Spare a though for the poor kids in retail. They can’t get full time jobs anywhere. They’ve just had their pay slashed for overtime work. And soon, they won’t even be able to flip burgers:
Last year, the kiosks were coming. It didn’t take them long to get here.
Wendy’s plans to install self-ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its stores — about 16 percent of its locations — by the end of the year.
The Dublin-based burger giant started offering kiosks last year, and demand for the technology has been high from both customers and franchise owners.
“There is a huge amount of pull from (franchisees) in order to get them,” David Trimm, Wendy’s chief information officer, said last week during the company’s investors’ day.
“With the demand we are seeing … we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year.”
Trimm said the kiosks accomplish two purposes: They give younger customers an ordering experience that they prefer, and they reduce labor costs.
A typical store would get three kiosks for about $15,000. Trimm estimated the payback on those machines would be less than two years, thanks to labor savings and increased sales. Customers still could order at the counter.
Kiosks are where the industry is headed, but Wendy’s is ahead of the curve, said Darren Tristano, vice president with Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm.
“They are looking to improve their automation and their labor costs, and this is a good way to do it,” he said. “They are also trying to enhance the customer experience. Younger customers prefer to use a kiosk.”
Welcome to downward mobility, as a machine takes the more sophisticated job, leaving kids cleaning the dunny, via Paul Krugman:
Izabella Kaminska has a thought-provoking piece on the real effects of technology on wages, in which she argues that much recent innovation, instead of displacing manual workers, has displaced high-paying skilled jobs. As it happens, I sort of predicted this 20 years ago, in a piece written for the Times magazine’s 100th anniversary (authors were asked to write as if it was 2096, and they were looking back.)
I argued then that menial work dealing with the physical world – gardeners, maids, nurses – would survive even as quite a few jobs that used to require college disappeared. As it turns out, big data has led to more progress in something that looks like artificial intelligence than I expected — self-driving cars are much closer to reality than I would have thought, and maybe gardening robots and post-Roomba robot cleaners will follow. Still, the point about the relative displacement of cognitive versus manual jobs seems to stand.
An aside: given the way Google Translate and such work,
Seattle’sSearle’s Chinese Room Argument doesn’t look as foolish as I used to think it was.Anyway, Kaminska’s point about the disruptiveness of such technological change is something we should take seriously. After all, it has happened before. The initial effect of the Industrial Revolution was a substantial de-skilling of goods production. The Luddites were, for the most part, not proletarians but skilled craftsmen, weavers who constituted s sort of labor aristocracy but found their skills devalued by the power loom. In the long run industrialization did lead to higher wages for everyone, but the long run took several generations to happen — in that long run we really were all dead.
So interesting stuff. I’d note, however, that it remains peculiar how we’re simultaneously worrying that robots will take all our jobs and bemoaning the stalling out of productivity growth. What is the story, really?
You can at least be reassured that this ongoing disinflation ensures low interest rates forever and house prices to the moon so you’ll be sharing with your kids permanently giving you a highly professional live-in cleaner.
