Except most people there aren't full time employees already, they do still have cashiers (stop lying to make your point), and McDonalds ~2-3 years ago changed up their beef and made it actually acceptable. You should try it if you haven't. It's a decent burger for the price instead of the grey garbage they used to serve.

Fast food places already work on a skeleton crew most of the time. They're super quick to cut people during slow hours. Automating the grill will probably eliminate about half a position when all is said and done. Until they've automated everything in the building they're not going to approach replacing even the majority of a shift. We might be heading that way, but not for a while, and the lowest paid workers are the lowest priority on the chopping block to develop technology to replace.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 6 2021 01:26pm

You're talking about 5 "cashiers" 16 hours a day 7 days a week. Our minimum wage is $13.25. You do the math. It doesn't matter "part time, full time, or just weekends". For $50K, they replaced $385,840 worth of overhead.

Again, do the math.

Edit: Those Kiosks were still fully functional as of March 2020, when they closed down indoor dining, and not a single one had broken down. Also note that it's not required to pay employer-match on SSI or any form of employee liability insurance on machines.

They're a MUCH easier way to go. Get the customer to agree to do their own work and win.

This post was edited by InsaneBobb on Feb 6 2021 01:33pm

I can't remember a time when I ever saw a McDonalds with more than 2 cashiers, even when I was a kid, and I still saw that even at the locations with the kiosks.

If your point is so rock solid don't misrepresent the situation.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 6 2021 01:31pm

We have 1 McDonalds in a 7 mile radius, 1 jack in the box, and 1 taco bell. That covers the entirety of (non gas station) fast food. Those three outlets service a population of around 90K people in that radius. There used to be a Carl's Jr, but their food was such trash, they shut down, and the nearest is now 20 miles out.

I did not say they're "huge" because they're really "small". Your point is so pointless it doesn't even bother to try to represent anything.

The exact same point applies for a 2 cashier fast food place, or a 1 cashier fast food place. Hell, I'd rather go through a kiosk any day than dealing with some idiot who's going to ask me to repeat the order 15 times while talking to their mate about their after-work plans.

If it costs you $30K/year to hire a person to do what a machine can do for a $10K one-time cost, and minor maintenance costs, then you're either an idiot or have a heart of gold to bother hiring people in the first place. And the processes used by places like McDonalds are 100% set, right now, for 99% automation.

Edit: Forgot the Subway inside the Walmart. So make that 4 fast food places. Just adding for accuracy. Not entirely certain whether the Subway is still open though. They were hemorrhaging money even before Covid because they only put 2 people on shift at any given time, and closed so early they lost half the evening customers and most of the swing shift workers.

This post was edited by InsaneBobb on Feb 6 2021 01:43pm

I'm an automation engineer. Not really arguing I'm saying it's ready to go.

Minimum wage here has been over 15 usd for over a decade, we still hire losers who forget my burger patty.

Maybe you could "automate" those stimulus checks.

It's interesting, but when I look up "Australian poverty" it appears some 13.6% of your population is living in poverty as of March 2020. And oddly, even as far back as 2005, they'd isolated a loss of jobs due to minimum wage standards, and the number of working age adults who sit at home jobless as one of the major culprits, and Australian Poverty rates had RISEN from some 9.7% in 2005 to it's 2020 rate. Alternatively, as of January 2020, 10.5% of the American population were living in Poverty, and that number has gone DOWN from 15.1% in 2010.

Regardless, automation of things like fast food has been predicted for a very long time. The tech was still in development. Now much of it is ready to go (or already implemented) and especially after lockdowns due to covid, fast food companies have more reason than ever before to make the investment to switch away from the indoor dining model that employs a lot of people to an outdoor/takeaway model that employs incredibly few.

That's actually an argument against your point because plenty of places in the world have far higher minimum wages. If it's ready to go why hasn't it been deployed?

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 7 2021 09:39am

We locked down our economy in 2020, more people are in poverty, less people are dead.
Minimum wage is not a factor in loss of jobs, cheap immigration work visas are the problem.

This post was edited by Plaguefear on Feb 7 2021 09:43am