Slashdot Mirror
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.
McDonald's would still be profitable with a $50/hr minimum wage.
Bullcrap.
Annual payroll expense per McDonald's restaurant: $602,000
Annual net profit per McDonald's restaurant: $153,900
Even a 25% increase in payroll would put them out of business. There is no way they could absorb a 300-400% increase, which is what you are claiming.
McDonald's cost vs profit
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A typical McDonalds does not employ ~30 full time people.
LET'S DO MATH!!!!
There are 14,146 McDonald's in America. McDonald's has 1.5 million employees. That is over 100 employees per restaurant.
Of course, some of them work in distribution, corporate administration, etc. and not at restaurants. Many of them are part time. But 30 full time equivalents per restaurants seems reasonable.
Now lets look at one restaurant that is open from 5am to midnight. The workers need to be there an hour before opening and an hour after closing. So that is 21 hours per day, for 7 days per week, or 147 hours per week. 30 full-time equivalents would be 1200 hours per week. 1200/147 = 8 workers in the restaurant at any time. That seems about right to me.
If there's no value added to going to a "restaurant", like human service, why go?
Restaurants that have drive through windows typically get 50-70% of their business from people sitting in their cars and shouting into a microphone.
People do not go to fast food joints for "human interaction".