If I could replace my employees with a robot I would do it in a minute, My wife always says the worst part of running our business is the employees. It is not the cost of labor it is the unreliability and outright laziness. When they do show up they spend more time on their phones then they do working. Good luck replacing them with anyone better they are all the same and firing them will only mean you have to pay them unemployment to not work.

It's probably what you don't want but it's what you and the rest of us will get. As we keep raising wages in this country, we have lost service and quality but we are all getting used to it and as time goes by, we won't know the difference.

When I was a teenager I worked at a gas station and at the time, it was illegal to pump your own gas. I washed windows, checked the oil and tires. Now days, nobody thinks twice about gas stations being self-service. The point is, that is happening all around us and the newer generations don't miss anything as they never had it in the first place.

I wonder if there are any charts out there that compare the homeless count to minimum wage trends.

While minimum wages certainly plays a part in the move toward mechanization, the real issue are workers: Reliable, thoughtful, competent people are hard to find.

Good friend of mine owns five Micky-D's in Pennsylvania. I have know him for forty years. He told me that very few families in his area make their HS and college age kids work, even in the summer.

That has really impacted how he and his managers work the people end.

My get off the lawn moment: I had to get a job in the summers when I was a kid and worked part time in college during the academic year.

There were no other options.

BTW, I think a federally mandated minimum wage is a bad idea - States need to be in charge.

Think it can put a clutch in a 911?

No, but three of them could! ;)

No webb; robotics is CREATING a LOT of jobs. Jobs more interesting that the monotony of flipping a burger.

Let me ask, do you grind your own coffee in the morning? Did you walk to Costa Rica to get the beans?

Machines make life better.

I believe the reason that you self-serve your soda at fast food chains, isn't that they want you to think you get free refills, (although that is part of it, I's sure) its that the soda costs pennies and they avoid paying $ for another body to fill drink orders

Yep ^ Feeding people efficiently should not be seen as a negative, yet here we are.

The thing I find most concerning about the fast food industry's move towards automation is, what will it do to kids looking for their first job? It's already tough for teenage kids to find jobs. Get rid of fast food work in large part and they'll have virtually no chance of finding work.

Is there another robot that takes the patty out from the freezer?
What about the robot that assembles the burger?
One more robot to wrap the burger and place it into the bag

Yep!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMsNZsp4LE0

Automation will take an already bad situation and make it worse for working age kids.

There is always Menards, Farm and Fleet, grocery stores, department stores...

Not when McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, and every other fast food place gets rid of more and more young workers and replaces them with screens and machines. Even with the fast food places hiring, it's hard to find a job in home improvement stores, farm stores and grocery stores because those jobs get filled quickly. Then if you displace adults from those jobs in fast food, you'll have those same adults applying for the jobs the kids would have been getting at those stores as well.

They can all work at Chick-fil-A!

They will have to WORK for sure and learn to say "my pleasure" when offered a Thank You.

My wife loves their salad. They do have a tasty chicken sandwich also. Watch any of those Chick-fil-A in action. The dining rooms are closed now due to the China virus, and the drive throughs are just loaded with 4 lanes wide, and kids running (really running) back and forth to the cars. The kids are working hard, lots of them.

Of course to work there, you better learn to hustle buns, because they don't want slackers.

Reliable, thoughtful, and competent people won't work for minimum wage. And I don't blame them.

I have some bad news... mechanization with AI can do design, art, engineering, medicine, critical analysis, and psychology.

Best choice for fast food workers seems to be middle-class parents who want to make sure their kids don't grow up with entitlement syndrome. I knew a few like that, and today their kids are MDs, nurses, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of min. wage workers are adults...

At a certain age and experience level, they do.

I am a perfect example. I started umpiring LL games when I was 14. I was a known BB player in the area I was in so I started at 14 with LL Minors then moved up to 10 - 12 Senior when I was 15/16. I knew everyone.

I made $5.00 dollars a game in the Minors, $7.50 a game in the Majors. This was in 1970 through 1973. I umpired 4 games a week. Big money in those days for a teenager, part time.

I loved it.

Moved to South Carolina, no rep but I needed a job between my junior and senior year in HS.

I worked for $1.75 an hour on a golf course that was under construction, Houndslake in Aiken, SC. Awful work. https://houndslakecc.com/

By the end of the summer I was making $2.75 an hour because I could drive a tractor.

In HS, you start small and sitting around the ranch simply was not going to happen.

"Have a job by the end of the week."

When I was in high school I used a 16 mm Bolex camera to shoot a short film of some students for a pep rally coming up. Everyone is school loved it. The football coach wanted me to film the football game, just from the snap, to the whistle to use for coaching. Long long before the days of video.

I shot a few games for him, and other coaches wanted it as well. Pretty soon I was shooting a game on Thursday nights for Jr high, Friday nights for high school, and Saturday nights for Alabama State and occasional Troy state games. My social life was shot, but I was making more money filming games than my regular job.

It was a big part of how I was able to afford a brand new 1974 914 2.0 ordered to my specs in 1974. I shot weddings almost every Saturday, and still worked 6 days a week most weeks. No robots will ever that over those jobs.