reliable microcontrollers and big high-res touch screens?
Impossible scenario. First you'd have a pile of dead too high to get over, then you'd have disease, and all of this assuming you could get 7 billion people to surround a compound, which is absurd. Further, the number of poor who would be willing to walk into heavy arms is not going to be large. There's little point trying to get food and shelter by killing yourself. You can say that some will defend the interests of others, and no doubt they would, but also this would be a very small number.
Then there's the "ammunition" thing. Bullets? Really? Will it be a question of bullets? Will a laser run out of photons? How about a tailored disease vector for which the rich have the countermeasure, and the poor don't? Area denial weapons? Chemical weapons? How about armored robots which can simply tear anyone in-the-zone limb from limb?
If the poor become a serious threat (by which I mean, violent), you simply can't argue that they can create and maintain a serious, widespread threat. The first time they go after the unarmed rich, that'll be the end of the unarmed rich, right there. You will almost instantly have armed rich, and now the context is completely different.
See, it's all very well to talk as if the poor were capable of exerting continuous unified force against modern arms, but the idea is utter nonsense: it doesn't stand up under even mild scrutiny.
The only solution to this that has any chance of working is social; government force, used top down, to disenfranchise the rich, and distribute the wealth much more generally than it is now. That's probably what will actually happen, too. If not, it's going to be a hell of a mess, and the poor will almost certainly lose in the process.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I haven't eaten at a Jack in the Box since the 70's, when I noticed the company was owned by Ralston Purina, the makers of dog food.
Personally, I think it's fine they use robots, as I won't be eating there anyway.
Don't believe me? Do a little research, and see how its grown against GDP per capita, and even median wage - despite how much that's been depressed, since the 1960s. $15/hr today still wouldn't keep up with economic growth.
Living parents cannot give more than $10K per child per year tax free. Why should they be able to give it all after death. The children didn't earn it. And EVERY other form of regular income is taxed.
The "death tax" is a disingenous lie! It's just the standard income tax and another *huge* loophole that benefits the very few extremely rich and allows the creation of family dynastys where great-great-grandpa did something once upon a time.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
I understand we can rise against and see all the issue this could potentially make, but what is the alternative? If a competing business changes the game and gets their operating costs lower, it becomes adapt or die. - Now all your cooks and delivery drivers just lost their jobs too.
The old system worked for the most part, but this is just evolution of work. By the old way of thinking, we should have never made it past the model-T. the car ran, no reason to make it more efficient or faster.
Business at it's core is making money. You can either charge more for your service or pay less to your employees of self.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to make a living working a job, but expecting to work fast food and make ends meet while living in an area with high cost of living is a recipe for going broke.
Wage slaves in other nations has lowered the pricepoint to one that is acceptable, well enough to put our wage slaves on welfare.
I hate those things. They are really slow in over all use. I see these only, I will just leave. Its the reason I don't go to a McD near here
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
Click on "expand" in the statistics. You quoted the average of the Euro countries (excluding, e.g., the UK). Germany, by the way, has 6.4% (according to this chart).
If you had a better plow horse you kept that horse and sold off the lesser horses. If you had a better employee you kept him and fired the less able employee. That is the traditional way of doing business. So now you have machines that can be far superior to human workers. Do you honestly expect a change in the pattern?
Further the worth of labor in the market is false and it is a rigged system. Crippling the strength of unions and of one union supporting another union have been disallowed thus lowering the costs of labor. That is no different than if we passed laws that investors could not purchase shares and that only one investor could fund a company fro his own pocket. The American Medical Assoc. is a union with outrageous powers. The bar association is also a union with unreasonable powers. If there were no bar association a lawyer might work for minimum wages. The notion that the laws of business should control wages is an aristocratic, poisonous lie.
His bonus check will go up.
A CEO only caring about his bonus check! Whodathunk it?
Maybe he could be replaced by AI!
Everything a CEO does can be truly automated: Operational Expenses, Ad Spending, Market Researching, Customer Finding, Campaign mailing, Firing people, Emailing Wall Street and doing periodic writeups for PR - all of it can be done without useless fellows wearing a tie, saying the stupidest things when sucking the meat out of a company.
You know what I assumed? Actual humans. NOT the degenerated dog-eat-dog society of complete and utter psychopaths that you call your cuntry. So NOT YOU.
Yes, this would "never work" in Murica, since you all are complete pieces of shit, and would rape children if it made you a dime and you'd get away with it. Your way of life is to use every method possible, fuck morals, fuck social behavior, fuck empathy, fuck basic common sense, fuck the planet, fuck the universe, fuck everything. Complete psychopath philosophy, in case you don't know. (lol, in case ... like you'd know ... ^^ you probably believe emoticons are bad since they are emotions ... "ewww". ^^)
Also, I’m likely twice as old as you, little retard. But way to project ... as opposed to an actual *profession*.
I mean look at you. You still believe in your value coming from some asshole putting a badge on your chest, and from *jobs*
I would say "grow up", but I have seen your elderly. Mental and character development just doesn't happen, on your side of the pond. ^^
(Americans who come here interestingly do. But only if they adopt the culture. Then again, that may be why they came here in the first place.)
But nice, when the utter and complete retard calls others "moronic". The Dunning-Kruger effect in full force.
The world will rejoice, when you degenerate metastasizing cancer of a country implodes in a couple of years. (I mean it clearly already started. And you're already ripping each other apart in a way that is fuckin' hilarious to every actual human.)
