Posted on 09/21/2013 12:16:21 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Medieval doctors bled their patients with leeches. Far from improving their condition, it left them worse off. Raising the wages of fast-food workers to $15 an hour would produce similar results for those the proposal is intended to help.
In America, minimum-wage workers are better paid than the average worker in Mexico. Why? It’s not because U.S. employers are more generous than their Mexican counterparts. Nor do Americans somehow deserve better pay.
American minimum-wage earners make more because they produce more. Better education and greater capital investment make American workers more productive, raising their earnings.
Competition forces businesses to pay workers according to their productivity. If companies pay less, their employees will jump ship to competitors. And if they pay workers more than they produce, they go out of business.
For better or worse, fast-food jobs are relatively low-productivity positions, typically filled by inexperienced workers. Most fast-food customers want a quick, inexpensive meal. They will not regularly pay premium prices for a burger and fries.
Doubling McDonalds’ wages would raise their total costs by 25 percent — well above profit margins. But raising prices would drive customers away.
If Congress mandated fast-food restaurants to pay $15 an hour, they would have to change operations to deliver the kind of productivity to justify those higher costs. That would mean replacing current workers with machines and hiring fewer, more skilled workers to maintain them.....
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
BurgerBots’ don’t spit in your food!!!
Yup. Not likely to give you the Jesse Jackson Special Sauce....
“replace humans with robots”........
Some humans ARE robots and cannot think or act for themselves. Our liberal gubmint folks might be a good place to test the robot theory.
Japan and other places have hot-food vending machines.
Select your item, the frozen item is grabbed, microwaved, and deposited in the output hatch.
Japan's population is shrinking and they will not allow non-Japanese to immigrate to any significant degree. They will become leaders in creating automated solutions to replace low-wage grunts, and will export those solutions.
I remember eating at the Horn & Hardart Automat on the lower level of NYC's Macy's back in the 60's.
One thing that helped kill them was inflation. They were viable when you could deposit a coin to get a plate of food. When a plate cost a dollar or more, before machines that could accept dollar bills, you had to switch to having a cashier.
One enterprising chap has invented the hamburger flipping robot, a vending machine that makes hamburgers. Darned good ones too by all reports, complete with bleu cheese or other options.
Of course people concerned about all our jobs going to China will cry, just as French weavers would throw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the automatic weaving machines which were so much more efficient that they would surely put the lower classes out of work and make them starve.
I have no idea. However it’s pretty sad when ya have upwards of 20 million people actually working in jobs, where they’re not even paid enough to pay for the very *basic* of things.
How f’d up is that?
PBR has made a bit of a comeback due to its being embraced by the urban hipster set.
Well that's pretty damn obvious. Most biz owners in today's America absolutely care less of their employees and have 100 percent zero allegiance with them. This isn't your daddys America.
They have been around for over 100 years. They called them Automats.
Why did the hipster burn his mouth eating pizza?
He ate it before it was cool.
It does punch whole in the argument that invaders are needed to provide cheap labor and jobs US citizens won’t do.
Yes, good point.
A spectacular tragedy could set the idea back many years.
Beer pallets are perfect for automation.
I live quite close to Amazon's prototype grocery warehouse near Seattle.
They bought Kiva several years back, which builds “order fulfillment” robots.
Those little things swarm all over a warehouse, picking individual items, all shapes and sizes and weight, then delivering them to a central, human packing station.
Last time I was there, several years ago, they had just begun to experiment with an unloader.
The demonstration I saw involved pallets of detergent, which were on sale at a special price.
They were also experimenting with Kiva robots stocking shelves rather than picking from them.
Amazon Fresh delivers mostly to individual customers, so they stock and distribute more like a Safeway store than a Costco warehouse.
I love this technology, but it is going to cause revolutionary economic changes for low skilled workers.
Manufacturing middle managers are about to get crushed, too.
Traditionally, collecting data, organizing it, and writing reports was their primary function.
SAP and Oracle are slowly but surely putting those guys out on the street.
Except the automat had humans preparing the food. Now there’ll be one or two techs that maintain the machinery for 4-5 restaurants, plus someone in each location to keep the machines clean and loaded with ingredients, and a “manager” to handle customer issues and to submit support calls.
It's not f'd up at all, those are called entry level jobs, meant for teenagers and retirees. Like the greeter at Wal-Mart! Fast food joints are doing a service to the nation for providing those jobs. Businesses are not in business to provide jobs, they're in business to make a profit and as long as they can find someone that will work for that amount of money that's what they should do. They are already forced to pay minimum wage (an artificial number set by politicians to buy votes) if a persons talent is limited to flipping hamburgers they need to be training to garner more talents not seeking to have the government force an artificial wage so they can be rewarded for their lack of drive , truth is they are already overpaid. enough is enough!!!
How f’d up is that?
It's not f'd up at all, those are called entry level jobs, meant for teenagers and retirees
Oh stop with that malt shop bull cheet...All day long when the teens are in school, who's serving you up the fast food slop Mr. ontap?
Go into any fast food joint and what do ya see? Adults and 40 year old illegal aliens...Ya gunna send your 16 year old daughter to work with them??
You need to climb out of the 1950s.
What if the people who are going to be losing their jobs are incapable of handling anything better?
There are some who have made 'life-choices' that have screwed their situations up rather badly, i.e; kids out of wedlock, past drug use, past criminal activity, etc. Employers don't want to hire them. What do we do with them? I'm not trying to tell you or anyone else that they're wrong with their conservative beliefs. However, I've sat and pondered the situation, and I cannot come up with a solution to the problem of all these low-skill workers that it appears cannot be trained for something better.
Perhaps, I have too much compassion.
Anyone have a solution?
Begs the question...Trained for what? Government jobs?
Are there millions of highly skilled jobs available?
Even if there were millions of skilled jobs available, who would work the low skill jobs?
But if they are willing to work all day, is it not possible to pay a wage that at least covers the very *basic* of things like rent, utilities and food?
Those who own most of the franchises are very well off...Trust me...They make millions...
Are the very basic things in life now considered luxuries in today's America?
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