if you want the best value on food then go to the grocery store.
Assuming your time and transportation has zero cost. And even then you're going to have to be buying pretty massive quantities to get a big enough of a bulk discount to even have a chance to make yourself a burger for anywhere near $1.
Rice and beans are healthy, filling, cheap, and can be stored dry in large quantities. Nobody HAS to eat a fast food sandwich. The real problem here is that companies want to pay their employees so little in order to enrich their investors that they are reducing their own customer bases.
"Researchers compared access to supermarkets, smaller grocery stores, and convenience stores in largely black, Latino, white and racially integrated neighborhoods in a national sample of more than 65,000 census tracts. Earlier research showed that convenience stores and groceries, which are smaller than supermarkets, stock foods higher in fat, sugar and salt.
The study found that living in a poor, mostly black neighborhood presented "a double disadvantage" in supermarket access. Unsurprisingly, poor black neighborhoods had fewer supermarkets than wealthier black neighborhoods."
There are reasons dollar menus are so popular at low-end fast food restaurants. In more poor areas of the US, supermarkets are hard to get to. The people in these places really only have access to CVS or corner stores that are high priced and only sell high margin, low quality food like canned ravioli.
Plus, a lot of poorer people already work at these places, so it's pretty convenient and cost competitive to the products from CVS.
Think of the damage all this unhealthy food loaded with sugar, saturated fat, and sodium is doing to the community. Heart disease and diabetes are rampant problems among the poor because this kind of food is cheaper (often due to govt. subsidies) and more readily available. Not to mention all the damage we're doing to the planet with the industrial ag practices required to sustain this low priced crap. I'm sorry if I don't lament if the fast food industry is failing.
They would actually be better off if fast food was more expensive. Cooking for yourself is cheaper and healthier. And it's not hard to do if you have a minimum set of skills.
On the upside there will be potential for better detecting foodborne illnesses as well as just better food hygiene with fewer human hands.
It's a dire time for people who dropped out of school and with few marketable skills. The tattered net that was the McD's job, is not going to be there for long, not that should have ever been a job for proper adults, but soon it will be on its way out.
However, I think minimum wage increases are a red herring. Increased minimum wages should buy you better employees who are more productive. Never the less, it's just more automation, possibly base wage increase accelerates adoption, but it's not the reason --were just getting better at automation and it's becoming pervasive.
As to people's appetite for automated food production and presentation Japan should allay their fears. After a little trepidation, consumers will grow to like the predictable service.
However, I think minimum wage increases are a red herring. Increased minimum wages should buy you better employees who are more productive.
Why would it do that? If your wages were higher than competitors, certainly paying higher wages gives you the best of the existing workers. But a minimum wage doesn't give you higher wages than competitors at all.
Why aren't you scraping the bottom of the barrel anymore? Before a min wage, you are hiring the least valuable workers. After a min wage increase you are still hiring the same low value workers.
People who didn't see it fit to work for 7/hr might find value in working at 15/hr. Now they can afford to pay gas to get there, etc. Cost benefitwise more people see a benefit in taking that job.
Also, it seems like a minimum wage actually makes life worse for employers who have use for high value employees. Without a minimum wage I can offer $15/hour and I'll get the high value people. High value labor is therefore sorted into high productivity use.
Once you impose a minimum wage this effect is eliminated.
All the benefits you attribute to a minimum wage could be gained voluntarily by companies even without a minimum wage. In fact the minimum wage interferes with these voluntary efforts. Yet they often don't exploit them. Why don't they?
He just explained that to you. The people who actually work hard and have goals will actually want the minimum wage jobs because now its more manageable to live off of.
A university student who needs to pay rent, groceries, a car, etc. Cant afford to live off minimum wage so they want the better paying jobs which may not exist cause companies want to get away with the most profitable scenario which is paying employees the absolute minimum.
That last statement wasn't needed, no body has time for ad hominems.
No, he explained why the labor force would go up - some people won't work at $7/hour but will at $15. That's not the same thing as these people being better employees.
...want the better paying jobs which may not exist cause companies want to get away with the most profitable scenario which is paying employees the absolute minimum.
Yet most jobs in the US pay far more than minimum wage. Why would they do this if paying minimum wage is the "most profitable scenario"?
With a minimum wage you have a fairer wages playing field. No longer are you competing against the wage exploiter when it comes to labor costs.
As to why you get a better employee at 15 vs 7/hr, think about an engineer.
At 70k a laid off engineer will sit it out. A so so engineer will take that job instead. Now, raise that 70k to 120k (or whatever rate) and you'll be able to entice the better engineer, while the so so engineer gets left out, perhaps going back to learn more marketable skills.
I think what hes referring to is that good skilled people will actually want the minimum wage jobs since they cash out the same as the harder earned jobs that require more effort to get into.
Probably because if they're able to actually support themselves, they might be willing to care about the company a bit, instead of constantly wondering if they'll be kicked out of their apartment.
Right, but if no one hires the bottom of the barrel, what do we do with them? Ramp up welfare programs, further penalizing anyone who eventually finds something they can do for a living?
Yes, logically, we'd have to provide [either subsidies, or training, etc.] for people who don't have skills necessary to enter the job market. However at the higher min wage, we get better workers as well as a bigger economy (they make more, spending more and thus contribute more to tax receipts). A worker at 15/hr has more economic stability than a 7 or 8/hr worker, as well you're now getting high school graduates with some junior college ed. A more educated workforce should offer the potential of more value add vs a less educated worker.
> However, I think minimum wage increases are a red herring. Increased minimum wages should buy you better employees who are more productive. Never the less, it's just more automation, possibly base wage increase accelerates adoption, but it's not the reason --were just getting better at automation and it's becoming pervasive.