Especially with these large fastfood restaurants chains, and it's very factory/formula based foods. It makes sense to just use robots/machines to prepare the food (it's all exactly the same, so a robot should be able to handle it even better than a human without the need for safety measures which require pretty some space. At our MacDonalds here in the Netherlands, we're already used to order/pay at a touchscreen and only wait until our food is prepared to be handed over to us by a person. But the whole preparation of the food could be done by machines and just dump it on a tray and put it in a slot on the counter. Only a skeletoncrew needed to keep an eye on everything.
Except when there is ONE of the following standing in front of the screen:
-Someone who doesn't read English.
-An elderly person.
-Someone who doesn't eat there often.
-A family with kids running around when the parent is trying to enter everything.
-A person with a special request ("No pickles.").
-A person with cash.
-A person with a flaky credit card account (I'm looking at you, Capital One!).
-A person who's blind.
-A person who can't use their hands.
-A person who's too short.
I assume these situations occur frequently; and these are just off the top of my head. It takes 3 SECONDS for me to say "Can I have a #3 with a Coke to go, please?" (Yes, walking in is often faster than the drive-through.) I go to a fast food place for fast food. If things are slowing me down, I will go elsewhere...in 3 seconds.
What he wrote is the common philosophy in most of Europe, and has been backed, even by some of your own puppets, like Merkel and Juncker.
So way to go, downvoting him. We didn't expect anything else from you. This site is clearly dead for a reason.
I work inside one of the two largest grocery stores in Australia. I can tell you that the self service checkouts as good as they are, are never going to replace staff. There's multiple reasons for it but theft/loss is one of the big reasons why staff are always going to be there. Minimum wage/staff wages are not the major drivers of these decisions. Any business that thinks they can automate away staff without increasing/improving on service, is going to quickly get crushed by businesses that provide a better customer experience/service.
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Even if the people earning minimum wage have degrees that has absolutely nothing to do with their impact on and importance to the overall job market.
/.) to side track the conversation about minimum wage workers and their place in the US economy. At best that's mean spirited trolling. At worst an active attack on the working class. Either way (and I'm getting tired of saying this): you should be ashamed of yourself. I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're not helping yourself or the people you care about.
You're attacking people with useless degrees (a group especially reviled here on
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if you pull everyone out of money making positions, they wont have any money to spend on your shit. that makes sense i guess.
Do you actually know anything about Rand or did you just think it was a cool buzzword? Collecting a check is an apt "insult" cause Ayn, in fact, collected a welfare check every month once she got old and had nothing. Your argument, like hers back before poverty, was she should have saved better. Well she didn't, and did she lay down in the street and starve to death as you think they will? Nope, she became a hypocrite cause ya gotta do whatcha gotta do.
I know you won't care about anything I said cause you think it's wrong or that a problem doesn't exist when one does. But wait until life fucks you and you'll be a goddamned hypocrite too. You'll even find cute technical reasons why you're fucking special and deserve to get that check but no else can. You "earned" it, buddy.
One of the reasons I don't mind the low quality cheap food is that they employ workers. If they got rid of the workers, I would expect a quite significant jump in food quality for the price in order to continue frequenting fast food restaurants.
what the fuck is jack in the box
They give you more options when placing your order. On top of that, they are guaranteed to speak/display your language.
First of all, most of McDonald's locations are franchisee owned. Only 18% are corporate owned, 6,444 stores as of 2015.
Secondly, McDonald's does not employ 1.5 million people. They employed more than 375,000 at the end of 2016.
Automation of fastfood ordering is already happening.
It's relatively easy/cheap to do and doesn't (normally) affect hygiene standards (although it may increase security risks, given that counterdroids can pick up on potentially troublesome customers)
However - As many franchise holders are finding out the hard way, many customers don't like it and are starting to go elsewhere.
Automation of the backend (cooking, cleaning and packing) is a lot more expensive and likely to take some time. Robots to do physical work are not cheap. relatively inflexible and require constant cleaning in this kind of environment. Employees not cooking or serving are cleaning, whilst robots not cooking are idle.
Employers who replace burger flippers on cost grounds are likely to be the same ones who attempt to cut corners on cleaning and in the process generate food poisoning outbreaks with subsequent compensation payments far exceeding the savings.
I live in southern California, where the In-N-Out Burger chain has paid above minimum wage for years, and generally has pleasant enthusiastic people taking orders. Jack In The Box has already changed Jack's voice in their TV commercials, and now they are thinking of this. Price is not everything that goes into the dining experience.
Tom from El Segundo
Dear Jack.
I have a question. When you, and most of your other CEOs lay off all their employees, WHO'S going to be left with money to be your CUSTOMERS?
Do Robots eat Hamburgers?
Asking for a friend.
how about rising ceo payout checks?
cap your ceo's checks and your company will have plenty to afford to pay those super costly part time minimum wage workers.
I wish I ate at jack in the box, so that i could stop eating at jack in the box in boycott.
The two major supermarket chains both have hand-held scanners that you collect at the entrance when you scan your loyalty card.
No staff there.
One walks around, scans one's own shopping, gets to the self-checkout.
Scan the "out" code, go to one of the pay kiosks, rescan your fidelity card.
(There are random checks at this stage where you might be obliged to ask the attendant to verify several randomly chosen items from your caddie.)
Mostly, one just waves one's RFID payment card or pushes in the debit card to the reader and pays on the spot.
You get a receipt and bonus coupons or promotions and walk calmly out of the store.
Most days, I never even speak to a soul in the supermarket now, it's in and out super fast, everyone goes home happy.
Can Robots replace Law Makers and CxOs
Casteism