How many min. wage worker hours - $30,000 ??
 

Flippy has been introduced - it is a robotic arm that... flips burgers

$30k and it doesn't get covid or sue for workman's comp.

no PARFing ok?

but robotics is coming for a LOT of jobs

Depending on local and state variations, employer share of payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, etc., that’s roughly the cost of one year’s FTE minimum wage worker. You can reduce the overhead by hiring a couple of part time minimum wage workers because part timers don’t get the same mandatory benefits, but it’s still about a wash at about one year. So the investment would have about a one year break even payback point.

Indeed.

There are still other jobs they can do, but chalk up another reduction in human tasking.

I suspect that greeting, and being nice to customers will be the last remaining holdout.

Spongebob would kick its ass!

On a serious note, no surprise as minimum wage creeps up. Flippy doesn't need workers comp, health insurance, paid holidays, overtime, etc. The fast food industry has been working towards full automation for several years.

2000 hours at 15 an hour.
Blame the clowns that said doubling minimum wage was a good idea.
Same idea as all the touchscreens for ordering in urban McDonald’s

I was in a restaurant quite a while back. They had these tablet looking things on the table. The waitress explained how we could order and pay using the device. I chuckled a bit when she left and told my friends at the table that I didn't think she realized she's training her replacement.

Well as min wage rises the cost benefit on machines improves for the machine.

Yes it does.

As to raising min. wage, it was not raised for decades so did not keep up with inflation. And a higher min. wage just speeds up what would already happen anyway.

When I worked at TacoSmell in the 80's we washed soaked boiled and hand blended the beans. The meat arrived refrigerated in a block and we added spices and mixed while cooking in a vat. That was in the days of 20 taco packs. We were good. A lot of customers had some great dinners.

Now, I'm under belief everything arrives packaged in boil bags because employees are not trustworthy enough to do their simple jobs. When I sit there in a fast food line for ten minutes, pay $10 for a simple meal, no ketchup even, get an attitude, order is cold and wrong, I think back to earlier days. I hesitate to even stop anymore these days. Much of this originates from higher up I suspect. No QC.

Japan has had burger vending machines for a while https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/vending-machine-burgers#:~:text=There%20are%20vending%20machines%2 0for%20books%2C%20jeans%2C%20and,its%20patrons%20o rder%20burgers%20through%20a%20vending%20machine,

But nothing replaces fresh.

oh yeh ... speaking of "robot arms"...


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1595468012.jpg

Ex-Machina movie is worth watching a few times but not relevant at this stage in time.

I've gotten robo calls that sounded human. But only for a second.

Same, but this one was amazing, the only way I knew she wasn’t real were the answers she gave we’re only slightly off.

As for that robot, how long will until it rises up and only serves beyond meat burgers?

A million years ago, I worked for a big aluminum company. Our best hiring office was the jail halfway house. We paid about min wage and had 700+++ employees.

We got bought by a European outfit. In Europe, they paid 23ish per hour and had lifetime employment. Summary: they looked for every reason NOT to hire in Europe.

It was a huge culture shock for the new guys when they saw our super large workforce. What took us 700+++ took less than 50 in Europe.

It's the future for sure.

Yep, makes you wonder if someone was making a point in establishing their price point.

The biggest upside (downside?) is the robot doesn’t know what the time is. So work the robot, 4,000 hours, you’re paying $7.50/hour, work it 16 hours a day, 365/year, you’re paying $5.14/hour...

And for the next 10 years the robot just needs some routine maintenance and will operate at little cost past that purchase price.

I bet that robot makes an absolutely average tasting burger. That's what I want when I eat out.

I’m happier and happier every day with my decision to be vegetarian and go out of my way to avoid mass-produced and processed foods like the plague. It’s probably the single best thing I’ve done for myself health-wise in my life. If it comes out of a box or bucket or drum, I don’t want it. If it’s an “animal product” I don’t want it. If it comes off a Sysco truck I don’t want it. If it’s recognizable as something that grows on a farm, good. If it has all ingredients that my 2nd grade daughter can pronounce, good. Pretty simple.

As far as automation, learn to do something that requires skill that can’t be replicated by mechanization - design, art, engineering, medicine, critical analysis... or for those that prefer - skilled trades, machinery repair, one-on-one customer service, etc. There are things out there that do - and likely always will - require human effort and can’t be done by machines. This is all a question of the choices people make. If someone’s “career” is flipping burgers or punching cash register buttons and those things get replaced by automation I’m not terribly sympathetic - go get some skills and try again.

In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you.

A bit sooner than Zager and Evens thought.

If this is the same outfit i heard discussed on the radio, manufacturer is charging a monthly subscription price. They’re intent is to go 100% that way in the future.

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.