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Coming soon: McDonald's with even less human interaction
By adamg on Fri, 03/31/2017 - 2:06pm
![McDonald's kiosk](https://www.universalhub.com/files/styles/main_image/public/new/mckiosk.jpg?itok=nwYKqthH)
The McDonald's on Hyde Park Avenue in Hyde Park now has two ordering kiosks, although they haven't fired them up yet.
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Those kiosks are all over
Those kiosks are all over London at McDonald's (yeah, I like a Double Bacon McMuffin, sorry not sorry), and speed up the process significantly
Well you can't blame the
Well you can't blame the kiosk for getting your order wrong....but damn I guess this is our future
Bwahahahaha
Fight for $15.
Aka
"Robot employment act"
Kinda
There will be fewer employees which means raising wages won't impact their costs nearly as much.
Who said
They were raising wages? Its a publicly traded company which employed low skilled workers. They will continue to eliminate jobs, reduce cost and increase returns for their investors.
Remember they used to employ dishwashers until raising wages made it cheaper to use disposable containers.
Social Pressure
In the future McD's might release a feel-good press release claiming they are moving to a $15/Hr wage "For the good of their employees." (They hide the fact they've laid of 30% of their workforce.)
Sales rise as a result of good PR while their costs have gone down. Everyone wins except for the people laid off.
What was the minimum wage
What was the minimum wage when the ATM was introduced 40 years ago?
What about when the vending machine was introduced 70 years ago?
And the automat 90 years ago?
Yep
They'll just be shifting the 2-3 registers to Customer Service positions. And that probably means shifting personal or firing and hiring at many locations to find someone for the new job.
Being quick on the register and accurate making change isn't going to be a desirable trait. Being helpful to customers, troubleshooting orders, ect will be.
This is honestly about improving the experience and chasing the new norms of the 21st century. Everyone has a smart phone, and fast food service has reputation of being worse than the food.
Universal Basic Income
"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." - Oscar Wilde
https://www.washingtonpost
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/30/were-so-unprepare...
Interesting anomaly
The article notes that even with robot use U.S. auto manufacturing jobs are on the increase due to the complexities of modern car contstruction, as well as the need for robot maintenance. But these jobs require a different skill set than was needed for assembly line work. The numbers of displaced workers who either cannot or won't retrain is already daunting and will continue to grow..
That's exactly what a robot
That's exactly what a robot would say.
The executive behind Pizza Hut and KFC says robots could replace
The executive behind Pizza Hut and KFC says robots could replace some fast-food workers by 2025
http://www.businessinsider.com/fast-food-automation-robots-yum-ceo-2017-3
Between Obamacare and high minimum wage, expect more kiosks
Between the massive job losses caused by Obamacare and the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the Democrats will hasten the installation of these things with the loss of millions of jobs. Wendy's and Panera are also rolling them out. Hotels are experimenting with a robot who delivers room service, while just about every industry looks to automate or export U.S. low-skilled jobs. Hopefully President Trump's return of manufacturing and clean coal jobs will help to offset the losses.
Neither Obamacare or high minimum wage issue
I know you want to shoehorn everything into your version of reality, but that's just a good way for you to always be wrong.
There are a ton of reasons why a robot/computer is going to be better than a person at certain functions. The only thing a person really gets you these days is versatility (someone at the register could switch to fries if properly trained, but the ordering kiosk isn't going to saunter over and make a Shamrock Shake any time soon). None of those are Obamacare or minimum wage.
You couldn't pay a person low enough to compete for the amelioration of having that computer in place instead. The same goes for manufacturing AND coal jobs (clean coal is a myth, fuck off with that nonsense right now...and it has nothing to do with the mining of coal anyways which is what Trump claims he's going to return the jobs to). Coal jobs aren't being lost to cheaper labor or Obamacare concerns...they're being lost to automation (you don't need 10 men with 10 pickaxes when you can have one man with a motorized retrieval system) as well as cheaper energy sourcing from natural gas and renewables. And the only way manufacturing will come back here is if it's cheaper to have the robots in a factory here doing the work than to operate them overseas and ship the finished products back here.
But we're not focusing on a generation of new robot operators/repairmen which would make it cheaper to run the robots here than overseas, you're still with Trump thinking that we're just going to make things with our hands here at home on a fool's errand.
All of which brings us back to the McDonald's kiosk. The one knock against them is that you're so far lost from reality that I'm not even sure you're intelligent enough to use a kiosk to place an order...so maybe there's still hope for people being hired to help you navigate life in this new era of automation.
Kaz: Are you talking to me, Bill Gates or the WSJ?
Are you talking to me, Bill Gates or the WSJ? I understand your hatred for me as an early Trump supporter/donor but neither Gates nor the WSJ are Trump supporters. What say you to them?
