Liberal do-gooders are so funny when they attempt to control the world. Their latest media aided cause is doubling the pay of fast food workers so they can have a living wage. Fast food jobs are for teenagers and adult dullards. You can’t earn a living working as a fast food worker. It seems only liberals don’t get it. Obama and his minions can push for an increase in the minimum wage and doubling of fast food wages, but it will just result in more people joining his free shit SNAP army. You can bet that McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King and every other bottom line oriented corporation is experimenting with RoboBurgerBoy. Robots will be replacing more dullards over the coming years.
Read the story by Brian Merchant
Somehow I still bet it can’t beat 5-Guys for a burger and bag of fries!
But it eventually will be put out a better one and faster and fresher..
Where are we going to get jobs from? When a work station (or a Mac) passes the Turing Test, there goes a bunch of office help too. You call and talk to a robot whether you like it or not simply because you cannot tell the difference between Jane the computer and Jane the telephone answerer. Screw this “Listen to options carefully because our menu has recently changed” that you’ve been listening to for years.
Now everyone will get a cheery “Hello, this Blah, Blah Company, I’m Jane and how can I help you!” You picture a perky blue eyed brunette and you’re really talking to a box of silicon.
MA
If the photo shown is a part of the actual machine, it is not even remotely of sanitary design. It cannot be cleaned, mechanically or otherwise and it cannot be washed, unless it is designed to rust. It isn’t exactly confidence-building that their brochure (or whatever it is) contains an obvious typo right in the header.
MuckAbout says:
Somehow I still bet it can’t beat 5-Guys for a burger and bag of fries!
Holy Shit! Five Guys is disgusting. Even Carl’s Jr. beats it to shit.
Bring on the robots,I would love one that cooks and cleans. Then the jobs created would be for people to build, clean, program and maintain the robots. Or would there be robots that build, program and maintain the robots? Yikes
You already have a robot that cooks, cleans and grocery shops. Me.
My son and I were just discussing this last week. Raise the minimum wage to $15.00, raise it to $20.00.
When the cost of paying a brain dead millennial a minimum wage that equal’s the cost of automation, there will be automation.
You could have a third of the numbers of employees at each food dump. It’s a win-win for that type of business. Get rid of the walking dead and pay the managers of the robots more, call them fast food processing programers.
Once again, the dumbass voter will ask for their own demise and the dumbass politician will deliver.
hey muckabout, i haven’t followed the turing test bot contest in the last few years. did a computer actually pass the test? has it come close?
I have read these theories – they especially claim that raising wages actually helps the econom – more folks have more moneyto buy things. Voila! indstant recovery.
Well, according to that, why don’t we rase the minimum wage to $1 million per hour. What a recovery we would have then.
Half or more, of the folks in the country have Iqs below 100. They are ill-equipped to do much more than menial labor. Menial labor will be poorly paid. any efforts to pay menial labor well will result in the entire country being less globally competetive than it is now.
Of the list Admin provide, actually there are 6 of them that have median wages of $35k or above: Nursing, general managers, carpenters, bookkeepers, truck drivers, and vocational nurses. The headline of the artice is :
“Of job sectors with the highest growing raw number of positions 9 out of 10 will pay $35,000 a year or less with little to non-existent benefits.”
The article does not quantify those figures, and in fact the chart it used, as posted above by Admin, actually refutes those numbers. What they were trying to do is fudge the figures to suit their argument. Per the chart, of the first ten jobs, nine in fact do pay under the $35k mark, but the second ten has 5 of the ten paying more.
That aside, thee is no doubt that jobs likely to be created will be in the service sector, and the service sector is by and large oing to pay very poorly relative to what the US has considered a middle class income to be.
The middle class days of glory are over. Welcome to the new world, where competition will be the name of the game for the young – educate and skill up, or be an aged care worker.
Unh huh.
More unemployed teens. Great.
Lets say every restaurant undertook robot chefs.
The people that do work serving that shit probably wouldn’t be able to afford to dine out.
Off to Taco Bell drive thru they go , where the taco filling, they cant legally call it meat because it is only 30% meat, to eat.
Also they can’t afford to buy much of anything else.
Shoot your toe-off business stooopit.
As a former auditor of food processing machinery manufacturers for 10 years for a national standards corporation, I could help them to improve their design. A lot. Too bad I didn’t learn about this before I took a full time job again. I am too busy to consult and it would doubtless interfere with my ongoing projects.
The answer is simple. Take every unemployed person, let him borrow $10 million from the Fed, turn around and have them buy Treasuries. Guaranteed income. Nobody has to work at McDonald’s. If it is good enough for the Banksters, it is good enough for everyone.
