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Wendy's Moves To Self Ordering System as Minimum Wages Rise

Moderate Right said:
In the liberal fantasy world prices do not rise and the owners just suck it up and make less money. They get so shocked every time when the owners raise prices and remain rich. It takes them by total surprise time and time and time again. They never learn.
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Is it possible to lower income disparity back to where it was during the middle of the 20th century?
 
Moderate Right said:
I'm glad you agree.
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I was disagreeing with you, please take the time necessary to understand the posts that you respond to.

Moderate Right said:
In the liberal fantasy world prices do not rise and the owners just suck it up and make less money. They get so shocked every time when the owners raise prices and remain rich. It takes them by total surprise time and time and time again. They never learn.
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This is complete horse****.

Even if prices rise, they rise far less than wages. For example, DOUBLING the minimum wage would increase McDonalds' prices by only 4.3%.

The reason it never works out that way is the lazy ****head writing the checks refuses to ever give his grunts a raise without getting at least a proportionate one for themselves.
 
Absentglare said:
I was disagreeing with you, please take the time necessary to understand the posts that you respond to.



This is complete horse****.

Even if prices rise, they rise far less than wages. For example, DOUBLING the minimum wage would increase McDonalds' prices by only 4.3%.

The reason it never works out that way is the lazy ****head writing the checks refuses to ever give his grunts a raise without getting at least a proportionate one for themselves.
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Almost double the wages and only expect a 4.3% increase in the cost for a burger? I want to see a small business take off with that logic.
 
RetiredUSN said:
Almost double the wages and only expect a 4.3% increase in the cost for a burger? I want to see a small business take off with that logic.
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It depends on how big of a share of income is spent on low wage labor. When I worked at McDonalds, labor cost was something like 15% or 20% of sales. We had to track it by the hour and send people home if sales were meeting our standards. So that 4.3% estimate might be a tad low, but it's not super low.

How much labor cost inflation we would have depends upon a lot of things, like whether sales increased or decreased (increased sales due to people having more money to spend could in theory cover 100% of the increased labor cost, although it is doubtful that it would), and what percentage of sales was profit and what percent went to things like land cost and executive income and advertising expenses.

The only thing that is for sure is that if min wage doubled, the price of the food wouldn't double, thus low wage workers would still come out better.

You also have to consider things like the fact that doubling min wage would remove people from welfare (assuming that the price of everything didn't double), thus the budget deficit could decrease. I suppose there may be some economic value in that.
 
ObamacareFail said:
Judging from what you just posted, it is you that needs an econ class. You do not have the foggiest clue how the economy works. It is not as simple as just giving an employee a higher wage. When the cost of payroll increases, the cost of the goods or service the employer is selling go up to cover those higher costs.` with every employer paying higher wages due to a significant minimum wage increases, the price of most if not all goods and services rise. At some point, that wage increase is meaningless as everything they buy costs more.
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making up how econ works is just so ridiculous.
 
imagep said:
It depends on how big of a share of income is spent on low wage labor. When I worked at McDonalds, labor cost was something like 15% or 20% of sales. We had to track it by the hour and send people home if sales were meeting our standards. So that 4.3% estimate might be a tad low, but it's not super low.

How much labor cost inflation we would have depends upon a lot of things, like whether sales increased or decreased (increased sales due to people having more money to spend could in theory cover 100% of the increased labor cost, although it is doubtful that it would), and what percentage of sales was profit and what percent went to things like land cost and executive income and advertising expenses.

The only thing that is for sure is that if min wage doubled, the price of the food wouldn't double, thus low wage workers would still come out better.

You also have to consider things like the fact that doubling min wage would remove people from welfare (assuming that the price of everything didn't double), thus the budget deficit could decrease. I suppose there may be some economic value in that.
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No matter how you play it, doubling the cost of labor and only finding a 4.3% increase for the cost of a burger is a fairy tale with a bad ending for any profit margin.
 
RetiredUSN said:
Almost double the wages and only expect a 4.3% increase in the cost for a burger? I want to see a small business take off with that logic.
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What the **** are you talking about ?

Do you think that 100% of the cost of a burger is labor ?

Yes, increased labor costs would require higher prices if no other factor in the business were willing to change. Of course, the bold is false, McDonalds alone spent more than enough to double ALL compensation (not just wages but also benefits) on stock buybacks and dividends. And even if the bold were true, it wouldn't phase the vast majority of the consumers in the slightest.

Forgot link :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...imum-wage-would-do-to-the-price-of-a-big-mac/
 
disneydude said:
I would have to disagree (at least from my experience). Disneyland full service and cafeteria style restaurants are all pretty good...however, I have had bad fast food service on both coasts. It seems like they cannot serve warm burgers and fries for whatever reason.
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Maybe we just go at the right times, but we've always got excellent service and great food. But just imagine if the line to order were unnecessary. Resort check in is not on the web. Fastpass+ is on the web. Even the ADR's for table service.
 
