The Congressional Budget Office, which can only tell you things based on what they are given, says a 15.00 national minimum wage will cost 1.4 million jobs. Sorry, it’ll cost a lot more than that. And that reaping is already underway.
Related: Kroger Has to Close Two Locations after City Passes 4$/Hour Pay Hike.
Self-Serve kiosks have been popping up in places where too-smart libs have forced minimum wages higher. That success has seen them migrate to places where we have yet to see such wage manipulation foolishness. Labor costs are often one of the small businesses’ biggest expenses. Democrats then pile on mandatory benefits, taxes, regulations, licensing, and other milkmaid services to drain job creators to feed the government and boom.
It’s “udderly” ridiculous.
Jobs never get created. Existing jobs are lost. Hours decline. Prices go up. The competition goes down. Quality and service may also suffer. Tax revenues nosedive. It’s a fact of economics.
Democrats are retarded.
Even large businesses can’t eat the millions in payroll created by arbitrary hikes in the cost of labor. They have to find ways to control that. Kiosks work great for fast food, which often runs on some very thin margins.
Kroger has been wrestling with these leeches at every turn, and with Feds dancing widdershins around the fight for fifteen fire, sacrifices will have to be made. That means jobs. In this case, cashier or checkout jobs. Bagger jobs. Entry-level positions, always the first to go.
Downtown Cincinnati-based Kroger (NYSE: KR), the nation’s largest operator of traditional supermarkets, plans to launch the pilot test of the all-self-checkout store Feb. 17 in Dallas. It’s converting one of its smaller stores, on Cedar Springs Road, for the pilot.
Kroger has been using self-checkout lines for a while, but this is their first rodeo with no traditional check-out lanes.
Staff will be available to help shoppers, but as with the Wal-Mart check-out experience, I suspect you’ll see an increasing ratio. One person per 6, 8, or possibly 10 lanes. The test will determine the best ratio.
Kroger is also looking into an option for an Amazon GO experience. That model allows shoppers to grab items and walk out. Technology bills them for their items when they leave. No human involvement at all.
Liberals will not either. Friends of San Fran Nan have argued that the cashless experience is exclusionary and presumably racist and bigoted. If you can’t get a credit card, you can’t shop in these places.
While self-checkouts typically take cash, an Amazon Go model requires a digital transaction. No bills or coins. Which is a problem for Democrats.
Note that policies trapping people in poverty or pushing them into it by artificially inflating the value of labor and the cost of everything are not a concern.
That’s just how they roll, or rollover whoever gets in their way. Not that this will dissuade Kroger or anyone else. Any business that survived or survives the anti-business COID-Era will need to embrace alternatives to keep their operations open.
Expect more of this in more places as the Obiden era stretches from weeks to months to years.
Image Credit: Cincinnati Business Courier