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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.
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.
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.
Replacing fast food with home-cooked meals.
Mostly random stuff.
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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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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How many meals will these new cashiers purchase.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
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
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'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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!