The thing that seems to be most left out of this discussion (not here on TBP, but in the media, among economists, in general) is that as wages rise, so do the price of goods. It sets the wheels of inflation going, and we all know that workers/consumers are the incremental losers of such a proposition.
The #1 new job is “personal care aid”. Unless you’re rich enough to pay them yourself, they are paid by Medicare. It’s the new “must have” item for boomers, like a Lexus SUV. They get them “at no cost to them” via Medicare, and get them to wipe their asses and clean their houses, all at taxpayer expense.
I might remind people, being on welfare is the equivalent of getting $54,000 a year pre-tax. There aren’t any jobs for millennials that pay this much. I suppose the welfare queens were right after all. Find a baby daddy and get impregnated, 100 million people have already….
Thinker, you are confusing price increases with inflation. Inflation is the result of an increase of the supply of money relative to the supply of goods and services and its’ velocity. An arbitrary increase in fast food wages would simply result in an increase in the prices of fast food, a consequence reduction in demand for it and most likely a lot of vacant fast food restaurants (which may not be such a bad thing). It the wage increase were spread to all restaurants, the upscale ones would remain and the rest of us learn to cook….the availability of heat to eat prepared meals at supermarkets would explode.
Z, yes, you are right in the textbook definition of “Inflation.” I was indeed using the term to reflect a rise in prices.
However, the very need for increased wages is because the Fed’s monetary policy has resulted in a devalued dollar. An increase in wages simply speeds up the velocity with which the dollar is losing value.
Super Weenie Hut, Jr.’s has a robot cook…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISe2xyGcvzM
They will get their money. And a Big Mac will cost 30 dollars. They will be right where they started. Lol
If robots made the food at mcdonalds, I might eat there on occasion. Robots are sanitary, and don’t have tattoos or rotting teeth.
My wife was discharged from the USAF in 1993 under a program called VSI. Basically they gave each person in non-critical positions, three choices of variable shittiness. We chose the one that paid the best. They were doing this military wide and to give the appearance of “helping the troops”, they organized these huge job fairs where they brought employers who specifically wanted ex-military to each base to help soon to be ex-military transition to civilian life. We were in the UK at the time.
Anywho, Taco Bell was one of the companies that showed up and I distinctly remember them claiming they needed people to maintain their new, revolutionary automated food prep equipment. Their presentation included machines that would make and package nearly all of the items on their menu. I remember laughing at the irony that they were there to hire people to fix the machines that would eliminate the need to hire people.
That was 21 years ago and I don’t think they ever installed that equipment.
Regarding the minimum wage. Like others have already said: Why not raise it to $20 or $100 or $1 million? That so many think that minimum wage can just be arbitrarily set to some number, illustrates how desperately we NEED a complete reset. Only then will you have the full and undivided attention of the survivors that will be needed to start anew. Those not paying attention will already be gone.
I_S
SAH said:
“If robots made the food at mcdonalds, I might eat there on occasion. Robots are sanitary, and don’t have tattoos or rotting teeth.”
It’s only because you evil non-progressives don’t want to share your wealth that they have rotting teeth! If you only cared, their teeth would be just as nice as yours.
[sarc/off]
I still would not eat McFood.
I_S
If robots made the food at mcdonalds, I might eat there on occasion. -SAH
No robots raising cows and chickens, slaughtering them or packing them to be shipped to McNugget land to be processed, chop and formed for your culinary sophisticated tongue.
Boeing assembles planes in S. Carolina and payes 21/22 dollars per hour. Can’t see a fast food worker getting 15 hour, but it would be hard to live on 15 hr. in Calif.
“Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein,”
When someone uses the word “cows” in relation to animal protein you know that they are ill-informed. The vast majority of beef production is based on steers- male cattle. Cows produce calves and only when they no longer produce are they consumed. And based on USDA regulations, cows over the age of 3 years can only be slaughtered under strict guidelines. For every cow that is eaten, at least ten male animals have already been digested.
“Cows” produce a lot more than protein. This is the problem with the industrialized agriculture model. Without cattle vegetables require huge amounts of fossil fuel inputs- from fertilizers to the associated carbon footprint of shipping and refinement. Cows don’t. Cows produce manure which add the required fertility to the land, sans petroleum PLUS the added benefit of soil structure, or tilth. Without livestock soil becomes depleted, making it less efficient for growing vegetables, increasing runoff, which poisons watersheds, etc, etc.
Our per acre production levels using cattle as our source of soil fertility exceeds the highest levels of industrialized agriculture. It doesn’t strip soil, but adds to it. It doesn’t pollute the watershed, it cleans it. It doesn’t add to the carbon footprint, it locks carbon into the soil, thereby reducing it.
Protein from cattle in the form of meat is a benefit, but its caloric count is hardly the only data set produced.