I'm not sure adding productivity helps. Since a lot of the time is spent doing things like waiting for the frier to be done cooking the fries. No matter how efficient a worker you are, the fries will not cook faster. Likewise there are times of the day when the foot traffic is very low. At those times people are told to do things like sweep the floor but I'm not sure if someone finishes sweeping 10 minutes earlier it really makes a difference.
More productive workers are also usually more dependable. So you're worrying less that the person that's supposed to come in before the lunch rush isn't just going to flake out on you.
I have to admit, I had not considered them just not showing up to work at all. I'm a bit unqualified to talk on this topic as I have never worked in fast food, I was more curious why it matters in that environment.
Productive workers are better, period. The fact that there are hours where productivity doesn't affect your bottom line doesn't really matter. Managers have been scheduling around these hours since the dawn of time.
Source: I worked fast food with both lazy and productive workers before I decided making $8.00/HR wasn't good enough.
At 15 on average one might get a better worker, one more dependable, one who may be able to be rested before work, one which does not have to work as many hours at minimum wage to make ends meet. This will result in a healthier worker, therefore more dependable and offer more labor stability to the employer.
Some will be pushed out. That means more people will require government subsidies and it contributes to building a virtual "wall" by pushing low skills immigrants out of the shrinking low skills labor pool. With automation Trump (or Hillary) won't have to visit immigration reform, there will be no jobs to attract people at the lowest skills levels. There will still be a pull on high skills professionals.
Why is this a good thing? If a Mexican can do a job cheaper than a machine, why shouldn't he be hired to do so? It makes life better for him and for the guy who doesn't need to buy a machine.
If you really dislike Mexicans and are willing to harm Americans in order to keep them away, I guess it makes sense. I guess I'm just not a fan of Trump/Bernie/Hillary style nationalism.
That's a characterization I didn't make. What I stated were the consequences of higher min wages. It benefits citizens as well as high skills foreign nationals in the US but is possibly detrimental to low skills labor. There is no judgement in that, just stating the consequences, some positive, some negative. Not all low skills labor come from directly across the border.
On the other hand it benefits higher skills workers from across the border because there will be more demand for high skills labor.
It's a good thing because it expands our ability to automate things. It rewards innovation rather than manipulating the immigration process.
And you know why people don't want Mexicans to flood America. I've seen you link to Putnam's study which shows that diversity destroys trust and communities. There are real externalities here.
I generally care very little about psychological externalities, whether they be dirty Mexicans destroying trust or Halloween costumes at Yale being too scary.
That's a bizarre stance. It's normal that people don't want to have, say, a brick factory built next to their house because it would impact their psychological well-being.
Trust between members of society, however, is not a matter of individual psychology. It's one of the crucial differences between western countries where you can expect a level of fairness in dealing with strangers, and the third world where you have to rely on your family and clan. It's what enables the markets to work, the justice system, the bureaucracy. Not to mention making living more pleasant.
And anyway, why would the "no Mexicans" policy be OK at a single house level, and not a gated community, city, state, country?
Brick factories emit pollution. A much better comparison would be to a porno factory in a soundproofed house - I just don't like the thought of gay dudes fellating each other right next door, and I don't like to see them walking out to their car in their leather pants!
With a functioning justice system, trust between members of society is something that can be outsourced. And if you are really worried about it, don't do business with Mexicans. I am sympathetic to the problem of political externalities - it would be terrible if the US were to be overrun by people who vote for Trump, Hillary or Bernie.
I take issue with your "no Mexicans" policy when you threaten me with violence if I don't participate in it. Same issue I have with Jim Crow, really (remember that Jim Crow was a "must discriminate" law).
I was thinking about noise from the factory, not pollution. We generally don't live in soundproof houses and even if you have some high-tech envelope building, you still might want to enjoy your backyard.
With a functioning justice system, trust between members of society is something that can be outsourced.
It's fiction. First, it doesn't happen. In reality outsourcing means third-world elites using western courts like Russian oligarchs settling their disputes in Britain or Latin American countries borrowing under US law. Second, because the justice system is too slow and expensive to be used in any significant number of transactions. Finally, rampant corruption renders it all moot in low-trust countries.
I take issue with your "no Mexicans" policy when you threaten me with violence
What about a private company? Should its owners be allowed to institute a "no Mexicans" hiring policy?
Thanks. Are there any signs you'd recommend that we watch for in respect to decline-of-empire and Gothic invasion and immigration, in order to see if the U.S. is following along a similar path? Or is that the preferred outcome?
The Romans were multi-ethnic from pretty early on - Italians, Greeks, Africans, any ethnicity surrounding the Mediterranean was represented. Their first black emperor (Caracalla) about 200 years in was a nonevent. Overall I think 500 years/1100 years (western/eastern) is a pretty good run.
The study that showed pretty much everyone is, at heart, a bigot? Yeah. So? Strive to do better. Knowing your natural predisposition, counteract it.
Help these Mexicans get jobs and in a while they won't be "diverse", they just won't look exactly like everyone. Even these purebred enclaves have got blondes and brunettes (right?) and society hasn't ripped itself apart. This is just another trivial difference they'll learn to ignore.
The study that showed pretty much everyone is, at heart, a bigot? Yeah. So?
Not really but that's like concluding that studies on multitasking show everyone's lazy and they just need to try harder instead of focusing on one thing. "Knowing your natural predisposition, counteract it."
Back in the communist days, there was a popular saying in Poland: "the system is fine, only people failed it." Obviously, it's silly to design a system for humans that doesn't work for humans because you otherwise like its aesthetics or it would work great if the people acted differently than humans normally do.
Not that we don't do it in IT with certain regularity.
