Wendy’s To Switch To Self Ordering And Automation To Avoid $15/hr Wage hike

Welcome to the future! The Automat!!!

Oh wait...

In all seriousness though, I'm not surprised at all. I've heard about plenty of companies here in NYC that decided in the face of having to insure full-timers decided to drop employee hours to 30 hours a week and have a shop full of part-timers instead. Same idea here. Pass all the laws you want and successful mega corporations will figure out ways around them, legally. There's a reason they've grown to such enormous sizes, they're ruthless, they're clever, and they don't particularly care about "doing the right thing."

If I had to guess I'd say we're going to see plenty of this. You want your drive through order? No problem. An interactive operator will take the order and you'll drive up to receive your order pushed by a vending machine style robot through a window into your car. Pay with a credit card and you're done. Maybe frequent customers will even be issued some kind of fob for payment.

The cashiers and order takers could likely be eliminated by that method. As far as the cooking staff goes... I don't think it's stretching it to believe that fast food could just as easily be prepped by machines. A fancy steak house no... McDonald's, maybe.

It'll be very interesting to see where these businesses are in 10 years. They may not resemble their current form at all.

a reply to: schuyler

Exactly. Automation had not caught on in fast food because workers were so cheap the math didn't necessarily work. It is easier to just have a bunch of teenagers doing everything. However, at $15/hr the math starts looking more feasible.

Greedy bastards.

Maybe if they didn't pay the CEOs so many millions they could afford to pay their employees.

www1.salary.com...

This is what happens when unskilled workers start making demands. Take note...don't make demands when you can be replaced by a trained monkey.

Typical biG corp, we want more money, but yea lets blame the rise of the minimum wage so they dont look too greedy. Im glad i work in a field where they cant cut my job.

If I didn't already have a career and was older than dirt, I'd go into the robot-repair biz.

a reply to: grey580

You do realize most of the restaurants are franchises - small businesses whose owners are not necessarily making millions. If you have a pension or any kind of retirement investments, I'm sure you'd want the CEO to ensure the highest return to the shareholders since it might affect your own personal retirement.

originally posted by: MrSpad
First of all lets not pretend that companies have not been looking at ways to do this forever. Even in boom profit times with low wages companies always look for ways to cut and replace with machines. Second, none of this ever works. Self check outs were all the rage at one time and now they are going away. And cost effective technology just does not exist. What they will do find ways to process more orders quicker. More ways to order and ways to speed up the back of the house. However they day of machines replacing fast food workers is not going to happen any time soon.

When I was over in the UK visiting my girlfriends family we went from London to St Andrews, train, bus, car you name it. Naturally we stopped off at all sorts of grocery stores, corner shops, etc. Pretty much ALL of them had automated checkouts, and the are starting to pop up all over here in southern ontario as well. Two grocery stores near my house have them. I don't even think I've spoken to a worker at either in my my 4 months I've lived here.

a reply to: MystikMushroom

I know of more than one employer that uses fingerprints to clock employees in and out.

originally posted by: grey580
Greedy bastards.

Maybe if they didn't pay the CEOs so many millions they could afford to pay their employees.

www1.salary.com...

You do realize their compensation is not all salary, right? The CEO making $2.5 million salary is too much for running a global organization with tens of thousands of employees?

originally posted by: beezzer
If I didn't already have a career and was older than dirt, I'd go into the robot-repair biz.

Good idea but the "real' money will be made by the investors in the technology that design and make the new bots.

www.techinvestingdaily.com...

What's the problem?
They are eliminating low wage jobs. That's a liberal dream.

*sigh*

I just had to do it

originally posted by: burdman30ott6

originally posted by: MrSpad
Self check outs were all the rage at one time and now they are going away.

Where are you? Here in Anchorage they have renovated several of our supermarkets over the past couple of years and they installed a lot more self-checkouts in the process. Fred Meyer's has as many self checkouts as cashiered checkout stands and usually they only have 3 or 4 of the cashiers working at any given time. One cashier, however, can man the counter for 20 self-checkouts. Usually the self-checkouts are seeing a lot of use, too.

I can concur. However, I have noticed that many, many people will still wait in line with only a few items to have an actual human being ring them up. I find this odd, considering they could save quite a bit of time checking themselves out. I wonder if these people get some sort of superior feeling having someone else scan their items? Perhaps they enjoy human interaction? Maybe it's a combination of both?

originally posted by: Edumakated
a reply to: xuenchen



These jobs are designed as stepping stones, not careers.

That may be true for some. There are millions of adults literally shut out from the workforce because they have a criminal history, these jobs are sometimes the only ones available to them or accessible.

Felony disenfranchisement also affects a person's right to vote in some states; barring them from participating. In my opinion these laws should be looked at and revamped to include at least non violent felons; open up the door a little bit so people can succeed.

a reply to: olaru12

I'd start a franchise and have a chain of stores repairing automated fastfood bots.

Problem is, I'd have to pay 15 an hour.

Hmmmm, if I could automate. . . .

The tech to do this has been out a while now, here's an interesting article from 2012...
www.gizmag.com...

Maybe they've taken this long to work out the front end & are now ready to implement.

K~

a reply to: Djarums

Dude...the automat rocks.

I remember using an automat in Amsterdam. I was confused at first, but then saw food items appearing in windows from a mysterious kitchen behind the tiny window-doors.

I had a pretty good chicken sandwich. I still couldn't figure out where everyone was getting those paper cones filled with fries though -- those looked insanely delicious.

What's going to happen when even the people making the lowest wages can't afford the burgers they cook?

How can entire industries make a profit when only the very top of the pyramid has enough money?

See, the base of the pyramid is being robbed of stones...it's simply not sustainable.

Maybe the whole recent push to raise wages was planned to step up the timetables for automation.

Now the corporations that manufacture and sell automatic equipment get richer faster.

And the maintenance and warranty contracts will be lucrative.

Hmmm.