Listening to academics about farming is like going to a preschool to get advice about space travel. They may be the most excited about it, but they are clearly the least informed.
It appears that this $15 an hour insanity is gaining traction.
I’m going to bet that the biggest minimum wage employers will be gifted exemptions – especially in the beginning – while the Mom & Pops will get no such exemption.
So, they will continue going dark and taking their jobs with them.
Meanwhile, McDs and WallyWorld will acquire more customers as the previously employed with choices become under-employed with none.
Watching the demanded (by the masses) destruction is proving to be quite interesting, even as it is horrifying.
This century, thus far, sucks. Tivo and DVRs and Iphones be damned.
Maybe with this machine I wouldn’t have a hair on my egg mcmuffin like the one I had yesterday. Just plain gross.
EF
What was gross? The hair or the egg mcmuffin?
This recent spat of requested minimum wage hikes have the bagger boys (the guys who bag off our feed) muttering about wanting higher pay.
They start off at 12$/hr, and cap at about 15. 15 is about 30k a year, and with the guaranteed overtime you are looking at quite a nice paycheck in a low income part of the US, and with absolutely no previous experience or education required. Its a pretty damned good deal.
I didn’t tell them this, but we recently had a meeting about just such an occurrence, and it turns out that replacing them with an automatic bagging line doesn’t make financial sense until about the $17/hr mark. However. A robot doesn’t take time off. A robot doesn’t have to be trained. A robot is more efficient and bags off more feed per hour.
Ultimately we didn’t pull the trigger on buying 2 robots to replace our 4 guys because A) we do a lot of custom work and we would still require a person on hand to swap bags/bins hourly, and B) the CEO is a nice guy, and really hates letting people go unless they are causing undue amounts of harm to the company. In his eyes feeding a few more families is better for us than lowering our cost/ton.
TPC, it’s not only small-company CEOs who think that way. I’ve been recusing myself from this discussion, but I can say that major companies know exactly where the “break even” point is on labor cost versus automation. The ones I work with are committed to providing the jobs, even if it means costing the company a bit more.
That may change, as government becomes increasingly more “involved”‘ in how they run their business.
Thinker & TPC
You clearly work with CEOs who have a sense of morality, right versus wrong, and have some compassion for their fellow man.
They certainly weren’t educated at Ivy League schools. Don’t you know that ruthless disregard for humanity in search of a higher bottom line is the way of the world?
The mega-corps, run by Ivy League MBAs, will be rolling out robots and firing people left and right. They will then price your small business CEOs out of business.
American the beautiful.
What difference does it make if McDonalds has a human or robot preparing the food? It’s still McDonalds!!! Shit “meat”, shit “bread”, shit lettuce, chemical sauces …. yuck.
I made a beef-barley soup for my father yesterday. It has about 15 ingredients. I suppose a machine (robot) could be programmed to wash, slice, dice, cook, stiir, etc etc.
But … it would completely destroy any and all creativity, spontaneity, and variety. You would get the exact same taste each and every time. Monotony Hell. No thanks.
You know what a robot could never do that I can? I can grab a tablespoon, take a sip of the cooking soup, and make a decision that it needs more oregano. Robots are dumbfuks.
And a robot can’t add the most important ingredient of all; it can’t cook with love.
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@Admin – He told me in my interview that he tries to make the best decisions he can for the company, but that sometimes he makes his decisions with his heart and tries to do “the good christian thing” by feeding as many people as possible, both by our products, and by employment.
Since then I’ve seen little to indicate I was lied to. Unless someone is well and truly toxic we just kind of work around them or shuffle their responsibilities around until the job fits the person a little more snuggly.
It means we all have kind of loosely defined responsibilities, but it also creates redundancies, so theres that.
All those robots = less income tax.
Although I’m not sure why we pay income tax at all – wouldn’t it be better all round if we just printed it?
Ah, Jim, if you only knew…
Stucky, McDonald’s puts out a standardized product because its customers want something predictable, something that tastes the same whether it was made in Buffalo, NY or Beijing, China.
It’s sad, isn’t it? People who don’t know the beauty of something “cooked with love” and creativity and spontaneity. Perhaps that’s why so many people have an unhealthy relationship with what they eat.
Olga,
we don’t “pay” income tax, they “take” income tax.
i don’t think it is about the actual funds, it is about the actual act of taking it. using force on peaceful people so that they stay cowed.
I am no psychologist but I am going to take a stab with some generalizations.
some thieves steal because they like it but many do it because it is the only thing they know and are trying to survive.
But a rapist goes after victims because of the rush they get from dominating their victim. if they jsut wanted to get laid they would have found a prostitute.
our govt is more akin to a rapist.