No, that's not what the Putnam study said. That's what Putnam wrote at the end that he hoped would be true, but had no evidence for (in spite of searching for it for 6 years and delaying publication of evidence to the contrary).
> Increased minimum wages should buy you better employees who are more productive
I disagree. I think an increased minimum wage, presumably above the market clearing price for a person with that set of skills, allows the manager to introduce non-economic factors into his decision making. This includes personal biases and encourages nepotism. It's also worth remembering that the minimum wage law had less than noble intentions
> The business-friendly National Center for Policy Analysis points out “the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, requiring ‘prevailing’ wages on federally assisted construction projects, was supported by the idea that it would keep contractors from using ‘cheap colored labor’ to underbid contractors using white labor.”
The current min wage is no wage for an adult. It's untenable. Admittedly, I imagine it will benefit modestly educated Americans (including white, black and Latin) but will likely be detrimental to low skills (minimum education) immigrants (and some locals) as there is no price advantage to hiring them, given their deficits.
Yep, and they have a remarkable "retro-future" charm to them.
All the automats really do is remove the person at the counter. There's still folks preparing the stuff in the back, there's still people clearing tables and cleaning up. Bringing this back will perhaps reduce headcount in some locations but only by a fraction.
There is nothing transformational about this idea. It is merely being used as fodder in arguments against raising the minimum wage. I am sure they would prefer avoiding fitting existing stores with such new technology.
My local McDonalds now has giant screens for you to place your order. Most of the time I'm in there they now have counter staff with very little to do.
If they can work out a way to automate the making of the burger, or even the transport from the chef to the customer, they'll be able to cut their staff even more.
I hate them. They are unresponsive and slower. I walk past them, go up to the counter, and get a nice greeting and a smile from a human being. Ditto for supermarkets: those machines are even more annoying. I always try to go to a lane with a real person (granted, they're not always smiling and sometimes acknowledge you less than a computer)
Self checkout is wildly faster for me, even with computers that feel like they're running on hardware from 15 years ago. I can have my basket organized in the same order I'm going to bag it, scan it in, bag it efficiently, pay and leave. The worst part about self checkout are the other people who don't know how to use it, have huge carts(especially at a tiny checkout kiosk that should really have a max item limit) or are just slow. In the case of lines at self checkout, I'll go to an empty lane if the whole store isn't just packed.
This will be huge. Imagine a cinder block building half-buried in the ground with a loading dock and a drive-up. You wave your chipped credit card, the screen shows your last 5 orders or a Menu button. Make your selection and drive up to the pneumatic delivery chute. Plop! your bagged meal arrives seconds later.
Economically, it means we'll finally have to face the fact that, to run our country, we don't actually need everybody to work any more. Have to figure that one out (or at least, come to the consensus that a basic income is a good thing).
If we could somehow gather up the taxes to pay for basic income, maybe we could hire people to work on all of the things in "the commons" that obviously need fixing or enhancing, instead.
I consider myself to the left of today's Democratic party (then again, I think Richard Nixon was more liberal than 21st century Democrats), but basic income sounds like a real moral hazard to me, and traditional Keynesian economics would likely deal with most of the unemployment problem, perhaps in conjunction with rolling back some "free trade" back-stabbing (alas, that crap was bi-partisan). Easy access to "welfare" in the 60s and 70s is what got us the back-lash of Reagan and friends.
Welfare is not the problem its made out to be. But to work on the 'moral hazard': perhaps the basic income can be earned simply by social activity like elder visits, park monitoring, mentoring, public health seminars. Encourage improvements in quality of life.
Making it 'earned' is missing a major point of basic income: that just giving the money away can ultimately be much cheaper and more efficient than verifying if people 'deserve' it.
The reason to 'deserve it' is twofold. First, to avoid folks stagnating - a public health issue. 2nd, to have some way of knowing the person actually exists! E.g. automate it with an app, that verifies simply that you spend time at places associated with socializing. Not much is cheaper than that.
I guess I'm still just enough of a jerk that I would like to see the recipient's contribute positively to society, such as the examples mentioned above (child / elder care, park ranger, etc). There is plenty to be done - why don't we set people on that (roads, utilities, parks, forests, care, fire, police,... ), then see where we stand?
The moral hazard is that it contributes to stagnation, something like the spaceship in "Wall-E". Social activity isn't much of a substitute for knowledge progress. I'd argue that improvements in the quality of life would be more significant by giving purpose and drive to the population as a whole (young and elder), something more akin to the spaceships in Star Trek, where menial tasks are handled auto-magically and problem solving is handled by the crew.
I wouldn't dismiss social tasks. It gets people involved in community, including knowledge progress. And who are we to decide what purpose and drive to give a population? The minimum for health and growth is socializing.
More generally, I really wouldn't trust centrally planned "knowledge progress" or socialization or whatever tasks any more than I'd trust most other centrally planned control of a society's lives. Whether it's a good idea or not, there's nobody I'd trust with that power.
Hey, the market economy is already 'planning control of lives'. We're talking about loosening those controls. By removing the threat of starvation and homelessness.
> the market economy is already 'planning control of lives'
Not (entirely) centrally (yet). If you piss off the wrong individual, or stand out to whatever degree, you still have a shot at a somewhat decent life. There's nobody outside of work you have to obey for threat of losing your livelihood.
I was agreeing with you - basic income only works if everyone gets it, if there isn't a test for getting it, so that there's very little way it can be denied.
The issue is that someone has to decide what "participating in society" actually means. Today, it's often seeking work or working for pay - but we already agree that there's ways of participating in and contributing to society that don't involve that. I'm sure that whatever you or anyone else can come up with that's "easily measured", there's people who contribute to society in other ways, and people who can't participate in the way that you want.
