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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.
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 you do the totals you get the same answer regardless, self service cashiers work out even in countries with 2-3x smaller minimum wage. You still need some cashiers to overseer the mechanical slaves, deal with customers experiencing technophobia or buying booze and tobacco.
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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Okay, I'm going to say it because everyone's going to make arguments that are overly complicated and the answer is actually quite simple. Other than 50+ year olds, pretty much you can take any modern register and turn it around to face customers instead and suddenly it is a self serve kiosk. Since 2006 to 2014 there's been massive leaps in the UI+hardware that you pretty much have registers that only require basic reading skills and the understanding of "touch based UI" to fully grasp. Cash registers pride themselves on things like minutes of training required for the average task, the end goal was to meet the needs of companies that literally need people fresh off the street being able to manage a till. This CEO talks about automation and it's clear he's suffering from IDTIMWYTIM. But whatever. The rise in minimum wage makes CEOs feel warm and fuzzy about doing something just like folks wearing black makes them feel warm and fuzzy that their countering gender inequality. We all know that they really aren't doing anything, but whatever. People like to point to useless gestures or baseless claims to justify a position that's always been happening with or without their input. At this point it happens so often that I'm pretty much convinced that the point of C-level staff in companies is pretty much gone. They exist at this point to sponge more money in their direction and that is all.
artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value
Dude, unless Crap-in-the-box can find some folks willing to work thirty cents an hour, it didn't matter what anyone did with wages, the writing is on the wall for pretty much all of us and no one with influence actually gives a flying fuck. But perhaps this will have the uptick that 80% of the world's population can finally die off and leave only the rich to suck each other's dicks. You know what happened when horse's were out matched tech wise? Better get used to saying neigh.
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
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.
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Where as in the US you pretend you can have a minimum wage below the poverty line then spend lots of tax dollars propping those people up with food stamps, etc, or just paying indirectly with theft and other criminal behaviour.
Regardless of the stupid FOX talking point crap in this thread, people aren't just going to die because you think they should try harder.
If you pay minimum wage, you are saying that you would've paid less if it weren't illegal.
I would pay less taxes if it weren't illegal. I'd pay less for just about anything if given the chance.
Regardless, there's a point where you won't pay more. That's the real issue here. Doesn't matter if it's automated or manual, there is a point where it's just not worth it.
Society thinks people should have a minimum standard of living. Great! I agree. Then society should pay for it. Stop forcing employers of low-skill workers to bear the weight of wealth redistribution. Put it in the tax code, which is more directly under the control of society.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
[quote]Furthermore, working the fast food counter is supposed to be a kid's summer job and off hours for college and pocket money or first car. It is not living wage work for adults. If fast food is your family's primary source of income then you have failed at life and see above about condoms.[/quote]
And those kids should be paid appropriately for doing a shitty job that adults by and large don't want to do.
Yeah, that's exactly the same tired, pointless argument I referred to. NO ONE CARES that you think they shouldn't exist, or that minimum wage is "supposed" to be a starter job, they will do whatever it takes to survive regardless of your politics.
Do you honestly think the rich keep welfare systems going out of the goodness of their heart, or because it's cheaper than rolling around in APCs between fortified encampments a'la South Africa?
then spend lots of tax dollars propping those people up with food stamps, etc, or just paying indirectly with theft and other criminal behaviour.
As opposed to the European way of making employees so expensive that you have 20% youth unemployment, who you then prop up with social programs, theft and other criminal behavior?
I'm not opposed to minimum wage (and frankly I wish we'd just tie it to inflation so we don't need to constantly adjust it). But lets not pretend that this will magically get people off of government assistance or eliminate crime.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
However, if you understand how a monetary system is supposed to work, you need money to flow.
A monetary system is meant to support economic activity. It "works" by providing a reliable, trusted, and standardized means of exchange so that we don't need to barter physical goods all the time or work out complex currency transactions. It is not "supposed to work" in the way you mean. If all you need is money to flow, then just letting two computers bat it back and forth as quickly as they can would make us all fabulously wealthy.
What you need to lift everyone's standard of living is wealth creation. You don't create wealth by artificially supporting someone's wages, be it through direct government assistance (food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, etc) or indirect assistance like minimum wage. I'm not smart enough to know how to take an untrained - possibly untrainable - adult and make them into a generator of wealth, but I do know that your ideas about the velocity of money are not what you think they are. I'd start by improving and equalizing access to education, and putting into place an incentive structure for government safety nets which rewards the bureaucrats for getting people back on their own two feet.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm not sure how to respond to your comment. We don't typically hit Wendy's as a night out on the town - we usually hit Wendy's when we are already out and want the convenience of a fast meal. The "human service" at Wendy's is generally the least-pleasant part of the whole experience.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
If you didn't earn it from your own hard labour, then you're not successful, you're a parasite. We have an entire economic/corporate heirarchy built on the concept that you get paid more the less actual work you do. Shareholders, managers, executives, CEOs, inheritors, landlords... All parasites.
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".
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.
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.
Sure, predictable, predicted. But go on and think through a bit further...
