McDonald's: You buy more from touch-screen kiosks than a person. So expect more kiosks

originally posted by: enlightenedservant
The excuse that higher wage demands is fueling automation is a lie that's being pushed to keep workers divided. Companies like McDonald's are already making a huge profit; they just want to share as little as possible of those profits with their workers (which means that a higher share of the profits go to investors/shareholders/etc).

I don't know about McDonalds but a friend of mine is a manager of a Wendys in the town I used to live in. Besides the fact that even as a manager he's still not really paid enough to live on ($12.50/hour, compared to the $7.45 he made before and 29 hours per week) I have talked with him a bit about the store finances.

The store generates about $1100 per day and pays out about $55/hour in wages (1.5 managers on shift, 5 other workers). They're open for 16 hours per day which comes to $880 per day in wages. That leaves $220 per day to cover taxes, profit margin, franchise fees, and any other expenses. The franchise owner makes about $50 per day from the business which is only $18,000 per year.

Most franchises are not the money making machines they're promoted as. You can make a profit at them, but it takes a lot of them to have a nice lifestyle.

Corporate may or may not have a lot of money it collects through franchise fees, but corporate doesn't represent 95% or more of the employees involved in the business.

originally posted by: surfer_soul
People seem to be under the false impression that it will just be low paid cashier jobs that will be lost to this tech but actually a whole plethora of jobs will be significantly lost. Such as:

The barrier to entry on all jobs goes down over time. That is why one cannot rely on education to solve this issue. Todays skilled labor is tomorrows automated labor.

originally posted by: Edumakated
True, not everyone is capable, but it is a reality that you have to constantly be improving yourself personally in the market place.

And that's why a Bachelor degree is insufficient to get hired above minimum wage these days. That should not be the case.

The buying power of minimum wage is about as low as it’s ever been. These kiosks represent the coming shift in jobs from humans to computers. No matter if minimum wage is raised or not, these kiosks and things like them will replace workers as they get cheaper and cheaper.

My mom hates the kiosk. At our McDonalds, they don’t let you order at the counter anymore. So my mom doesn’t go there anymore.

Eventually, many more jobs will be replaced by computers and AI. What will happen next?

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Isurrender73

Entry level work like this is not going to support you for life and it's not meant to.

Yet I’ve seen conservatives complain about worker turnover...

a reply to: surfer_soul

The creaters of a cartoon figured this out quite a while ago.

Meet George Jetson

Here’s another fact about George Jetson: He has a full-time job working two hours a week for Spacely Sprockets. His work as a Digital Index Operator affords him a solid middle-class lifestyle, freeing up enough cash for his younger, unemployed wife to go shopping at the beginning of every episode and make (presumably) monthly payments on his robo-maid. He’s worried about money, but only in the way that all sitcom dads are worried about money, which is to say nominally. George isn’t just the star of The Jetsons, he’s the poster child for post-work work, the becalmed beneficiary of automation. www.google.com...

It's quite simple. People will make the same amount of money working far fewer hours so everyone can find a job. Life will become more about living and entertaining ourselves than grinding 9-5 living paycheck to paycheck.

originally posted by: surfer_soul
a reply to: TheRedneck

What I wonder though, is with so many people out of work and not paying taxes, where will govenments find the money to pay people a basic income? Or the universal basic income I've heard touted about? Aren't most coutries up to their eyeballs in debt as it is?

link

:

The corporate bigwigs who will be raking in tons of cash from automation will have to be taxed more, and rightly so. It’s about time they paid their dues.

Without jobs, how are people supposed to afford to consume? In the long run, the universal basic income is inevitable.

a reply to: dug88

I'm all for automation. We can't run from the future for the sake of promoting the working poor. The solution eventually will have to be more innovative than preserving underpaid jobs.

a reply to: Edumakated

I'm looking at some of the same stats you listed (HERE) and I'm not feeling bad for them. Not only does that article show that the average McDonald's franchisee owns 6 franchises (so multiply those profits by 6), but it also gives an example of a franchisee selling his McDonald's franchise for more than twice what he purchased it.

I don't have any stats for the average resell price, but so far it's looking like: Average franchisee makes $150,000-$200,000 per franchise for $900,000 to $1,200,000 a year in profits. But if those yearly profits aren't enough, then the franchisee can just sell one of the stores for the cost of the initial investment (which is what I'm seeing most often) or for around twice the initial investment (going by the anecdotal evidence in the article).