Should not have been downvoted. It takes little creativity to imagine artificial intelligences serving the consuming masses coming to the conclusion that they can handle things on their own and humans are a net resource drain.
This company has been marketing one of its products as an automated burger maker. Not sure if they have McD's as a customer. They claim 360 burgers/hr[0]
Knew those were imminent; a recruiter contacted me a year and a half ago for a job working on those systems for McDonalds, so I knew it was only a matter of time before they started showing up.
You in the Chicago area, by any chance? That's where their R&D building is located. Although I believe she said they were going to do some testing on the west coast, also.
I'm okay with this. As he says, robots are the best workers.
Once companies start investing more in automation, then we as a country can focus on freeing humans from the shackles of performing meager tasks for penance. We can tax these companies a modest amount and give that to unemployed workers.
It's really a win/win. The business makes lots more money and the former workers now have a load of free time to do with as they please. They can focus on developing skills for higher paying jobs, or just live out their lives in modest leisure, focusing on raising their family instead of just feeding them.
This problem could be solved with robots as well. Why not having farming robots alongside with ones which protect them and the products of their labor from the greedy hands of the have-nots? It could be that robots able to kill will overturn the balance to the ones who can afford them even if they are a few. Who would dare to stop them?
If you have nothing to lose as a have-not, your options for action are extensive.
Even the smallest nation-states can afford and manufacture nuclear weapons now (ie North Korea). I don't foresee this capability getting more expensive or more difficult as time goes on, only cheaper and easier.
That's not a statement that can be made universally, I think. They're way better in scenarios which tend to be deterministic, but otherwise not so much (e.g. when there's more interaction with humans!). I also like the predictability of robots, but more than once I got blocked by a e-toll system with Gandalf-syndrome - "you shall not pass!" :). It's really a lousy, lousy experience.
You can say "it was a case of bad implementation", but surely an analagous argument can be made to a less-than-performant human employee.
Look back at human history. Now ask yourself how you can be so naive still.
We (society in general) will let these people starve and act like it's their own fault.
> They can focus on developing skills for higher paying jobs
Ever wondered why they don't do that now. I mean, everyone could right after high school right? They had tons of free time then. It costs money, an increasing amount of money actually. Where do you propose they get it? We (society) blame people for not improving themselves when they work hard to make a corporation money now, how can you think that would improve when they don't.
Actually, the argument is that people working 60 hours a week at two jobs really has no free time to learn anything. If you free people from work, some portion of them will take up a hobby to fill time and some of those hobbies can be turned into a job.
Some of them may look to school and education to improve their prospects, but those aren't the only path to a good job. Lots of people are creative and have good business sense and I think freeing people up from doing meaningless tasks is a great way to capitalize on this fact.
To me, people + time + capital => innovation.
All I'm proposing is to give these people a lot of time and a bit of money.
Also, automation tends to make commodity goods less expensive. Which helps the poor and middle class. Assuming of course that the market does it's job and costs do go lower rather than getting added to the company bottom line.
Lower costs of goods only helps the poor if they have the money to actually purchase those goods. If they're just being kicked out of jobs, and not given any assistance, then lower cost of goods does nothing for them.
Freeing people from work also "frees" them from the income stream that allows them to feel secure.
If you don't feel secure in some being able to provide basic needs (food, shelter, water, etc) for yourself and your dependents then it's a lot harder to focus on higher level concepts which are required to learn new, more marketable skills.
> We can tax these companies a modest amount and give that to unemployed workers.
This is subjective and a slippery slope. There really is no difference between a tax and raising the minimum wage. A tax creates a new middle mam, the government, who is responsible to pay people vs a business owner. Either way the cost is passed to the consumer.
Saying there is no difference between a tax and raising the minimum wage might be going a bit far. Depending on what you're taxing the incentives and results of a tax and a minimum wage increase can be very different. For instance, a tax on profits doesn't change which activities are profitable it reduces the extent to which they are profitable, while a minimum wage increase can actually change what activities are profitable in edge cases.
Personally, I think guaranteed basic income + no minimum wage puts the incentives in the right places, but I'll settle for increased minimum wage in the face of the unlikelihood of a basic income being put in place.
"Once companies start investing more in automation, then we as a country can focus on freeing humans from the shackles of performing meager tasks for penance. We can tax these companies a modest amount and give that to unemployed workers."
Except Congress right now would never enact such a tax (or any tax, thanks to that stupid pledge). So what will those workers who no longer have a way to support themselves do?
This is just the tail end optimizations (aka human effort reductions) that have been happening for a long time in the food business.
Fast food in particular, but even most "fast casual" places don't actually make the food in the sense of raw ingredients come in, finished dishes go out.
What is delivered to each restaurant are prepackaged, pre portioned food "modules" that are then rapidly assembled: frozen hamburger patties, bags of precut flash frozen fries, bags of precut onions, etc. Which is wildly more efficient than handling everything in house.
Similarly, Starbucks switched from barista's who needed some level of skill to the "Mastrena" machines which let you hit buttons to make drinks.
"Government driving up the cost of labor" is an absurd thing to say for the CEO of a company which is expanding and who, most likely, drives around in a luxury car and owns a private airplane. Rising wages are only a problem for greedy businessmen who won't buckle up for once and pay employees their fair share, sacrificing maybe a year or two of ski-holidays and caviar.
Actually, your comment appears to be even less based on reality and observation than the quotation you're railing against.
Assuming you're reserving your diatribe for the US, major corporations are simply hoarding and offshoring cash reserves. This is so that they can defer paying the highest corporate income tax in the world, and wait to file all of this cash when the next administration announces a corporate income tax holiday. That will be when the hiring happens and wages get raised in the US.
a large majority of the Carls Jr locations are franchise - the pay of the CEO of McDonalds or Carls Jr is not really connected.
