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I live in a country with one of the highest mandated minimum wages in the world. Guess what I saw passing by a KFC the other day? An automated ordering kiosk.

by brc 13y ago

I live in a country with one of the highest mandated minimum wages in the world. Guess what I saw passing by a KFC the other day? An automated ordering kiosk. Just use a touch screen to place your order, swipe your card and your food will come out with your number. It is just wishful thinking to think that raising minimum wages makes people better off. At best, it just creates inflation for the very products that those workers buy. At worst, it cuts the rungs off the bottom of the job ladder and increases the incentive to permanently replace low-wage employees with automation. Most people start work on the lowest wage there is. I certainly did. Making it harder to employ people at low cost removes the ability to start working your way up the ladder. You can argue the morality of the minimum wage - whether it should exist or not, what the level should be, but you can't argue the marketplace effects.

swang 13y ago
Are you talking about those self-serve kiosks that they have next to the ordering station or do these robots actually cook the food as well? The reason I ask is because no one wants to use those self-serve kiosks. They've had them everywhere as a means to "free" an employee up but what ends up happening is an employee has to come by and help the customer because 1) the interface sucks and 2) people dont want to read screens then tap then read more screens, they'd rather just tell a cashier what they want and have the cashier press the buttons. But if you mean the robots also serve and cook the food... where do you live again?
- AjithAntony 13y ago
  > The reason I ask is because no one wants to use those self-serve kiosks. I could totally see automated ordering happening. Look at big box stores and self-checkouts. At my local home depot, walmart, and mejier, and smaller stores like county market, there are often only two cashiers for the whole store (I only go at night, i guess). One oversees a bank of 4-8 self-service check-outs, and the other handles one full service checkout. Self-service grocery store checkout is way more complicated than fast-food ordering. There are coupons, produce codes, scales, large qty of items, and the actual act of scanning and bagging. By intentionally under-staffing the full service lanes, people naturally adapt to self-service. This is the standard now. Imagine how efficient fast food could be. One touch for predefined meal, accept the defaults or maybe one more touch for size change, tap your NFC credit card or device, done.
- brc 13y ago
  Of course robots don't serve and cook the food. But at least one front-end person is out of a job. Once upon a time banks experimented with new robot tellers that nobody used, because it was easier to just ask the nice cashier for your money. These robots were even free to use. There was once a time when airport check-in had a couple of weird self-service terminals off to the side...that nobody used. Now with Delta you can't check in with a real person. Rental car companies have got one of those weird check-in robots.... It doesn't matter what the customer wants in the end. If the customer will put up with it and the company can save money, then it will happen.
  - swang 13y ago
    These self-serve kiosks have existed forever and they're not really a recent invention. Yet somehow they are still not very ubiquitous. More efficient? Probably. But when has a business made a fast decision just because something was more efficient? But most likely it is inevitable that fast food will go this route. (Probably not until McDonalds decides to deploy it all across the US), but your statement that at least one "front-end" person is out of a job is not true at all. No one behind the counter is trained only to be a cashier. Pretty much the first thing you do when you work these kinds of jobs is learn how to handle the register because that's the most important thing at a restaurant (getting money from a customer). So how many people is this kiosk actually replacing? Who is to say that having these self-serve kiosks won't just free them up to do something else like cooking food? If freeing them up allows them to serve more customers to make more money then why would the store fire them? There are a lot of things to consider but it seems short sighted to just assume that nixing this task will somehow eliminate an entire spot in the employee roster. Anyways. I just realized how big of a tangent this is, since essentially your example of this was to underlie the fact that people working minimum wage should be appreciative because it can all be automated away, which I disagree with. The whole "ladder" and chopping off the bottom "rungs" is a bit bullshit though since it implies that all the burdens will land upon those same workers.

by brc 13y ago

swang 13y ago

Are you talking about those self-serve kiosks that they have next to the ordering station or do these robots actually cook the food as well? The reason I ask is because no one wants to use those self-serve kiosks. They've had them everywhere as a means to "free" an employee up but what ends up happening is an employee has to come by and help the customer because 1) the interface sucks and 2) people dont want to read screens then tap then read more screens, they'd rather just tell a cashier what they want and have the cashier press the buttons. But if you mean the robots also serve and cook the food... where do you live again?

AjithAntony 13y ago
> The reason I ask is because no one wants to use those self-serve kiosks. I could totally see automated ordering happening. Look at big box stores and self-checkouts. At my local home depot, walmart, and mejier, and smaller stores like county market, there are often only two cashiers for the whole store (I only go at night, i guess). One oversees a bank of 4-8 self-service check-outs, and the other handles one full service checkout. Self-service grocery store checkout is way more complicated than fast-food ordering. There are coupons, produce codes, scales, large qty of items, and the actual act of scanning and bagging. By intentionally under-staffing the full service lanes, people naturally adapt to self-service. This is the standard now. Imagine how efficient fast food could be. One touch for predefined meal, accept the defaults or maybe one more touch for size change, tap your NFC credit card or device, done.
brc 13y ago
Of course robots don't serve and cook the food. But at least one front-end person is out of a job. Once upon a time banks experimented with new robot tellers that nobody used, because it was easier to just ask the nice cashier for your money. These robots were even free to use. There was once a time when airport check-in had a couple of weird self-service terminals off to the side...that nobody used. Now with Delta you can't check in with a real person. Rental car companies have got one of those weird check-in robots.... It doesn't matter what the customer wants in the end. If the customer will put up with it and the company can save money, then it will happen.
- swang 13y ago
  These self-serve kiosks have existed forever and they're not really a recent invention. Yet somehow they are still not very ubiquitous. More efficient? Probably. But when has a business made a fast decision just because something was more efficient? But most likely it is inevitable that fast food will go this route. (Probably not until McDonalds decides to deploy it all across the US), but your statement that at least one "front-end" person is out of a job is not true at all. No one behind the counter is trained only to be a cashier. Pretty much the first thing you do when you work these kinds of jobs is learn how to handle the register because that's the most important thing at a restaurant (getting money from a customer). So how many people is this kiosk actually replacing? Who is to say that having these self-serve kiosks won't just free them up to do something else like cooking food? If freeing them up allows them to serve more customers to make more money then why would the store fire them? There are a lot of things to consider but it seems short sighted to just assume that nixing this task will somehow eliminate an entire spot in the employee roster. Anyways. I just realized how big of a tangent this is, since essentially your example of this was to underlie the fact that people working minimum wage should be appreciative because it can all be automated away, which I disagree with. The whole "ladder" and chopping off the bottom "rungs" is a bit bullshit though since it implies that all the burdens will land upon those same workers.