Only one of you mentioned coal
Way to dodge all that logic with, "What? You talkin' to me?"
You're wrong, Kaz
Jes' plain wrong.
"(clean coal is a myth, fuck off with that nonsense right now...and it has nothing to do with the mining of coal anyways which is what Trump claims he's going to return the jobs to). Coal jobs aren't being lost to cheaper labor or Obamacare concerns...they're being lost to automation (you don't need 10 men with 10 pickaxes when you can have one man with a motorized retrieval system)"
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/coal/2012/11/clean_coal...
So, apparently, clean coal isn't just a figment of Fish's mind. It's real and will be developed elsewhere.
Oh, and as far as the 'men with pickaxes', well, mining is done by machines, as anyone that watches 'Dirty Jobs' would know. They haven't shoveled coal since Tennessee Ernie Ford's 'Sixteen Tons'.
Face it, the Lightbringer stomped on coal and Hillary pledged to finish the job. Coal might die, fracked natural gas might be cheaper and cleaner, but it at least deserves a fair playing field.
"I'm not even sure you're intelligent enough to use a kiosk to place an order" So, I guess the ad hominem arguments here on the hub are rolling along just fine. Seems AG chastising Lbb for saying STFU to someone really didn't stick at all.
So, on that note, I deliberately cited a lefty website (Slate) because I figured anything else wouldn't be up to the lofty standards of those here that know friggin (a euphemism for another word) everything.
Yawn
One article in slate.
One.
Sorry, but science works according to the burden of proof, not one article in Slate. "Clean Coal" is a charade - even if you can reduce the air pollution, there is still those pesky high levels of CO2 per unit of energy issue to deal with.
Give it up.
Yawn? Get some sleep.
It must be exhausting being you. Anyway, I went with Slate because it leans left. So, here's a few more links from the coal mine that is the Internet:
2010. Ancient, I know, but it was during the Obama Era:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421509004145
2014. Ancient, I know, but it was during the Obama Era:
http://www.us-china-cerc.org/Advanced_Coal_Technology.html
2014. Ancient, I know, but it was during the Obama Era (said the parrot):
https://www.wired.com/2014/03/clean-coal/
2013. Woh. Older, but hey...government. They can be trusted, right?
https://business.usa.gov/article/china-buys-clean-coal-technology-us
2008. Ancient, but, hey...MIT!!! They do science there. This one touches on coal gas:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411393/china-closes-the-clean-coal-gap/
"Sorry, but science works according to the burden of proof, not one article in Slate."
OK, so let's hear from the real scientists. You know, the really smart experts that are right and know it all.
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
So, the Really Smart People were so wrong it's almost funny. I'm still waiting for the glaciers to come barrelling down from the north by 1980.
All the quotes come from this link about Earth Day in 1970:
https://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-y...
See, dear, in order for an opinion to be useful it has to come from a person that is not only expert, but also unbiased. Perhaps you cannot ever be proven wrong because you are biased in your thinking.
All I'm saying is give clean coal technology the same level playing field that Solyndra was given by the Obama Administration. As a matter of fact, let's settle for a level playing field without the half billion dollar screwing the taxpayer took on that one:
WAPO. Kinda leans left:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/specialreports/solyndra-scandal/
Another one for a little background on what happens when crooked businessmen and incompetent bureaucrats with an agenda get together:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/26/solyndra-misled-governme...
Don't get me wrong, I don't want all that 300 million year old dead plant carbon released either, but here's the real deal...China and India are going full blast into coal. If a way can be found to clean it up, we had better find it.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/may/27/why-india-is-captured-by-ca...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-future-of-coal-in-china-india-australia-...
And of course, India giving itself tennis elbow patting itself on the back over coal:
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/clean-coal-indias-way-ahead-to-lower-carb...
Thank you, India:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_ind.html
And of course, some real info on coal, but you've already seen this one:
https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html
Sure...in 2012
Five years ago, when your link was written, people were still pinning hopes on the technology.
As recently as 5 months ago, not so much.
http://insideenergy.org/2016/10/11/clean-coal-fact-or-fiction/
And while this article still tries to hold out hope for some kind of out of thin air technology to come to fruition. Nobody else is.
PBS? Well, OK
Hmmnn...coal gas. See the MIT link above.
I never said it would be easy. Coal gas is nothing new, it was done in the 1800's. That's why gas system piping has drip tees.
Or we could just go nuke...but not from Westinghouse.
Sadly
The politics of nuke are nuked, despite huge advanced in engineering and safety of Gen5+ reactors. People just don't it near them.
Hopefully MIT gets it SPARC fusion reactor funded and spun up. Apparently new material science and superconductors are letting them shrink things and engineer them to be cost competitive with nuke. Maybe this will be the final "in 10 years".
Coal is dying
Not because it's dirty, but because of price. It's a market force.