A far larger problem is the market focus on short term performance and a changing regulatory environment (post enron) that criminalizes mistakes - for the last 30 years (since the corporate raider era in the 80's) CEO tenure has been shrinking, and overall risk has (to the CEO) been rising - because of that rising risk (of being sued, fired (for not meeting unrealistic market performance), or even going to jail) - their pay has gone up considerably.
I'm not saying any of this is good or right - it just is.
This is really a net plus. The vast majority of people working fast food, really don't like it (as a job). They hate the pay, and most hate the work. Technology like this is a blessing in disguise, it frees people from working in places they hate. If you're the kind of person who actually liked a job in fast food, you're a special person... and a fine dining restaurant would probably be even more enjoyable for you. Of course the downside is our society requires you to have a job to participate in the economy, and the bar to getting a job just raised a bit higher. Technology combined with globalization isn't changing the world... it CHANGED the world. In 2016 we're at a crossroads to decide how we deal with it. To me the current "extremist" candidates Bernie vs Trump represent two alternative views... Bernie seems interested in building a society that takes care of its citizens, even if they're not capable of taking care of themselves in the new economy. He advocates not for "Free" college, but rather raising the bar to help people get the NEW minimum education required to participate. Trump says (though its unclear) that the solution to people no longer being able to participate in the new economy is to ratchet back the social (not technological) progress we've made.
I'll take a stab and say protected classes. You can't refuse service or employment to someone based on race, disability status, and so on, and the rare edge cases of people abusing this statute adds fuel to the "political correctness is ruining this country" fire.
Without such protections, people would be cheaper to employ because the deck is further stacked against them.
So is adding more protected classes progress in all cases, are are there certain criteria as to what counts as a protected class? And is this really progress (imagine how protected classes works in certain jobs related to the sex industry), you are basically overriding a persons ability to consent, and even if the action is only something physical, is it really progress for the government to force consent under threat?
And maybe we could even break it down. Maybe protected classes for employment is great and maybe protect classes for service aren't. Or maybe protected classes for employment is actually regressive because it is endorsement of all the factors you can discriminate on. For example, orientation isn't a protect class (at least not federally), and thus in many places is legal to discriminate based on. Perhaps progress would be that employment discrimination is only allowed for factors actually relevant to the job, and adding protected classes is a regression from this.
Obviously a political statement supporting the profitability of his current business model!
"This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage," says Puzder. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?"
The 'human' question is, will a minimum wage job pay enough to support a person. Obviously this is not considered :(
He's right - when the bulk of common minimum wage jobs have been replaced by machines to offset the human resource cost, it's going to decimate low-wage employment.
There will eventually be a price point at which the cost of buying and maintaining machines is more expensive than human labor. The problem is those competitive wages are extremely low, measured in pennies an hour. (Mechanical Turk is a great example)
Today's minimum wage workers may eventually end up working illegally or flooding "gig economy" 1099 roles - driving their collective value in those markets down to wages less than a dollar an hour.
Without a strategy like Basic Income, our cushy Western living standards are going to be at a real crossroads soon. We're about to turn a good chunk of the Western world into Bangladesh
The deception in his argument, though, is that this is happening because of rising minimum wages.
If the minimum wage stayed the same, but automation was cheaper regardless (it will be by its very nature, count on it), he'd still be first in line to axe those jobs.
Agreed. He clearly has a self-serving business and political agenda underlying his statements.
If his business is suffering right now, it's because the American appetite has changed - people either want decent food made with quality ingredients in a friendly higher-touch environment, or dollar value menu quick calories.
Much rather see crummy middle-ground fast food chains like Carl's/Hardees, Burger King, Wendy's go under and be replaced with better businesses that respect employee attention to quality and service than have them morph into automats. If fully automated dining becomes a category, I really doubt these lumbering grease factories will be the ones to dominate it anyhow
This is easy for you to say, you can easily make the trade-off of higher quality for more money. But is it right for you to force your values onto people with less money, who will feel the pain of that trade-off more sharply? Maybe they'd also prefer to eat in a nicer place, but their circumstances simply don't allow for it.
Keeping costs down isn't being miserly, it's helping to deliver a product that is within reach of the less fortunate.
You misinterpret.. My comment had a very specific list of middle-tier fast food joints that have gone to crap.
McDonald's wasn't in that list. Neither was Taco Bell. Both very affordable, and still pretty consistent.
But if you're going to call me out on classism, it's a fairly ironic position to take that fast food is some sort of special charity to the poor. A far more charitable approach would be embracing publicly-subsidized grocery stores in food deserts rather than letting private equity slumlords peddle sugary deep fried dog food as if it's the only game in town.
Right now there is a gap between cost of human labor and cost of automation. When automation becomes cheaper than human labor, it will make more economical sense to switch to automation. Even if you stick with only automation getting cheaper, the gap is still closing. But with the cost of human labor also increasing, the gap is just closing even faster. It is not reasonable to think we can slow the decreasing cost of automation as that is just the nature of technology at scale. But we have absolute control over the cost of human labor. Every time we vote for a minimum wage increase we are choosing to increase the cost of human labor. If this is the choice we make then we can't really complain about the effect it has.
That is a good point. One of the reasons historians tend to claim as to why the industrial revolution occurred in 18th century Britain and not Ptolemeic Egypt (where there is evidence of machines like steam engines) is that ancient Egyptian labor was cheap, which meant more profits for ruling classes while the people had jobs.
