McDonalds Starts Rolling Out Automated Kiosks.

[uallas5]

If you can get some schmuck to take $10 an hour to do the job and machine to do it costs $500K...you pay the schmuck.

Well yeah, but a tablet in a kiosk costs WAY less than $500K so that decision is pretty easy.

I think Elfenix is right in saying that a good part of this is that tapping a screen is pretty commonplace for most people in society. Hell my 83 year old mother-in-law has an iPhone 6S and is surprisingly good at it. I used to work in Healthcare IT and we were looking at self check-in kiosks at busy clinics over 10 years ago but a big problem was instructing the patients, especially older ones, on how to use them. That wouldn't really be a problem now.

 

[glenn1]

It doesn't have to cost $7.25 an hour. It has to cost LESS than the $15 hour or more times the number of jobs it replaces. If 1 kiosk can replace in terms of productivity 2 or even 3 cashiers it can be a significant savings.

When people are cheaper than automation, then people get the jobs. When automation is cheaper, then the jobs go away. That has been the way for a very long time. Unless you're a Luddite.

McDonalds is just saying that with the increase wage to $15 as a min in many places now, that for those places automation is now much cheaper than labor. So they are installing automation and those labor positions are gone.

That's an oversimplification. Plenty of places center their business model and customer service on human interaction and thus wouldn't utilize automation no matter how much in labor costs it saved. Just because McDonald's on the low cost/low service end of the restaurant spectrum and thus its customers expect the company to embrace automation to keep prices down, the "Le MacDonauex" 3-Michellin star restaurant is always going to have human waitstaff.

 

[Yakk]

Screens are ok, tried them. Service is no faster for it really.

There will always be a bottom tier. It's slowly creeping up with people rushing to keep ahead. Reading through CV's right now and honestly bachlor degrees are a dime a dozen and one of the the minimums needed to get through the first screening. I guess for me a bachlor degree is bottom tier.

 

[theeedude]

What they need to do next is to have a robot deliver the tray to the table. There are already robots delivering medical supplies in hospitals, this has to go nationwide and across all industries. We don't need to have people wasting their lives doing things that robots and AI can do.

 

[rh71]

I don't think I've said it here - we couldn't even find apple juice anywhere in the kiosk menu. This was after spending 2 minutes putting in other items for the 5 of us. We cancelled the order and walked up to the register anyway. What a friggin waste of time that was.

 

[bshole]

Yeah but who is this "we"?

In my opinion I think everyone is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. How do we create more good paying jobs? The solution was actually provided to us decades ago and yet it never came to fruition. Automation is already here and it will continue to eat up jobs and more and more people will either have to work multiple jobs or spend more time in school in hopes that their education will be a ticket out from the bottom of the barrel jobs, only to be competing for less and less available jobs.
I think the solution is a simple one and yet one that's almost foreign to Americans...working less.

What's considered full time needs to be lowered and weekends need to be lengthened. Humans should be benefiting from automation not suffering from it. All of this should be done while pay remains the same. This will create more jobs (to deal with less coverage) and it will stimulate the economy which will cover the increased costs of labor. The further automation encroaches the less we should be working.

Hell ya!!! I am totally down for less hours at the same pay.

 

[bshole]

I don't think I've said it here - we couldn't even find apple juice anywhere in the kiosk menu. This was after spending 2 minutes putting in other items for the 5 of us. We cancelled the order and walked up to the register anyway. What a friggin waste of time that was.

Yea kiosks are always the last option I take. I take it only if the line to an actual teller is much much deeper. Nobody tells you this but if you use a kiosk, you the customer has to do the work. That is just unacceptable to me. Damnit, I am the customer, why should I have to bag the groceries and scan the products? It is an utter bullshit scam by the corporate scum who want to scam free labor from their customers. If they are going to make us do the work, we should get a discount on the product.

 

[Ns1]

If they are going to make us do the work, we should get a discount on the product.

uh, that's kinda the idea - you're doing the work so that the prices don't have to go up. You think that 350 foot yacht for the CEO is going to pay for itself?