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Not a good sign, it looks like there will be fewer McDonalds jobs in the future.
The push for a $15 starter wage has negatively impacted the career prospects of employees who were just getting started in the workforce while extinguishing the businesses that employed them.
Please don't post biased editorials and try to pass it off as news. I've seen other fast food restaurants with automated kiosks like this long before the whole $15 minimum wage thing came about. For me, as often as a McDonald's cashier has wrung up my order wrong, I'll gladly use a kiosk so I can make sure it is accurate.
How many jobs have computers taken over over the last 40+ years?
How many jobs have machines taken over since the Industrial Revolution?
I see this is an evolution of the job market. Jobs get replaced with different jobs.
Yes, but they will be replaced with even fewer jobs, and the jobs will require advanced training and education. It was a lot easier going from the farm to the factory. Now you have to go from the factory to studying computer science or engineering.
Besides, many places now have online ordering. You order and pay online and just go pick it up. It's no different than having a kiosk to order from but I've never seen anyone up in arms about that.
I don't have a discussion on minimum wage, but these automation systems have nothing to do with whatever the minimum wage is. It's a case of getting the technology available more than anything else. If it were available 20 years ago, we'd have had this discussion then. The whole minimum wage argument merely gives them the cover to do what they would have done anyway.
Exactly. I doubt on a large scale (like McD's) the cost of the machines comes close to the cost of cashiers even at a lower wage like $7.50. Even back in college in one of the cafeterias where you could order typical fast food they replaced a cashier with a touch screen ordering system. It was simple, literally the only options were a single patty burger, hot dog, or chicken fingers with the option to add fries or not and whatever condiments. Was much quicker and I saw the same guy working as a cashier just doing more of the small prep work and still had to be there to hand out the food. I'd love it if places like Wendy's did this and put more people back in the kitchen making the food. Maybe then the wait wouldn't be so long...
The McDonald's near my job has been undergoing renovations for months now. Rumor has it the renovations are taking so long because they are installing the kiosks. I believe that this would be a mistake for Mc Donald's and enacting them may cause them to lose even more business. They need to improve the service provided by human beings, not replace them with machines. The main reason Chick-Fil-A is so popular is that they have plenty of staff on hand and they are always, cheerful, helpful, and friendly.
Kiosks were installed here at Jason's Deli, Walgreen's, and Panera Bread. I have NEVER seen them used. They offer no advantage to customers in using them. When my wife and I were coming back through the airport a few weeks ago after disembarking from an internatonal flight, we were shocked to find customs are even using kiosks for international travelers! The machine asked my wife and I all the standard questions about what we were bringing into the United States, the made us take a selfie of ourselves, then printed out a blurry ticket with a faint black and white photo of ourselves, complete with heads chopped off. The kiosk offered us no way to focus the angle, and we're so short we couldn't reach the lens properly. Kiosks have a purpose, but it's more limited than companies believe it is.
I wonder if the demand for operators and repairpersons will come anywhere near the number of jobs lost to automation.
Of course not.
The automation itself costs money, if it didn't reduce employment it would be a net loss for the business.
You can't believe how many people don't understand this.
The cotton gin was a one-time invention that increased 'employement' (slavery) through the collapse of the cost to clean cotton, leading to an explosion in the amount of cotton grown and needing harvested. Don't expect this kind of breakthrough to happen again in our lifetimes.
Today's breakthrough would eliminate BOTH the labor to hand-clean the seeds from the cotton AND the labor needed to harvest it, eliminating all but a few tech jobs to keep the machinery working.
Not a good sign, it looks like there will be fewer McDonalds jobs in the future.
The push for a $15 starter wage has negatively impacted the career prospects of employees who were just getting started in the workforce while extinguishing the businesses that employed them.
We've had these kiosks in Montreal since 2015, sometimes they're a pain. Once in a while they glitch and you lose your order or they never print out your ticket. They're also trying to make McDonald's "fancier" by delivering food to a customer on a wood platter, I see it every time i go to the one near my school.
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