It is worth noting that Egyptian prominence is directly due to the abundant resources of the Nile, and presumably, with technology displacing natural abundance, there could certainly be more for everybody. Famines are more often a result of policy, and rarely because food is so scarce that no-one can eat (ex: Ireland and India under British rule)
Business Insider would’ve scored some journalistic points if they had used a real photograph of a janky ass Carl’s Jr burger instead of promotional art.
The path: Google's self driving car finally makes it out of dev. hell and a few years pass. Domino's and Pizza Hut plaster some of the cars with glaring vinyl stickers and plop a stoned teenager in the seat because lawyers. More time passes. Someone finally figures out how to make a decent enough pizza via a robot oven. Now you have a self driving car and a self making pizza, the stoned twentysomething is finally taken out of the car to find another job. You pull up you phone and order a pizza, the car is routed while in transit to another place and makes the pizza while delivering other pizzas. Store fronts disappear with their allotment of stoned thirtysomethings. Domino's tries to put in a self making deep-fried chicken wings machine, but so many catch fire and don't know it while driving down a freeway that lawyers evoke their toll. Eventually Pizza Hut puts in malicious code to wreck Domino's cars 'safely'. A literal arms race now pops up. Then the stoned fortysomethings order 2 pizzas from competing companies at the same time. The entertainment from watching heavily armed robots fight for the right to deliver you pizza becomes a major sport. Fin.
Or you could do it Snow Crash style and hope the delivery guy is late so you can shoot him and take the car.
That aside, when you use automation to strip personality from a venue, it puts personality at a premium. Some of the best places to eat in town are those where the staff are friendly and you can chat with each other about your day. No robot could ever do that (as long as you know it's a robot).
"Your pie in 30 minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit." (But yeah, it's an exageration even in the context of Snow Crash's hypercrazed world. Hiro later rveeals he doesn't know what happens to the drivers in such situations.)
Automats were/are pre prepackaged to go food (read: longish shelf life, things that dont get soggy or taste blah when cold). On the other hand these can have food made to order like any fast food joint, just more streamlined ordering and little interaction if any with staffs.
You can build your own bowl (completely customized) at Eatsa using their app. They also win on design and UX. I definitely recommend checking one out, it's really fun.
Let me just say this, not even Bernie Sanders favorite - Sweden - has legal minimum wages.
(In Sweden the Employers and the uhm.. "organized" Unions negotiate collective agreements that have something similar to legal minimum wages - but they're voluntary, not mandated by the state or the county etc)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadAssuming your time and transportation has zero cost. And even then you're going to have to be buying pretty massive quantities to get a big enough of a bulk discount to even have a chance to make yourself a burger for anywhere near $1.
The study found that living in a poor, mostly black neighborhood presented "a double disadvantage" in supermarket access. Unsurprisingly, poor black neighborhoods had fewer supermarkets than wealthier black neighborhoods."
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/30/science/la-sci-sn-po...
Plus, a lot of poorer people already work at these places, so it's pretty convenient and cost competitive to the products from CVS.
It's a dire time for people who dropped out of school and with few marketable skills. The tattered net that was the McD's job, is not going to be there for long, not that should have ever been a job for proper adults, but soon it will be on its way out.
However, I think minimum wage increases are a red herring. Increased minimum wages should buy you better employees who are more productive. Never the less, it's just more automation, possibly base wage increase accelerates adoption, but it's not the reason --were just getting better at automation and it's becoming pervasive.
As to people's appetite for automated food production and presentation Japan should allay their fears. After a little trepidation, consumers will grow to like the predictable service.
Why would it do that? If your wages were higher than competitors, certainly paying higher wages gives you the best of the existing workers. But a minimum wage doesn't give you higher wages than competitors at all.
Also, it seems like a minimum wage actually makes life worse for employers who have use for high value employees. Without a minimum wage I can offer $15/hour and I'll get the high value people. High value labor is therefore sorted into high productivity use.
Once you impose a minimum wage this effect is eliminated.
All the benefits you attribute to a minimum wage could be gained voluntarily by companies even without a minimum wage. In fact the minimum wage interferes with these voluntary efforts. Yet they often don't exploit them. Why don't they?
He just explained that to you. The people who actually work hard and have goals will actually want the minimum wage jobs because now its more manageable to live off of.
A university student who needs to pay rent, groceries, a car, etc. Cant afford to live off minimum wage so they want the better paying jobs which may not exist cause companies want to get away with the most profitable scenario which is paying employees the absolute minimum.
That last statement wasn't needed, no body has time for ad hominems.
...want the better paying jobs which may not exist cause companies want to get away with the most profitable scenario which is paying employees the absolute minimum.
Yet most jobs in the US pay far more than minimum wage. Why would they do this if paying minimum wage is the "most profitable scenario"?
As to why you get a better employee at 15 vs 7/hr, think about an engineer.
At 70k a laid off engineer will sit it out. A so so engineer will take that job instead. Now, raise that 70k to 120k (or whatever rate) and you'll be able to entice the better engineer, while the so so engineer gets left out, perhaps going back to learn more marketable skills.
We can't all hire the best (or better) employees.
I'm not sure adding productivity helps. Since a lot of the time is spent doing things like waiting for the frier to be done cooking the fries. No matter how efficient a worker you are, the fries will not cook faster. Likewise there are times of the day when the foot traffic is very low. At those times people are told to do things like sweep the floor but I'm not sure if someone finishes sweeping 10 minutes earlier it really makes a difference.
Source: I worked fast food with both lazy and productive workers before I decided making $8.00/HR wasn't good enough.
If you really dislike Mexicans and are willing to harm Americans in order to keep them away, I guess it makes sense. I guess I'm just not a fan of Trump/Bernie/Hillary style nationalism.
On the other hand it benefits higher skills workers from across the border because there will be more demand for high skills labor.
