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It's still a net loss of jobs. I'm certain the future will involve increasing automation to further reduce headcount. A McDonald's recently opened near me with

• Squeeeez 1y ago
  Where do people eat then? Coming from someone completely foreign to such a culture.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    At home in front of the television while scrolling their phone
    • inglor_cz 1y ago
      This unfortunately sounds like where the trend has been going at least since Covid. People started treating "meeting other people in person" as a tiresome chore, and the world is adapting to that change.
      • Animats 1y ago
        Very true. Pre-COVID, I used to go to a small kabob restaurant in Silicon Valley. During COVID, I'd order from them via Doordash. The food wasn't as good cold, though, even if re-heated. After COVID, I started going back in person. Often, I'd be the only in-person customer, despite a steady stream of deliver drivers going in and out. Now, they're out of business.
        • nobody9999 1y ago
          >Pre-COVID, I used to go to a small kabob restaurant in Silicon Valley. During COVID, I'd order from them via Doordash. The food wasn't as good cold, though, even if re-heated. After COVID, I started going back in person. Often, I'd be the only in-person customer, despite a steady stream of deliver drivers going in and out. Now, they're out of business. Because DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats/etc. charge the restaurants more than their gross margins. In such an anvironment, unless a restaurant raises prices 25-30%, they're eventually going out of business. I'd say that these companies are most certainly not providing 25-30% value add. Rather, it's just leeching off restaurants and their customers. It's disgusting and has killed many, many restaurants where I live (NYC), even though we already had a culture of delivery before these parasites came along. And more's the pity.
        • sitkack 1y ago
          I was amazed at how good and cheap the food was in Mountain View and Sunnyvale. That is a bummer.
        • rambambram 1y ago
          Super off topic, but I'm going to borrow "kabob"! Sounds even better than 'kebab'.
      • Spivak 1y ago
        You're implying that food delivery is antithetical to seeing your friends in person. We have people over and then order food all the time.
        • inglor_cz 1y ago
          It is not completely antithetical, but I would bet on a fairly significant correlation between those two.
      • pests 1y ago
        > “meeting other people in person” as a tiresome chore. Someone linked the short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster the other day where this is an element. A character makes a big deal of having to meet her son in person, opposed of through the machine. Written in the 20s, gets a lot of things uncannily correct for a society 100 years later. Video calling, silence/do not disturb mode, notifications, air conditioning, people no longer wanting to look at real things with their eyes, etc.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          https://youtu.be/dhQW0ufJRBQ https://youtu.be/dhQW0ufJRBQ
  • senkora 1y ago
    There’s almost always still a parking lot because of zoning laws, so you can eat in your car while parked.
    • rilindo 1y ago
      This does feel like we are going back to the beginning of how fast-food started (minus the large crew of people)[0] [0] https://youtu.be/YqyCaATQPtk?t=74 https://youtu.be/YqyCaATQPtk?t=74
      • xeromal 1y ago
        I was thinking of this exact clip! I love this movie.
      • iamflimflam1 1y ago
        Video is unavailable to U.K. viewers.
    • rascul 1y ago
      I have always preferred to sit in my car to eat at a park or some relatively peaceful place in the shade without too much activity. Sitting in a big dirty room with a bunch of people watching me eat has never been comfortable.
      • Auracle 1y ago
        I agree. I can listen to a podcast in my car, there's no chance someone will cough or sneeze near me, etc. My first time being into a McDonalds since I was a kid was earlier this summer when I gave my 3 year old the option of going in or staying in the car. I was pretty shocked at how barebones it was now. There weren't even napkins available and none with our food...which, when you have a kid with, is an issue.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          This varies widely - my cutoff is whether they still have a soda refill machine on my side of the counter.
  • PopAlongKid 1y ago
    This reminds me of the Sonic fast food chain. The first (and so far only) time I've visited Sonic was some years ago, I was staying at a motel across the street, walked over there to order, and was surprised there was no place to sit or even a normal counter to order at. The ads they run on TV give no indication that Sonic is strictly a drive-thru operation.
