About a year ago I wrote the post below after seeing an ordering kiosk in a McDonalds down in Alabama. I was in our Hardees last night, and they now also have kiosks in addition to a single person taking orders. It looks like order takers will be replaced by kiosks and smart phone apps very soon. The way to fight back is to give great customer service, making the restaurant make more per hour than your salary by your being there instead of a cold, humanless machine.
McKiosk?
I was reading a stat this weekend that one in three working people were in a union in 1970 but only one in ten are now. The author of the editorial used this to explain why wages have stagnated, but I took a different meaning. Given that once a company is unionized it is virtually impossible to de-unionize it, this statistic means that we saw a lot of union jobs go away, forever. A drive through Detroit (with your windows rolled up and at top speed, not stopping at the lights) would also show the effect of trying to force companies to pay a worker more than what the value of what he was doing was worth. This, combined with absurd work rules (in some union car plants, you needed to continue to pay workers who sat and read the paper in a room in the plant if you didn’t have enough work for them), has chased a lot of companies out of the country or just out of business.
Now the same folks who brought us the unions and ran great American cities into the ground have their sites set on minimum wage workers. With demands of $15 per hour wages, organizers are convincing some misguided fast food workers (many workers wisely don’t participate because they can do the math) to protest at their place of business. Note that the average McDonald’s worker produces about $13.50 in value for his/her company, so the company would be losing $1.50 per worker per hour if they paid $15 per hour. Multiply that by thousands of workers, and you would see millions of dollars in losses each year. No company could withstand that.
The solution for companies faced with rising labor costs who can’t just move out of the country as did the factories is to cut the number of workers. Enter the ordering kiosk. The picture above shows kiosks I found at a McDonald’s in Florida last week. There were six kiosks setup and they were getting a lot of use by the customers without many complaints. I went ahead and ordered at the counter (I like to support the workers, plus I would rather have a person help me with my order than go to a machine), but a lot of others chose the kiosks. Smart phone apps are also being rolled out. Raise costs enough and you’ll just have a cooked burger appear on a conveyor belt and you would add the toppings yourself. The restaurant would just need to employ a couple of people to load the burgers into the hopper. They could eliminate the need to clean by just making it a drive-thru with no table service.
People with three kids and a home should not be in these jobs. These are jobs for teenagers and young liberal arts majors to take as a first job to learn the skills needed to get the next job and move up the ladder. If you take these jobs away by raising the minimum wage or by protesting until McDonald’s and other employers relent, you’ll be cutting off this critical pathway to a better life that a lot of people need. You can’t get a job without experience, and without minimum wage jobs, you can’t get experience.
So if you’re a fast food worker and want to keep your job, what can you do? Be the best worker that ever existed. Show up ten minutes early. Leave your cell phone in the car and concentrate on doing your job to the best of your abilities. Smile at the customers. Help them with their orders. Make suggestions for them to save a few cents by bundling items. Provide value for your employer so that they have more business because of you. Make customers visit your store to see you, rather than go to the place across the street with the kiosks. In short, act like you work at Chick FilA. Plus, don’t demand to be paid more than you create.
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Disclaimer: This blog is not meant to give financial planning or tax advice. It gives general information on investment strategy, picking stocks, and generally managing money to build wealth. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell stocks or any security. Financial planning advice should be sought from a certified financial planner, which the author is not. Tax advice should be sought from a CPA. All investments involve risk and the reader as urged to consider risks carefully and seek the advice of experts if needed before investing.
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Follow on Twitter to get news about new articles. @SmallIvy_SI
Disclaimer: This blog is not meant to give financial planning or tax advice. It gives general information on investment strategy, picking stocks, and generally managing money to build wealth. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell stocks or any security. Financial planning advice should be sought from a certified financial planner, which the author is not. Tax advice should be sought from a CPA. All investments involve risk and the reader as urged to consider risks carefully and seek the advice of experts if needed before investing.