And you know why people don't want Mexicans to flood America. I've seen you link to Putnam's study which shows that diversity destroys trust and communities. There are real externalities here.
(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan who pointed out the parallel. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/nativism_agains.... )
I do, however, support your right to put up a "No Mexicans" sign and make your own house a safe space.
Trust between members of society, however, is not a matter of individual psychology. It's one of the crucial differences between western countries where you can expect a level of fairness in dealing with strangers, and the third world where you have to rely on your family and clan. It's what enables the markets to work, the justice system, the bureaucracy. Not to mention making living more pleasant.
And anyway, why would the "no Mexicans" policy be OK at a single house level, and not a gated community, city, state, country?
With a functioning justice system, trust between members of society is something that can be outsourced. And if you are really worried about it, don't do business with Mexicans. I am sympathetic to the problem of political externalities - it would be terrible if the US were to be overrun by people who vote for Trump, Hillary or Bernie.
I take issue with your "no Mexicans" policy when you threaten me with violence if I don't participate in it. Same issue I have with Jim Crow, really (remember that Jim Crow was a "must discriminate" law).
With a functioning justice system, trust between members of society is something that can be outsourced.
It's fiction. First, it doesn't happen. In reality outsourcing means third-world elites using western courts like Russian oligarchs settling their disputes in Britain or Latin American countries borrowing under US law. Second, because the justice system is too slow and expensive to be used in any significant number of transactions. Finally, rampant corruption renders it all moot in low-trust countries.
I take issue with your "no Mexicans" policy when you threaten me with violence
What about a private company? Should its owners be allowed to institute a "no Mexicans" hiring policy?
Help these Mexicans get jobs and in a while they won't be "diverse", they just won't look exactly like everyone. Even these purebred enclaves have got blondes and brunettes (right?) and society hasn't ripped itself apart. This is just another trivial difference they'll learn to ignore.
Not really but that's like concluding that studies on multitasking show everyone's lazy and they just need to try harder instead of focusing on one thing. "Knowing your natural predisposition, counteract it."
Back in the communist days, there was a popular saying in Poland: "the system is fine, only people failed it." Obviously, it's silly to design a system for humans that doesn't work for humans because you otherwise like its aesthetics or it would work great if the people acted differently than humans normally do.
Not that we don't do it in IT with certain regularity.
I disagree. I think an increased minimum wage, presumably above the market clearing price for a person with that set of skills, allows the manager to introduce non-economic factors into his decision making. This includes personal biases and encourages nepotism. It's also worth remembering that the minimum wage law had less than noble intentions
> The business-friendly National Center for Policy Analysis points out “the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, requiring ‘prevailing’ wages on federally assisted construction projects, was supported by the idea that it would keep contractors from using ‘cheap colored labor’ to underbid contractors using white labor.”
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-th...
All the automats really do is remove the person at the counter. There's still folks preparing the stuff in the back, there's still people clearing tables and cleaning up. Bringing this back will perhaps reduce headcount in some locations but only by a fraction.
There is nothing transformational about this idea. It is merely being used as fodder in arguments against raising the minimum wage. I am sure they would prefer avoiding fitting existing stores with such new technology.
If they can work out a way to automate the making of the burger, or even the transport from the chef to the customer, they'll be able to cut their staff even more.
If I have produce, or a large basket of stuff likely to contain a "processing error" in it somewhere, no way. Go for a real clerk.
Economically, it means we'll finally have to face the fact that, to run our country, we don't actually need everybody to work any more. Have to figure that one out (or at least, come to the consensus that a basic income is a good thing).
I consider myself to the left of today's Democratic party (then again, I think Richard Nixon was more liberal than 21st century Democrats), but basic income sounds like a real moral hazard to me, and traditional Keynesian economics would likely deal with most of the unemployment problem, perhaps in conjunction with rolling back some "free trade" back-stabbing (alas, that crap was bi-partisan). Easy access to "welfare" in the 60s and 70s is what got us the back-lash of Reagan and friends.
Not (entirely) centrally (yet). If you piss off the wrong individual, or stand out to whatever degree, you still have a shot at a somewhat decent life. There's nobody outside of work you have to obey for threat of losing your livelihood.
I was agreeing with you - basic income only works if everyone gets it, if there isn't a test for getting it, so that there's very little way it can be denied.
We don't actually need everybody any more. FTFY
This company has been marketing one of its products as an automated burger maker. Not sure if they have McD's as a customer. They claim 360 burgers/hr[0]
[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robo...
You in the Chicago area, by any chance? That's where their R&D building is located. Although I believe she said they were going to do some testing on the west coast, also.
Once companies start investing more in automation, then we as a country can focus on freeing humans from the shackles of performing meager tasks for penance. We can tax these companies a modest amount and give that to unemployed workers.
It's really a win/win. The business makes lots more money and the former workers now have a load of free time to do with as they please. They can focus on developing skills for higher paying jobs, or just live out their lives in modest leisure, focusing on raising their family instead of just feeding them.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
Even the smallest nation-states can afford and manufacture nuclear weapons now (ie North Korea). I don't foresee this capability getting more expensive or more difficult as time goes on, only cheaper and easier.
That's not a statement that can be made universally, I think. They're way better in scenarios which tend to be deterministic, but otherwise not so much (e.g. when there's more interaction with humans!). I also like the predictability of robots, but more than once I got blocked by a e-toll system with Gandalf-syndrome - "you shall not pass!" :). It's really a lousy, lousy experience.
You can say "it was a case of bad implementation", but surely an analagous argument can be made to a less-than-performant human employee.
We (society in general) will let these people starve and act like it's their own fault.
