Robots have been able to make hamburgers for more than 50 years, but it was never before financially sensible for franchises to transition. When such work was greasy kid stuff, the positions paid little and had a high churn rate. They were beginner jobs.
Globalization, technological progress and other factors, however, have hollowed out the middle in America, so calls for minimum-wage increases in such service positions, now often treated as careers, were a natural. Equally expected is the response by fast-food company CEOs who want to keep the bottom line lean: We’ll automate.
Perhaps there’s something worse than the fear that we’ll be reduced to McJobs: What if even such low-paying positions are automated?
From Joe Kaiser at Illinois Policy:
The Fight for $15 campaign plans to target McDonald’s on April 14 as part of a new pre-Tax Day tradition, led by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU.
Chicago is one of 300 cities worldwide where strikes and protests are scheduled. SEIU has spent $70 million on its Fight for $15 campaign. The union’s Local 73 represents more than 28,000 government workers in Illinois and Indiana.
Protestors may want to stop by the McDonald’s at Adams and Wells to meet their replacement – an automated McCafé kiosk.
The store, which is anticipating Chicago’s minimum-wage increase to $13 an hour by 2019, is testing out coffee kiosks in the restaurant instead of having employees serve it. The kiosk features a touch-pad for ordering and paying. The screen also prompts customers to answer questions about their kiosk experience, giving the impression this is something that could be adopted as an alternative to hiring. This kind of automation, which replaces a human employee with technology, is one of the unintended consequences of Chicago’s minimum-wage increase.
It may not just be a coffee machine either. Other McDonald’s locations have used self-service kiosks with touch-screens for paying. And while self-serve kiosks don’t seem too unusual, San Francisco-based Momentum Machines has created a robotic hamburger-making machine the company claims can produce 400 high-quality burgers in an hour with minimal human supervision.
A robot making a hamburger sounds a bit absurd, but the desire to circumvent artificially set wages certainly isn’t.•