McDonald’s Response to $15 Minimum Wage: Automation in Every Store
Priced out of a job. "If a store can replace a $15 an hour employee with a robot that costs $35,000, it will not only improve that store’s operating margins but will actually enhance customer experience: robots don’t get sick, they don’t have attitudes or get pregnant, they don’t go on strike, they always show up for work on time, and, as software improves, will provide a friendly, interactive interface with the store. McDonald’s decision will also answer, finally and forever, the question that economics textbooks and economics professors have been raising and then trying to answer for decades: What impact will raising the minimum wage have? Supporters of minimum-wage laws say that they increase the standard of living of workers, reduce poverty, reduce inequality, and boost the economy as well as the morale of workers. Opponents say minimum-wage laws increase unemployment and poverty and are especially damaging to small businesses that are forced to raise their prices to cover the increased labor costs. Here’s the math: a worker being paid $15 an hour costs his employer $38,500 a year, including unemployment insurance and the employer’s part of Social Security. If Rensi is right, and the average robot in a McDonald’s costs $35,000, in less than a year that store has paid for it in reduced wages, and eliminates that $15 an hour cost forever after. If there are 30 employees in a McDonald’s, and if just 10 of them are replaced by a robot, customers will enjoy another benefit: lower prices on their Happy Meals."
1 comment:
This isn't rocket science. Companies aren't in business for charitable reasons, they are in business to make money. I wonder why that's so hard for Liberals to understand. This was predictable and not the least bit surprising. The mom-and-pop aspect is particularly sad. A corp. the size of McDonald's can and will cope with this silly law. The M&Ps will be forced out of business.
Same thing happened to the sugarcane cutters who came from Central America once a year to harvest the cane. There were long waiting-lists of workers wanting to come, stay here for two or three months and take home enough money to feed their families for a year. The Libs decided the sugar giants weren't housing them and feeding them in luxury and demanded higher wages and benefits. So the sugar companies automated, and now the cane cutters have no jobs. They were legal, temporary immigrants willing to do what was beneath American workers to do. I wonder if the bleeding hearts are sending them money.
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