"Clean Coal" only increases the price, if it were actually real. It's never going to happen. We're not going to spend money capturing emissions from burning coal when doing so rockets it's cost way above renewables, natural gas, and nuclear.
And digging the stuff out of the ground isn't going to be cheaper any time soon.
Man, I hope President Trump
Man, I hope President Trump can revive manufacturing and clean coal before he gets replaced by a kiosk.
Easy to code
You push a button and it tweets random argle bargle plus a dogwhistle for the skinheads.
Manufacturing Bullshit is not a true manufacturing job
according to theBureau of Labor Statistics.
These are in use in the Kenmore Sq
McDs. They appear to be frequently down.
Maybe not ready for Prime Time
If they work as "well" as the ones at CVS, which are NEVER faster than going to a human, the counter people at McDonalds have nothing to worry about.
CVS
Couldn't disagree more. I don't go to my neighborhood CVS since they took out the self serve.
It went from three self serve kiosks and a person to a person. Or sometimes two people. So the lines are almost always over ten minutes because the people buying one thing are mixed on with entertainment shoppers who want to chat and take forever.
I used to pop on and pick up an item. Now I wait for a big shop at target or the grocery. I do still shop at CVS in DTX because they have self serve so I can get in and out.
Self check out
I agree that CVS self checkout is pretty fast, but I've had the opposite experience at grocery stores, and only use the self checkout if there is no line, most customers are way slower than store cashiers. The Shaws at the Pru had self checkout for awhile but did away with those lanes and added back cashiers.
Same
Self Checkouts were a god send to CVS and Home Depot. Only because if you only wanted one or two items, you can use a self check out far faster than you can a cashier. They work well for a couple of items that don't require anything extra (PLU lookups, weight, etc etc), but the minute you have several items or lots of stuff requiring PLU's (i.e. bread, fruit, etc). the time savings go way down (as does the hassle-value go way up). This is why they don't work well in supermarkets.
I think in most CVS's cases, no job really was lost when they moved to self check outs. You still need an attendant to help customers with the self check outs. (age restricted items, coupons, usage, etc).
The CVS near me, a busy CVS, does not have self check outs. They still only have 1 person on register, and if help is needed she calls someone for a backup (who usually is stocking), and if they need a third person, a manager might come up. If you need more than 3 people to check people out at CVS, you're having one hellva sale or a run in band aids or something! (and usually are staffed for it)
And frankly, that practice of running your front end has been in place for many years as it was how we did it eons ago when I worked at a drug store (a chain similar to CVS that JCP/Eckerd (Rite Aid now) sucked up in the 90s). We never had more than one person dedicated on register, unless it was around Christmas or we were having a big sale. It was always "call for backup".
Even still, the CVS(s) in DTX (both on Summer & Washington) still have at least TWO people on check outs during most times. One attendant, and one actual cashier. Slower times, it's just one. So no real job was lost there when places moved to self checkouts, because there was always a low number of physical cashiers anyways long before cashiers existed. The self checkouts, and the abundance of them (1 attendant + 6-8 self check outs) just made it seem like we lost jobs.
Universal Basic Income
This is why we need one.
Just wait for Universal Hub Basic Income
$1 per 1000 bike traffic comments
$2 per 500 Southie comments (pro or con)
Seasonal rates
.50 cents per 50 space saver/shoveling comments
And rates based on the French Toast Level
Higher rates for Red and Orange.
I haven't been to McD's in awhile
but this should drastically improve chances for getting the right order.
I have used the self-ordering
I have used the self-ordering kiosks at a Quick Chek store in NJ for sandwiches and only got 1 order correct of the 3 times I've used them- the best AI is only as good as the actual person behind them at times
So basically
this will eliminate jobs. This is sad. This generation is sad.
Blamn
SEIU who took advantage of low skilled workers in an attempt to grow their numbers. Fight for $15 was really a fight for SEIU to gain more political clout and fast food workers were their pawns.
Fight back
Demand that workers be treated fairly and paid a living wage!!! Then they will have NO reason to organize or be organized by SEIU!
Notice how Market Basket doesn't have unions ... and still doesn't? Gee ... wonder how that happens ...
im here for the $15 snowflakes
ty
I appreciate some human
I appreciate some human interaction when I am ordering food. Although I prefer my humans to be happy and not living in a gutter... so I will keep on pushing for a higher minimum wage and will be avoiding the bots.
I used these to order a Bacon Egg & Cheese Biscuit in Paris
...but without the bacon. I was surprised when the clerk came and handed it to me while I was standing in the back of the restaurant. "How'd you find me?" I asked. "There's a camera," she said.
The next day at Charles de Gaulle Airport I was stopped by security and told that my picture was on a list of "non-bacon-eaters," i.e. potential terrorist threats.