Wendy's Reacts To Minimum Wage Increase
The San Francisco Chronicle reports the Wendy's restaurant chain will be installing self- service kiosks in all of its 6000 restaurants, this at least in part a result of minimum wage increases in California and New York:
"Company president Todd Penegor said that Wendy's is "wary about wage hikes," as Investor's Business Daily writes. The chain restaurant's shares posted a nine percent drop after poor second quarter sales."
Whether this eliminates current jobs, it certainly eliminates future ones, putting those only capable of minimum wage jobs at a further disadvantage. Hate to say I told you so.
Actually, no I don't, but we'll be seeing more of this sort of thing. It will be interesting to see which chain does this next. Replacing human work with automation is inevitable with, or without, increases in minimum wages. Increases in minimum wage just helps speed it along.
Addendum: Investor's Business Daily also covers the story.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 7:38 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You are right Fred. When Seattle raised their minimum wage to $15 everyone was telling them there will be consequences but their city council never listened. Now they are paying the prices with higher unemployment, more crime and more people having to get government assistance. Obviously the Eureka city Council is just as shortsighted. Since they cleared out the marsh I see lots of homeless everywhere and I read about a lot more robberies, burglaries, shoplifting and other various crimes. I'eve even had a couple of recent run-ins myself with these homeless.
Hey Eureka city Council, thanks for for dumping your problem that YOU created in your constituents laps. We vote, and you can be voted out of office.
Lucky for you, Fred, that you snagged your wife because she is obviously one very smart, smart lady! The Walmart where I was hired to work (in 2007) is in Georgetown,TX. They have 8 self-check registers. When I was a cashier, I told the other cashiers that someday the store would be operated by automation, robots and about 10 humans. They laughed at me.
A Chicken or the Egg question:
Which comes first: The automation or the excuse for the automation?
I suppose I could use a machine to place my order, but I can imagine many scenarios where my wait in line would be much shorter if the idiots in front of me were interacting with a human.
Translation: when these machines are deployed, I'll stop eating at Wendy's. I don't buy the excuse that these machines are needed in response to a living wage. There's a mountain of research that demonstrates this is a red herring. No doubt, they already had plans to replace workers and they're using the minimum wage as an excuse.
I'm not entirely opposed to automated ordering. I place my pizza orders online.
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