"Fight for $15" is about to prove what the real minimum wage is - Granite Grok

“Fight for $15” is about to prove what the real minimum wage is

Robot Hamburger makerWe’ve all been blogging about the effort, spearheaded by a lot of folks who don’t believe someone’s money actually belongs to those that earned it, to organize the fast food industry to a minimum wage of $15/hour for flipping burgers.  Far above the economic worth of that actual job and believing that there would be no retribution – that consumers would be happy to pay much more for the same products, that employers would never mind that extra cost, and that everything else would stay status quo:

Behold “ramifications” (e.g., capitalist systems react and adjust)! Emphasis mine, reformatted:

Epic fail: McDonald’s reacts to ‘Fight for $15’ by placing automated ordering stations at all U.S. locations

From the “best-laid schemes” file comes word that McDonald’s has announced plans to roll out automated kiosks and mobile pay options at all of its U.S. locations, raising questions about the future of its 1.5 million employees in the country and around the globe.  Roughly 500 restaurants in Florida, New York. and California now have the automated ordering stations, and restaurant in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., will be outfitted in 2017, according to CNNMoney.

And why there? Psst: SEIU and the Governor of

The locations that are seeing the first automated kiosks closely correlate with the fight for a $15 minimum wage. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a new $15 minimum wage for New York state in 2016, and the University of California has proposed to pay its low-wage employees $15. Florida’s minimum wage will rise Jan. 1, 2017. Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2014, followed by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Customers place their order at touch screens, and then receive a number with a “digital locator,” which then notifies staff to where the customer is sitting. Once the order is ready to serve, a McDonald’s employee delivers the food to the customers table. News of McDonald’s plans to expand its digital self-serve ordering stations and table service to all of its 14,000 American restaurants backs up concerns that the fight for $15 will expedite the growth of automation and robots. Aparna Mathur, Resident Scholar for Economic Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that a push for a $15 minimum wage might just be enough for companies to expedite plans to automate industries such as fast food.

 

And this next bit may ONLY apply to current employees (and probably due in no small part to the political and PR nightmare if they did otherwise):

The drastic change raises questions for its workforce, as Mathur discussed, which McDonald’s chief executive, Steve Easterbrook responded to Thursday. The CEO said that the new system will not reduce costs, but it would mean workers might have different jobs. “We’re not cutting crew; we’re redeploying them,” Easterbrook said, according to the Times.

Hmmm, probably “Nope”.  They’re willing to take the financial hit upfront and be willing to wait for the productivity gains to kick to the bottom line later on as the notorious “employee turnover” allows them to not have to cut people – but able to just not replace them.  They know that these extra costs arbitrarily imposed upon them by Government have to be wrung out of their systems somehow.  Given the digital transformation we are undergoing, the choice to do this is plain to see.

Again, it is one thing to have to meet the Market’s pricing for labor – it is another to have some chucklehead receiving a government paycheck lord it over you.  And what will Gov. Cuomo say when the “future is now” hamburger joint has the burgers created by robots, payment by ordering kiosks, the floors and equipment cleaned by a steroidal Roombas, the inventory taken care of by others like those in Amazon’s warehouses, and the re-ordering done by a local MRP forecast type system based on past sales and just-in-time replenishment systems?

How many tax payers will be earning the money to pay for your bloated NY state government?

Oh, and the real minimum wage?  Soon, many of the folks that thought they were going to get much, much more in their paycheck are about to find out what real minimum wage is: $0.00.  And they can thank the Socialist political PAC known as a union (e.g., SEIU) and other Progressives politicians don’t believe their policies result in bad outcomes.

I do wonder if these poor schmucks who have been hoodwinked by those that ALREADY knew that this woul happen will continue to eat at McDonald’s now that they have been “educated” when you demand and overreach?  Just remember, you brought it upon yourselves.

And you can blame your teachers that failed to install ANY kind of economics education into your heads.

(H/T: Liberty Unyielding)

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