The GDP isn't lessened by switching to robots. As a civilization/society/country, we're not producing any less by this transition. If anything we have the ability to produce more. The only difference is how society's production is apportioned to everyone.
Some people believe that the right way to structure society is by using degrading low-paid jobs as a way to apportion a pittance to poor people. It sounds like you're in this camp. Is that because you believe there exists no other feasible way of apportioning, or because you think this is the best out of all feasible ways to apportion?
When and where exactly was this golden age when rich people weren't rich?
According to both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders the "Golden Age" was the 1950s.
Back then, people had jobs for life, everyone could afford a house, no one was poor, and America was Great.
Of course, that is total bullcrap. Average job tenure is higher today than it was then. Home ownership rates are higher today, and houses are also significantly larger. Poverty was a much bigger problem then. Even white men are better off today, and minorities and women are far better off.
Most nostalgia is nonsense, especially about the past.
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.
Sub-living-wage employment is a drag on society. Those "businesses" survive only because the public subsidizes their labor costs - directly through welfare programs or indirectly through crime and social degradation. It is therefore a net economic benefit if those loss-making (before subsidy) businesses are eliminated from the market.
ALL workers are "wealth creators". The education/training canard is just a distraction. The question is: Shall workers retain enough of the fruits of their labors so that they may eat, live indoors, and otherwise "have a life"? Or shell workers be forced to accept a starvation wage, so that all the remaining fruits of their labor may flow into the pockets of capital owners?
But there's a related question of whether the worker's productivity is actually greater than the cost of feeding and housing them. What happens when it isn't? In the first industrial revolution, the output of weavers using hand-operated looms dropped below the cost of providing them with food because the value of the thing that they were creating was significantly inflated by its scarcity, and that went away with mechanical looms. What should society do with people in this situation? Some you can retrain, but not all.
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Reminds me of Costco vs SAMS.. Costco has a union, with benefits making $17+ an hour vs SAMs minimum wage part-timers told to make up the difference through welfare.
Inheriting millions is NOT "earning" anything... shuffling stocks to make more money is not "working" or "earning" anything.
Tax wealth (not just income) at 90% above 5 Million....
I can count on zero fingers the number of times I went to a fast food restaurant to interact with the folks working there. And that even counts when I had family working at one.
If you do the totals you get the same answer regardless, self service cashiers work out even in countries with 2-3x smaller minimum wage. You still need some cashiers to overseer the mechanical slaves, deal with customers experiencing technophobia or buying booze and tobacco.
This, stores have replaced checkouts in every state with self service checkouts... if it were just about the minimum wage then they wouldn't have bothered in states with low minimum wage. The biggest issue with adoption are the customers, as you correctly pointed out.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
More likely, automation will mean all the burgers are wrong in the same way. With humans, they are all wrong in different ways.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
This. Sub-livable wages should not be legal for this reason first and foremost. Don't allow companies to use human labor as a conduit for corporate welfare.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As long ago as 1999, $15/hr was a minimal living wage for "real" adults who pay for their own rent, transportation, insurance and food.
Most jobs contribute far more than $15/hr value to the employer's organization - if they don't, I'm all for finding solutions that make those "worthless" jobs go away and free up people to do something that is worth $15/hr or more.
Arguably, even semi-talented street busking (entertainment) in a reasonably heavy pedestrian traffic area is worth more than $15/hr. And, if everybody is employed at higher paying jobs, everybody who enjoys an entertainer can afford to toss them a buck every couple of days as they walk past.
Killbots? You realise this means the leader of the next US revolution will be Zapp Brannigan...
Blank until
Ah yes, another demoncrat throwing yet another temper tantrum.
"And if you dont show some initiative, you deserve to die, that is what the fanatic capitalist right says, am I correct?
According to 2nd Thessalonians in the bible if one does not work does not eat. You whiny commie demoncrat terrorists keep touting "What if someone is too disabled to work" Well here's the thing, there is no such thing as being "too disabled to work." Even if there truly were those that are too disabled to work, guess what, can't work falls under don't work so either work or die. Those that are "too disabled to work" are truly "too disabled to live"
LOL, you seem nice.
"When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 23:22
"There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land." Deuteronomy 15:11
"If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother." Deuteronomy 15:7
"Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near, so that you do not show ill will toward your needy brother and give him nothing. He may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found guilty of sin." Deuteronomy 15:9
"The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern." Proverbs 29:7
"If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth." 1 John 3:17-18
Quoting the Bible is fun, eh? It's almost as if you can find passages to justify any point of view, even for an uncaring prick like yourself.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Or to simplify the point further: it is impossible for workers to under-price robots and self-service in the long-run, or the medium-run, or increasingly now even the short-run.
There is no "dirt-cheap labor" solution to dealing with the increasing automation of work.
CEOs want dirt cheap labor and they want robots to eliminate it at the same time. They aren't offering a deal - keep wages low and we will leave the jobs intact. They have no intention of doing that, and there is no actual promise being made by "Jack in the Box CEO Leonard Comma" to not automate if wages are not raised. Like those Carrier jobs that went to Mexico six months after they announced they were being "saved" a press release is not a deal, it is not a contract, it is not even a promise. It means nothing.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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!