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McDonald's beginning to replace cashiers with touch screens

Anyone actually think the capitalists will pass on the decreased labor costs to the customer instead of hookers and blow?

Oh well, it's not like they bothered to pay their employees in the first place. Same difference.
 
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TheRedUnderURBed said:
Anyone actually think the capitalists will pass on the decreased labor costs to the customer instead of hookers and blow? Oh well it's not like they bothered to pay their employees in the first place.
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if your already used to paying current prices for your crap burger.. Why should they change the price??
 
Still going to need people to make and serve the stuff. Also going to be more techs maintaining the stuff.

I'm actually glad. No more dealing with people having a shitty day, who just don't give a shit, give attitude, etc. Just put my crap on a tray...
 
Throckmorton said:
Considering a machine makes $0 and is cheap to buy and maintain, why would minimum wage have anything to do with this?
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Because the machines are not free and do operate on a fixed cost(R&D, support and maintenance). I am not sure at what wage it hits the tipping point, but that point has obviously been exceeded.
 
charrison said:
Because the machines are not free and do operate on a fixed cost(R&D, support and maintenance). I am not sure at what wage it hits the tipping point, but that point has obviously been exceeded.
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Probably <$1/hr. There really isn't much expense doing this. One Workers Wages for a Year probably would pay for multiple Stores.
 
McDonald's has already built an experimental restaurant that is completely automated. Not even people in the back flipping burgers. I suppose they have to have people come in to clean the place regularly, but that's about it. You might be surprised just how many patents for stuff like this already exist that haven't been implemented yet for one reason or another. Dominoes Pizza already has a heat lamp oven that will cook a pizza in two minutes flat, but its overkill for most places and doesn't really speed up the delivery that much.

There are also experimental factory farms that are completely automated and indoors. Trucks just off load supplies at one end, and pick up produce at the other. Saves on all the insecticides and whatnot but, its still not yet as cheap as the vast monocrop fields and cheap imports.

Where it all ends is anyone's guess, but with the military spending a lot on robotics research these days you can be sure the pace towards automation is going to increase in the near future.
 
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glenn1 said:
Another "it sucks to be a minimal-skills worker" news item. Of course, minimum wage laws and the price of labor have nothing whatsoever to do with the decision of employers to utilize automation in place of teenagers and high-school dropouts, nothing at all. Also, developments like this are even more reason to support "living wage" laws, right?
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Stupidity: Cheap entertainment for the smart.

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sandorski said:
Probably <$1/hr. There really isn't much expense doing this. One Workers Wages for a Year probably would pay for multiple Stores.
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They are probably more expensive than you think. A grocery store close by ripped out its self checkout machines because of support costs. Low volume embedded hardware and software solution is all that cheap to produce.
 
glenn1 said:
Another "it sucks to be a minimal-skills worker" news item. Of course, minimum wage laws and the price of labor have nothing whatsoever to do with the decision of employers to utilize automation in place of teenagers and high-school dropouts, nothing at all. Also, developments like this are even more reason to support "living wage" laws, right?

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/mcdonalds-to-replace-cashiers-with-touch-screens-1691/
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lol OP fail, but I don't blame you. If you've never worked in fast food then I wouldn't expect you to know how it works. The people who take your order at McDonalds and Wendys are also responsible for getting your fries and your drinks. Even with the automated purchasing thingy, that same exact person is doing the exact same thing they did before - get your fries and drink.

I totally support this. Everybody always complains that we're going to lose jobs to machines, yet it never happens. I engineer stuff on a computer and I do it just as hard as people did with paper and pencil. Secretaries with computers have just as much work as when they had typewriters. It's just a different kind of work.
 
Imp said:
Still going to need people to make and serve the stuff. Also going to be more techs maintaining the stuff.

I'm actually glad. No more dealing with people having a shitty day, who just don't give a shit, give attitude, etc. Just put my crap on a tray...
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that's the good new here. More tech jobs and if you like to eat goober food you can get it at the push of a button.
 
Jack in the Box in Palo Alto, CA has one of these. After waiting in line for the bumbling fools at the grocery self check outs I don't see how this will speed anything up.
 
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sandorski said:
Probably <$1/hr. There really isn't much expense doing this. One Workers Wages for a Year probably would pay for multiple Stores.
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It's not just the cost of buying and maintaining the equipment. Customer satisfaction is probably a big part of the equation as well I'm sure. The technology has probably been cheaper for a while, but if it isn't easy to use and customers hate it, it would hurt business and they could potentially lose more in sales than they stand to gain from reduced operating costs. Obviously, though, McDonalds now thinks that the technology has finally gotten to the point (both in terms of cost and user friendliness) that it makes sense to deploy, at least in Europe where wages tend to be higher than the US and there's more incentive for automation like this.
 
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