• standardUser 1y ago
  That's the direction every company is headed everywhere. It's far more prominent in locales with very high labor costs, but once those technologies are easily scalable they will roll out everywhere, even places with cheap labor.
  • lovich 1y ago
    No, you don’t understand. If the government hadn’t been involved, private organizations would have kept employees around even when cheaper alternatives exist. This is sarcastic of course. Ideally if our economy distributed rewards across all of society everyone would be for changes like this if they did actually speed up automation
    • laughing_man 1y ago
      The government does have an effect, though. If a company is avoiding automation because automating things is expensive, a big jump in labor costs may speed the process along. If you push a bunch of companies to automate, automation becomes cheaper for everyone.
      • carlosjobim 1y ago
        It will force all businesses to either become more effective or close down. Depending on how you look at it, it's a good or a bad thing.
        • laughing_man 1y ago
          From what I can see, it's pretty much a bad thing all around. The business would have had more money if it had hired someone, and there would have been a job available to someone who needs it. The other thing that will probably happen is a reduction in service. Cashiers get replaced by ordering kiosks, for instance.
          • carlosjobim 1y ago
• decremental 1y ago
  [dead]
• trod1234 1y ago
  That owner neglects that the latter fuels the former, and gets to a point where no business can occur at all (given sufficient time horizons).
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    The owner isn't neglecting it, it's a tragedy of the commons. If the owner was to overhire, it might reduce the homeless population a little, but at great cost. And other businesses nearby will benefit for free. Only large coordination at the level of state or national government can afford to implement welfare as a real investment in their citizens. If you do it at the city, county, or corporate level, it's just charity.
    • trod1234 1y ago
      The neglect I mention occurs because they perpetuate the outcome they seek to avoid, largely without knowledge of the true factors that lead to wealth as a group/nation in the first place which are codified in some older books. You make the same assumptive leaps, which are based in fallacy, that cause this route to be a giant circle without agency/choice. Your, "Tragedy of the commons" implies there's nothing you can do to change the world unless you are at the top of government, and that is both wrong, and the perspective of a demoralized hopeless person. Actions matter, and you can do quite a lot at the local level by building strong community, and community is not government.
• DarkNova6 1y ago
  I fail to see the causality how this is caused by minimum wages.
  • joshuamoyers 1y ago
    Its not at all imo. Franchised businesses are not in the habit of employing low skill workers as a public service. This data is interacting with both covid effects and infrastructure upgrade/rollover - in other words, it takes a while for companies to adopt affordable touch screen ordering systems and its been phased in at a ton of non-fast food (at least in my area) over the same period of time. Local health grocery store has touch screen ordering at their deli, as well as simultaneously going cashless. Most coffee shops too. Look at most international airports - almost all the kiosks have one or no attendants now.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    The causality is raising the minimum wage pushed business to do this sooner rather than later. this is why, as per the study, California lost more jobs than states that didn’t raise the minimum wage
    • gddgb 1y ago
      [dead]
• unsnap_biceps 1y ago
  I currently live in a petty remote area and we have literarily zero homeless folks in our hamlet area. (We actually have a fairly robust program that provides housing for folks in need). We have one fast food restaurant in the area and it's a McDonalds. It was one of the main hangouts for folks in the area. We would have weekly meetups there. After Covid, they closed the seating area and installed the touch screens. They went from employing around 7 to 9 folks down to only 3 and talking with the franchise owner, they're not planning to ever hire back up and re-open seating. He did mention that the gross revenue is way down, but net revenue is about the same and his stress in managing the location is way reduced with the headcount reduction and simplification of the business.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Never having to deal with a member of the public inside your property is a huge liability and hence stress reducer.
    • spaceguillotine 1y ago
      so is not opening a service based business
      • bawolff 1y ago
        Sounds like that is the path this business owner took. One macdonalds deciding they dont want to be a sit-down resturant anymore doesn't prevent anyone else from opening a competing resturant.
      • XorNot 1y ago
        Sure but it's also a scaling factor. People are going to choose the tradeoff that's right for them or their insurance costs.
        • exe34 1y ago
          Capitalism working as intended. Wealth extraction without having to give back to the community.