ObamacareFail said:
Two world wars started in Europe for instance?
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Exactly, WWII turned Germany from a country that was proud of being a military powerhouse to one of the most pacifist nations in the world for example.
 
countryboy said:
Seriously? What will a college degree be worth, if everybody has one? ;)
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ask all the people that got 2 year degree's post 2000
and now ask all the people that have 4 year degree's now.

the fact is we are swamped with degree's that unless you have some job skills that
make you different and put you above those that don't then you are in trouble.

I am going to press my kids to get internships and things like that when they get older.

my daughter wants to be a meteorologist and my son wants to be a marine biologist right now
but I am sure that will change. however getting an internship to work somewhere or my son getting
a job at sea world (if it is still around will provide good job experience).

or he could get a job out at nasa or something internship.
helping with environmental studies.

as for his paywall argument no such thing.
college costs money and well you have to pay for it. there are plenty of scholarships, grants etc ...

according to him it should all be free.

then again there is a pay wall to housing
a pay wall to food
a paywall to cars

I guess they should all be free as well. the logic is simply just not there. it is an appeal to emotion for sure.
 
winston53660 said:
WTF are you talking about? Nazi Germany was one of the most evil things to ever exist akin to the radicalism of the Taliban of today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZblvLxXEFdE
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From the creation of the German state to the end of WWII Germans were proud of their military power but after WWII Germans became extremely pacifist. I have no idea what you are referring to.
 
Citizen.Seven said:
Of course there are phone apps that do this. I'm talking about in-store ordering for people who don't have or want an app. That means a piece of hardware that can withstand hundreds of different users a day using it, with a robust enough touchscreen that will work with multiple 9's reliability. If a machine acts up, it not only may cause losing that order, but people standing in line behind them. I've walked from convenience stores and fast food places that were too slow for me, I imagine that if a machine were the cause, many more people would be willing to do that. That's lost business, which is why just sticking a $500 tablet with a theft chain won't work.

And my estimate was for one shift worker at 15/hour. At current federal rates, cut that in two, or about 58k per year. When you factor in maintenance costs, power consumption, redundancy, and reliability requirements, that 58k wouldn't get you a whole lot of hardware.
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Yes, it would get you plenty of hardware. There are already places that do this with ipads. Hell, the MSP airport terminal has bars in it that do it with ipads that can make orders and simultaneously track your flight status and give popup notifications for status changes/boarding times and whatnot. They have an ipad per seat, rather than one customers stand in line for.
 
Deuce said:
Yes, it would get you plenty of hardware. There are already places that do this with ipads. Hell, the MSP airport terminal has bars in it that do it with ipads that can make orders and simultaneously track your flight status and give popup notifications for status changes/boarding times and whatnot. They have an ipad per seat, rather than one customers stand in line for.
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I actually agree with you,
Even with consumer grade products, having multiple low cost copies
would improve the mean time between failures.
It would just be important, that some bean counter not try to save money by reducing the number of spares.
 
longview said:
I actually agree with you,
Even with consumer grade products, having multiple low cost copies
would improve the mean time between failures.
It would just be important, that some bean counter not try to save money by reducing the number of spares.
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Yeah, the hurdles for implementing this type of automation are technical and social, not financial.
 
Helix said:
fast food will eventually be almost completely automated. that is nearly a certainty. other careers will follow, even much more skilled ones. and then, we have to ask ourselves how we will sustain our job>money>access to resources economic model. i'm not arguing that we should keep making buggy whips just to make them. i'm more curious about how we'll address this situation. i'd argue that we should remove any paywall in front of education.
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The problem with robots is not the displacement of labor, but economic policies that redistribute the surplus to land rent kept by the title holders. There is also the problem of drones and other robots used for evil purposes. The proper use of robots is a governance problem. Technology as such is not an economic problem.

I think the most likely outcome is not massive unemployment. Human desires are unlimited, and even if robots do much of the servicing, there would be substantial psychological demand for human services. But there would be a large surplus as rent, so even if people are employed at wages above subsistence, the equitable solution is to distribute the community-based rent to the local residents, and distribute the rent due to natural resources globally to all people. - Fred Foldvary

Geoism is the answer.
 
Geoist said:
The problem with robots is not the displacement of labor, but economic policies that redistribute the surplus to land rent kept by the title holders. There is also the problem of drones and other robots used for evil purposes. The proper use of robots is a governance problem. Technology as such is not an economic problem.

I think the most likely outcome is not massive unemployment. Human desires are unlimited, and even if robots do much of the servicing, there would be substantial psychological demand for human services. But there would be a large surplus as rent, so even if people are employed at wages above subsistence, the equitable solution is to distribute the community-based rent to the local residents, and distribute the rent due to natural resources globally to all people. - Fred Foldvary

Geoism is the answer.
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i don't really agree with the property tax only proposal, as we've already covered in multiple threads. i prefer taxing all income as income above a cap.
 
Geoist said:
Technological displacement has occurred for hundreds of years. Minimum wage just seems to be speeding up the inevitable. There have been jobs displaced that are far more valuable than fast food servicing.
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Sure. And it's even debatable if this correlation is due to any causation. It certainly seems like min wage increases may be the cause of automation for Wendy's, but lots of companies automate each year even without a min wage increase.
 
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