And that's just the franchisee. McDonald's as a whole makes far money money than that, with this separate article (HERE) claiming that McDonald's keeps a whopping 82% of the revenue generated by the franchisees. That's because the company is the landlord (check the average $391,000 rent fees from the first article) and is also getting a huge chunk of the other expenses listed in the first article. And McDonald's still owns at least 6,400 stores themselves (HERE), which means that there's no franchisee excuse for not upping the pay of their workers.

To put the numbers into perspective, McDonald's made so much money last year that they gave more than $7.7 billion back to investors in the form of stick buybacks and dividends (HERE). That link even shows that McDonald's made more money combined from its company-operated restaurants than from its franchisee owned stores, even though there are far fewer company owned stores.

From my perspective, all of this just reinforces my point when I said "Companies like McDonald's are already making a huge profit; they just want to share as little as possible of those profits with their workers (which means that a higher share of the profits go to investors/shareholders/etc)". dang, i thought i was never going to be able to link this back to that quote

originally posted by: darkbake
Yet I’ve seen conservatives complain about worker turnover...

Worker turnover is actually a good thing for the economy. It means there's a high degree of job mobility and in the end that means companies have to better serve their employees in order to retain talent.

originally posted by: enlightenedservant
a reply to: Edumakated

I'm looking at some of the same stats you listed (HERE) and I'm not feeling bad for them. Not only does that article show that the average McDonald's franchisee owns 6 franchises (so multiply those profits by 6), but it also gives an example of a franchisee selling his McDonald's franchise for more than twice what he purchased it.

I don't have any stats for the average resell price, but so far it's looking like: Average franchisee makes $150,000-$200,000 per franchise for $900,000 to $1,200,000 a year in profits. But if those yearly profits aren't enough, then the franchisee can just sell one of the stores for the cost of the initial investment (which is what I'm seeing most often) or for around twice the initial investment (going by the anecdotal evidence in the article).

And that's just the franchisee. McDonald's as a whole makes far money money than that, with this separate article (HERE) claiming that McDonald's keeps a whopping 82% of the revenue generated by the franchisees. That's because the company is the landlord (check the average $391,000 rent fees from the first article) and is also getting a huge chunk of the other expenses listed in the first article. And McDonald's still owns at least 6,400 stores themselves (HERE), which means that there's no franchisee excuse for not upping the pay of their workers.

To put the numbers into perspective, McDonald's made so much money last year that they gave more than $7.7 billion back to investors in the form of stick buybacks and dividends (HERE). That link even shows that McDonald's made more money combined from its company-operated restaurants than from its franchisee owned stores, even though there are far fewer company owned stores.

From my perspective, all of this just reinforces my point when I said "Companies like McDonald's are already making a huge profit; they just want to share as little as possible of those profits with their workers (which means that a higher share of the profits go to investors/shareholders/etc)". dang, i thought i was never going to be able to link this back to that quote

A couple of points:

The difference between an OWNER and employee is that the owner is risking his/her own capital to invest in a business. That owner can also lose everything. A business owner should be able to sell their business and make far more than their initial investment. That is part of the risk / reward proposition and why people take the risk. If you don't want the risk, you punch a clock as an employee, but you can't complain that the owner is making a lot of money. If you want to make owner money, put up your own capital. In fact, if you can't sell for far more than you invested, then it wasn't a great investment.

Only about 15% of McDonald's locations are owned by corporate. The rest are franchises. I have a not so small amount of McDonald's stock and benefited quite handsomely, so quite familiar with how they are doing as a company. Companies are supposed to give money back to it's INVESTORS. That is why they are in business. Investors are not all institutional companies but the employees and other small investors as well. We all benefit when the company is performing. if you want to benefit, open up an Etrade account and go buy some stock. Stock ticker on NYSE is MCD.

The point is that wages at the restaurant level are a small business issue. Raising wages would hurt many of these restaurants. As already demonstrated, they don't generate an obscene amount of profits.

originally posted by: xuenchen
Just a matter of time until some group decides to tie ropes around kiosks and pull them down.

😲

yep
i hear they are built with gold wires

a reply to: Isurrender73

It's quite simple. People will make the same amount of money working far fewer hours so everyone can find a job. Life will become more about living and entertaining ourselves than grinding 9-5 living paycheck to paycheck.

lol yeah right, just like how it is now for the unemployed and under-employed, spending all their free time looking for work or extra work and forced to prove it or they will lose their benifits and get sanctioned.