(actually a rapist who steals 1/2 the victims property and kills every 100th victim)
@ harry
I stand corrected.
nice stucky. naturally, i am going to take a stab at your list of 15. you tell me where i’m wrong.
beef
barley
stock/broth
water
wine
holy trinity (onion, carrot, celery)
garlic
tomato paste
olive oil
s and p
thyme
bay leaf
Admin – You said ” The mega-corps, run by Ivy League MBAs, will be rolling out robots and firing people left and right. They will then price your small business CEOs out of business. ”
I believe that is implying blame to the CEO’s of companies potentially affected by this absurd proposal. CEO’s of these corporations are fighting the wage increase tooth and nail. If the wage increase goes ahead, their sales will plummet, their profits will plummet, and their workforce will plummet.
They are not the ones driving this bullshit – it is the dumb as rocks left wing liberal do good fucking asshole coalition of morons.
Yes, the CEOs will respond in some way in order to try and maintain profits. If the wage increase goes ahead, it will force them to take action, and there is no doubt that there will be jobs lost, one way or the other. But it is not of their choosing.
Let’s make sure we are targetting the right people in this instance. And it is not the CEO’s that are at fault in this particular case. Quite the contrary.
archie
Replace the wine with beer. Add potatoes. Other than that, you pretty much nailed it.
archie
oh …. replace the salt, pepper, and thyme with Vegeta.
My mom has been using that for decades, so my dad “expects” that taste.
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yeah, i forgot the fucking spuds. i rarely eat them nowadays. thanks. i’ve never seen the vegeta stuff. i’ll look into it.
Dining in the USA is an exercise in heartbreak. The prevailing mentality seems to be one of “all this for just $5.95!!!” But cheap food isn’t necessarily good food. If you doubt this, just check out the sheer size of many americans who seem to live on a diet of processed crap food.
Slow cooked, fresh and no additiives. Simple really. Sure it’ll cost more but then you could aways just learn to cook and save a bundle
Good … not one more stray hair, spit, or nose fruit near my burger!! I’ll start eating fast food again when these machine show up in my city.
Actually, “slow cooked, fresh, and no additives” doesn’t even cost more. Just make a good hearty soup on the slow cooker, with fresh veggies, some meat or chicken, and maybe some noodles. You can use a big hunk of awfully good meat, yet the price per serving will break down under $1 a serving, and you can make a pot and feed your family for a few days, along with things like oatmeal for breakfast, and some fresh squeezed juices.
You won’t entirely escape additives, and it might not be “organic”. I mean, I buy most of my food at Aldi’s, so I’m sure that chemical fertilizers were involved somewhere. But you will eat much better and MUCH more cheaply than you ever can at the fast fried food pits .
The nice thing is that Robots don’t spit or ejaculate into your food as we’ve come to see in the news. I say bring it on!
Marvelous! Make it happen!
I work in the industry and I have to say that there are many of us who work our asses off for minimum wage. Even managers make less than you’d think. People look down on us like we’re scum and treat us like crap.While it may not exactly be difficult, it is fast-paced and always busy.
I’d say that we are worth $15 an hour for the people we deal with and the amount of work we do.
DeeDee – here is the thing folks such as you do not seem to understand. You do not set your wages – the market does.
Except if the government screws with things and puts their noses in it.
Where –in your right mind ??? think that the average pay for a carpenter is 40K a year??? their high.. Not even close– more like 22K– thats 500 pr wk.. Average,, get you numbers right– I know — Im a journeyman carpenter– residential.. Even Commercial carpenters dont make that…IN Arizona anyway. Blame that on the Illegal i migrants!!!
DeeDee, you do work hard, and it is fast-paced. But the reason you are “worth” $15 / hour is because the dollar doesn’t buy as much as it used to. Rent is higher, gasoline is higher, food is higher, and it takes more dollars to buy those things.
It’s not a matter of how much you earn. It’s how much everything you need COSTS. And we can thank the Fed and government for doing that to you.
What happens when the Burger Machine jams?
Does the Burger Machine wipe down the tables and mop the floors at the end of its shift?
Does the Burger Machine Plunge Toilets stuffed up with Tampons?
Realistically, how many people would one of these machines actually replace in a Fast Food joint?
Usually the typical one is only staffed by 4 or 5 most at one time. You need 2 on the registers, 2 in the back flipping the burgers and 1 roaming around doing cleanup.
The best this thing does is replace one of the Flippers, you still need the other one to keep the machine running. The machine also probably costs the equivalent of 10 years of salary for one of these people, and will break down long before this.
The ONLY application would be in a HUGE Mickey Ds which has maybe 5 or more flippers working at the same time.
This is dumb ass shit.
RE