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Your Future Is Now

I’ve said before that raising the minimum wage in order to provide the “poor” with the material standard of living they feel entitled to is a plan that will backfire, causing incalculable financial harm to the very people it’s meant to provide for.

mcdonalds-automat

McDonald’s New Kiosk Model
(Click to Enlarge)

Well, it appears that, if you’re one of those who’ve been screaming to make $15 / hr to flip burgers, your future is now. McDonald’s is piloting a new, cashier-free kiosk system in several major US cities after having great success with them in Europe. And this is just McDonald’s; others are moving this way as well.

What is as telling as it is interesting is that, despite the hype, that these kiosks were developed to reduce labor costs, they weren’t. They were developed in order to speed up the ordering process and overall improve the customer experience…because the workers, who now want more money, couldn’t or wouldn’t do job as well as a self-service kiosk.

And the above are just about the cashiers. Other automated systems are in development or early pilot to completely automate the fast food cooking process. Hence, soon there may be very few people employed in the fast food industry at all.

Yes, to all those who’ve pushed, and pushed, and putsched to jack up the minimum wage I say, your future is now and it is bleak.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2015 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Politics, Society. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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How They Misthink

In the Civilized World, especially Britain and America, the “poor,” most especially the “working poor” misthink a lot. They truly mistake their place in the scheme of society and economics and, because of this, have replaced pride with hubris.

I wonder about people who think that those who are poor shouldn’t demand reciprocity from their employers. We should devote ourselves to something that doesn’t benefit us more than it absolutely has to? We’re meant to care about their best interests, but they don’t have to care about ours? If you’re going to put as little as possible into my training and wages, if you’re going to make sure that I can’t get enough hours to survive in order to avoid giving me healthcare, and generally make sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible at any given time just to make sure I know my place, then how can you expect me to care about your profit margin?

— Linda Tirado
Hand to Mouth

This is an all too common failing though more detrimental to both individuals and nations when coming from the “poor.” They conflate their worth as people with their worth to their employer and almost always over-inflate and overstate that importance.

Jobs Strategy
Hubris Is A Self-Punishing Sin

What these people fail to realize or, at least, fail to accept and internalize is that the only reason that they have one or more jobs is that, at the current time, it’s more feasible and/or cost effective for employers to employ them than it is to either outsource the work or replace the bulk of the labor process with automation. They can’t or won’t grasp the simple concept that they’re by and large disposable and interchangeable parts insofar as the context of their work is concerned and that this is the basic, incontrovertible nature of very low-level, largely unskilled labor.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2014 at 5:53 am and is filed under Society. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.