• dangus 1y ago
  We need to detach from the "jobs at any cost" mentality behind your first sentence. By that logic ending child labor is "still a net loss of jobs." I mean, here you are talking about a business owner having issues with the local homeless population who are homeless because their jobs don't pay enough to afford housing. All these business owners race to the bottom paying their employees scraps and then wonder why they have empty dining rooms with no customers to afford their products sold at record-high profit margins. Obviously, minimum wage doesn't really fix the economy on its own, but it is a very important tool in a toolbox for ensuring that capitalism is restrained from following its worst instincts.
• bko 1y ago
  People like to think that employment is pretty much the only good that does not result in a mismatch of supply and demand from a price floor. Take for instance a proposal that says "no one is allowed to sell their used car for less than $10k". Maybe the justification is poor people are desperate and sell their car too cheap and all these dealerships and buyers are a monopsony underbidding the real value of the car, profiting off these uninformed, unorganized individual sellers. Does anyone think this is a good idea? Would anyone bother reading studies contemplating the effect this may have? No, of course not. Everyone knows that this would essentially mean many cars that would have sold under $10k would just not get sold. Sure some people would benefit, maybe getting a higher price for their car. Some things would shift, maybe people would opt for scooters or e-bikes or something. But I wouldn't want this price floor if I was on either side, trying to offload a bad car or buying one.
  • zukzuk 1y ago
    The cost of employment is not comparable to the cost of a particular good. Employment has much more complicated implications on the economy and on society. A minimum wage is set in part to prevent a desperate race to the bottom, and to (try to) ensure something approaching a living wage. It’s a blunt and often ineffective tool, but viable alternatives are scant. The free market won’t solve this one any more than it solves the problem of healthcare.
    • BurningFrog 1y ago
      The price mechanisms of supply and demand are very well understood since the 1800s, and apply to anything that's bought and sold, including labor. 150 years of solid science. When facts conflict with beliefs we hold dear and perhaps define our identities, our brains are very skilled at finding ways to keep believing what we want to believe. Especially when the facts define your in-group. Changing such beliefs, makes you one of the people you and your friends hate. The mind will convince itself of pretty much anything to avoid such social suicide.
      • UltraSane 1y ago
• UltraSane 1y ago
  " ongoing issues with the local homeless population" This is the REAL issue.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• croes 1y ago
  A net loss in fast food jobs doesn’t mean net loss over all. More money in low wage jobs is mostly spend and not saved and can lead to more jobs in other sectors.
• V__ 1y ago
  I just can't understand McDonald's long term strategy. I can either go to them or to a locally owned burger place near me, and spend about the same. Waiting times are the same, and every other metric is worse at McDonald's. I went to McDonald's last week because I haven't been there for over a year and well, I won't be going for the next few years again. If they can't compete on price, speed or taste, they only compete on location and/or their current customer base. I just don't see how that is a viable long-term strategy.
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
    I haven't been to a McDonald's in over a year, but back then at least app had insane deals that blew away anything else.
  • omoikane 1y ago
    McDonald's main value for me is consistency: it might not necessarily taste great, but it tastes roughly the same everywhere. There are better restaurants, but there is a greater probability of finding a McDonald's because it has more locations. McDonald's might not be the best choice, but it's usually a great fallback option if you are unfamiliar with the area.
• motorest 1y ago
  > A McDonald's recently opened near me with no seating, and orders can only be placed through the app or at the drive thru. I personally know a couple of Uber Eats restaurants whose only physical presence is literally a garage in a residential neighborhood, and they only take orders from the app. I also know of a Uber Eats competitor whose business model includes rider hubs that stock on a limited set of high volume products for quick delivery. I wouldn't call them net loss of jobs per se. I see those as entirely different businesses with completely new business models. It's more a kin to ordering groceries online than to going on a night out.
• bamboozled 1y ago
  I guess I'm a minority but when I generally dislike McDonald's but one of the reasons I continue to go there is because they often employee so many people from different demographics. It's been a redeeming quality trait of theirs. They give young people a start with work experience , 20-40s some managerial experience and sometimes elderly people a job too. Once I'm just ordering a shitty burger from a machine, I have probably lost any reason to give them my money at all, there is just way better alternatives.