Pricing jobs out of existence

Jazz Shat at Hot Air blogs:

McDonald’s employees who picketed for a better living wage (whatever that means) may come to regret that decision. According to a Redditor, a McDonald’s in Illinois replaced their cashiers with machines. The machines appear to be the cousins of the ones found in grocery stores, big box stores, and CVS that allow customers to complete transactions.

What are the economics?

For a location open 24 hours: The cost of human cashiers, not counting benefits, $15/hour * 24 hours * 365 days/year = $131,400

For a location open 6AM to Midnight: $15/hour * 18 hours * 365 = $98,550.

For the machine to be cost effective, all it needs to do is cost less than $100,000 a year to buy and maintain.

That’s not much. This could all happen very quickly.

Yes, as the Forbes article makes clear, it didn’t exactly require a rocket surgeon to predict that if you drove the labor costs up too far in an unltracompetitive market such as the fast food industry, automation would begin to look too tempting to ignore. You’re going to make us pay the guy at the fry machine 15 bucks and hour? Well… we decided to pass on that and pay a robot nothing instead.

A great result for the low paid workers – unemployment!