This idea of a universal basic income will no doubt be similar to working tax credits we currently have in the UK. the clue is in the name "basic" there will be nobody living middle class lifestyles on basic income. Just lots more poor people around dependent on the government and hand outs. No doubt we will also see suicides rise as people struggle to make ends meat.

originally posted by: TheRedneck
Why kiosks are better than cashiers:

• Kiosks don't demand wage increases for doing nothing.
  
• Kiosks don't call in sick so they can sleep late.
  
• Kiosks don't steal money from the company.
  
• Kiosks can make change.
  
• Kiosks do not force you to figure taxes for them.
  
• Kiosks don't sue you for firing them.
  
• Kiosks do not sexually harass other kiosks.
  
• Kiosks are not racist.
  
• Kiosks are not rude to the customer.
  
• Kiosks do not quit in the middle of rush hour.
  
• Kiosks do not show up with a hangover.
  
• Kiosks do not complain about hours.
  
• Kiosks do not take restroom breaks, so they don't need to wash their hands.
  
• Kiosks do not argue with the boss.

Let's face it... if kiosks and robots become the minimum wage job holders of tomorrow, it's because they outperform humans at those jobs and give better service.

TheRedneck

The "perks" of self-serve are more like appeasement for the minority of mouthy, uppity whine-asses bent on making mountains out of molehills & finding issues that are far less common than claimed, not really perks. Even then, said mouthy, uppity whine-asses still find a reason to corner someone and bitch.

Either way, it doesn't outweigh the system crashes/freezes that seems so endemic to them. We refuse to use self-checkouts at the stores for a reason, they always f# up and crash or freeze. Ever had the weight sensor spaz out? "Item in bagging area, please remove item. Item removed from bagging area, please return item. Item in bagging area, please remove item. Item removed from bagging area, please return item. Please wait for assistance." Try that item after item, it's sooooo much better than a cashier is /sarc

When we have used them, we spent more time WAITING, both for someone to come over, reboot/key in a code and do either of them, so we could be on our way than we would have with a person at a lane register.
Frankly, the fact that people would rather wait in a long line for a human to do it than deal with machines tells us the "convenience" of it being faster, as it's billed as, falls flat. Faster or not, works well or not, people want other humans to purchase through, not a machine.

originally posted by: darkbake

originally posted by: surfer_soul
a reply to: TheRedneck

What I wonder though, is with so many people out of work and not paying taxes, where will govenments find the money to pay people a basic income? Or the universal basic income I've heard touted about? Aren't most coutries up to their eyeballs in debt as it is?

link

:

The corporate bigwigs who will be raking in tons of cash from automation will have to be taxed more, and rightly so. It’s about time they paid their dues.

Without jobs, how are people supposed to afford to consume? In the long run, the universal basic income is inevitable.

Yes the corporate bigwigs should be made to pay more tax, but they will try every trick going not to. Lets not forget all the loopholes they already use to avoid paying their dues, they have been caught red handed multiple times. The Panama and Paradise papers released by wikileaks should give us all food for thought about the ethics of these corporate elites. They are sociopaths.

Even with a universal "basic" income, people will only just manage to scrape by, they won't be able to afford all the extra shizz that drives the economy. How will it be any different to the situation those that are already unemloyed find themselves in?

a reply to: enlightenedservant

I live in Canada.
The price is a bit different here, but the $20 included a medium pop.
So in actuality the burger itself probably cost 16 bucks or so.

As for the why - The kiosk only displays those extra toppings, so I had no idea they were offered at the till. Up until then, I had no idea I could pick different cheeses or jalapeños etc..
But most likely the cost would had been the same.

a reply to: surfer_soul


Eventually the 99% will overthrow the 1% and make the necessary changes.

The world moves in cycles. The end of the current cycle is near.

originally posted by: surfer_soul
Even with a universal "basic" income, people will only just manage to scrape by, they won't be able to afford all the extra shizz that drives the economy. How will it be any different to the situation those that are already unemloyed find themselves in?

The largest advantage to a basic income is that it gives people the ability to feed themselves and pay the rent while inbetween jobs. That fact alone gives the ordinary person immense leverage in being able to negotiate for a better job, because they always have the freedom to walk away from an unacceptable offer.

a reply to: surfer_soul

Really? Where are all these people who cannot learn? Who lack the ability to take classes to improve their knowledge? Who are incapable of doing just a little more to make themselves more valuable? Who are unable to not lay out of work?

You do realize the largest complaint by employers is that workers won't show up on time? And that's somehow not the workers' fault?

ANYONE can improve themselves... most just don't want to.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

There are a lot of people who lack the opportunity. You're in your late 50's and still trying to finish up your college education. Are you surprised that people younger than you haven't been able to do so?