> They can focus on developing skills for higher paying jobs
Ever wondered why they don't do that now. I mean, everyone could right after high school right? They had tons of free time then. It costs money, an increasing amount of money actually. Where do you propose they get it? We (society) blame people for not improving themselves when they work hard to make a corporation money now, how can you think that would improve when they don't.
Some of them may look to school and education to improve their prospects, but those aren't the only path to a good job. Lots of people are creative and have good business sense and I think freeing people up from doing meaningless tasks is a great way to capitalize on this fact.
To me, people + time + capital => innovation.
All I'm proposing is to give these people a lot of time and a bit of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Freeing people from work also "frees" them from the income stream that allows them to feel secure.
If you don't feel secure in some being able to provide basic needs (food, shelter, water, etc) for yourself and your dependents then it's a lot harder to focus on higher level concepts which are required to learn new, more marketable skills.
That's why I suggested taxing the companies and using it to supply these people with a basic income.
This is subjective and a slippery slope. There really is no difference between a tax and raising the minimum wage. A tax creates a new middle mam, the government, who is responsible to pay people vs a business owner. Either way the cost is passed to the consumer.
Personally, I think guaranteed basic income + no minimum wage puts the incentives in the right places, but I'll settle for increased minimum wage in the face of the unlikelihood of a basic income being put in place.
Except Congress right now would never enact such a tax (or any tax, thanks to that stupid pledge). So what will those workers who no longer have a way to support themselves do?
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU
http://www.mandatory.com/2013/08/09/10-things-idiocracy-pred...
At this point, maybe somebody else can insert a better "Culture" reference than I can :-)
Fast food in particular, but even most "fast casual" places don't actually make the food in the sense of raw ingredients come in, finished dishes go out.
What is delivered to each restaurant are prepackaged, pre portioned food "modules" that are then rapidly assembled: frozen hamburger patties, bags of precut flash frozen fries, bags of precut onions, etc. Which is wildly more efficient than handling everything in house.
Similarly, Starbucks switched from barista's who needed some level of skill to the "Mastrena" machines which let you hit buttons to make drinks.
1 - http://www.businessinsider.com/the-company-behind-starbucks-...
Assuming you're reserving your diatribe for the US, major corporations are simply hoarding and offshoring cash reserves. This is so that they can defer paying the highest corporate income tax in the world, and wait to file all of this cash when the next administration announces a corporate income tax holiday. That will be when the hiring happens and wages get raised in the US.
A far larger problem is the market focus on short term performance and a changing regulatory environment (post enron) that criminalizes mistakes - for the last 30 years (since the corporate raider era in the 80's) CEO tenure has been shrinking, and overall risk has (to the CEO) been rising - because of that rising risk (of being sued, fired (for not meeting unrealistic market performance), or even going to jail) - their pay has gone up considerably.
I'm not saying any of this is good or right - it just is.
Without such protections, people would be cheaper to employ because the deck is further stacked against them.
That is how we go back in time.
And maybe we could even break it down. Maybe protected classes for employment is great and maybe protect classes for service aren't. Or maybe protected classes for employment is actually regressive because it is endorsement of all the factors you can discriminate on. For example, orientation isn't a protect class (at least not federally), and thus in many places is legal to discriminate based on. Perhaps progress would be that employment discrimination is only allowed for factors actually relevant to the job, and adding protected classes is a regression from this.
"This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage," says Puzder. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?"
The 'human' question is, will a minimum wage job pay enough to support a person. Obviously this is not considered :(
There will eventually be a price point at which the cost of buying and maintaining machines is more expensive than human labor. The problem is those competitive wages are extremely low, measured in pennies an hour. (Mechanical Turk is a great example)
Today's minimum wage workers may eventually end up working illegally or flooding "gig economy" 1099 roles - driving their collective value in those markets down to wages less than a dollar an hour.
Without a strategy like Basic Income, our cushy Western living standards are going to be at a real crossroads soon. We're about to turn a good chunk of the Western world into Bangladesh
If the minimum wage stayed the same, but automation was cheaper regardless (it will be by its very nature, count on it), he'd still be first in line to axe those jobs.
If his business is suffering right now, it's because the American appetite has changed - people either want decent food made with quality ingredients in a friendly higher-touch environment, or dollar value menu quick calories.
Much rather see crummy middle-ground fast food chains like Carl's/Hardees, Burger King, Wendy's go under and be replaced with better businesses that respect employee attention to quality and service than have them morph into automats. If fully automated dining becomes a category, I really doubt these lumbering grease factories will be the ones to dominate it anyhow
Keeping costs down isn't being miserly, it's helping to deliver a product that is within reach of the less fortunate.
McDonald's wasn't in that list. Neither was Taco Bell. Both very affordable, and still pretty consistent.
But if you're going to call me out on classism, it's a fairly ironic position to take that fast food is some sort of special charity to the poor. A far more charitable approach would be embracing publicly-subsidized grocery stores in food deserts rather than letting private equity slumlords peddle sugary deep fried dog food as if it's the only game in town.
It is worth noting that Egyptian prominence is directly due to the abundant resources of the Nile, and presumably, with technology displacing natural abundance, there could certainly be more for everybody. Famines are more often a result of policy, and rarely because food is so scarce that no-one can eat (ex: Ireland and India under British rule)
That aside, when you use automation to strip personality from a venue, it puts personality at a premium. Some of the best places to eat in town are those where the staff are friendly and you can chat with each other about your day. No robot could ever do that (as long as you know it's a robot).
it was pretty awesome, except for the standard issues (slow people trying to use it, etc.)
Carl's Jr.: Fuck you, I'm eating!
http://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Steel-Rat-Born-Series/dp/144...
(In Sweden the Employers and the uhm.. "organized" Unions negotiate collective agreements that have something similar to legal minimum wages - but they're voluntary, not mandated by the state or the county etc)