so 2 of my 3 local wendys now forces all orders to be done by kiosk. looking down the rabbit hole i am looking at a minimum of 8 labor positions cut in each location. additional hygiene problems as they dont have a hand sanitize for use before using the kiosks or after using. we know sick people will use them and not care if they get others sick. and now i have to avoid one of my favorite easy to grab meal places because i refuse to support this trend of cut jobs to save on labor because we have a min wage hike coming. ( fine if optional use but not fine if forced use). i know most people dont care about these things but damn i do care.
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Yeah it’s stupid and can get very messy very quickly.
In all first world countries service industry has boomed and become the primary source of income for the large majority of the population. These kiosks, on top of having poor hygiene is a big middle finger to many. Though the industry will adjust and we will see a shift in what kinds of jobs are available, although I personally don’t like it. As for the service industry i don’t see it going away anytime soon, if that’s any consolation. I’m more concerned with the product we get from such restaurants once they start moving towards automation.
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and once that happens it will be mom and pop places for me for the rest of my life. refuse to support automation in everything. just like i refuse to get in a car with automated breaking or auto drive( pick your auto pilot term). my trust in these systems is semi good i just dont trust the security of the manufactures to keep the vehicles from being hijacked via remote( wifi bluetooth etc…). and yes i still drive a manual car with a clutch for these reasons. ( and dont say no one has been killed using a hijacking of modern cars it most likely has happened just never discovered)
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I have similar feelings about this whole thing. Though at some point you will most likely be “forced” to use automation at some point unless you would rather become completely crippled and made to be ineffective in life, work, etc.
It’s a hard line, and i’m trying to find where it begins and where it ends.
On the bright side the cashier can’t fuck up entering your order.
i dont mind assisted robotics to a point but i mind fully automated robotics where there are human lives at the other end of a bomb gun car etc. and the fact that cashier cant muck my order up is of little concern when my orders are usally standard menu no fuss no muss.
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Just the natural progression of things. Is it good? Depends on which end you’re on of course. For some it’s great, while others it’s horrifying, and that’s just in the short term. Long term we’ll have to wait and see the issues that arise because of this.
Service, is the 3rd tier of an economy. You have your raw materials gathering, then manufacturing, followed by service, and management is tier 4. Automation will eventually take over the bottom 3 (it already has to a degree) because for the guys at the top it makes much more financial sense. It’s a shame it’s been accelerated due to people’s short-sightedness in raising minimum wage which hurts way more than it helps. My econ professor always told us, “The only people minimum wage benefits, are those who don’t earn minimum wage.”
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Just another reason not to eat fast food.
Did we need another? 
for me yes. as i live most of my week on the road and dont have a kitchen to cook in. so for fast lunch its fast food for dinner its mom and pop joints that make things from scratch. breakfast is so rare for me that its a toss up.
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We are moving towards management and up such as specialization, things are slowly becoming more abstracted and those of the older generation and those that just don’t “have time to learn complex skills” will be the ones to bleed in the end. Education is not moving nearly as fast as automation is.
EIther way you look at it, it will be uncomfortable to many, but not impossible.
Pressure is often a great way to bring depth to character. These advancements should never be viewed as an us vs. them or that “they” are crippling “us”; rather it should be viewed as an opportunity for growth as people. Though i doubt the general population will have such an attitude.
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Good on you!
I’m going to tell a story real quick. Back in 2008 when our economy tanked, one of the first companies to jump ship was a store called Cost Plus World Market (a staggeringly appropriate name). They pulled out of the country within weeks. Fast forward, our economy recovered, and World Market came back. My wife was super excited, they always sold a lot of cool stuff, and she was excited to see it again.
I cooled her jets with a quick, “Fuck those guys.” They pulled out of our economy before we saw the full extent of how bad it was going to get. They up and decided to not just not be a part of the recovery, but to actively hinder recovery by unemploying however many workers they employed across the nation. They did not want to invest in the US market. When the economy recovered, they came back. Fuck them if they think they’re getting another dollar from me. Fair weather companies.
This is how I view companies who balk at minimum wage increases. Jimmy Johns, Papa Johns (what is it with Johns?), etc. Take all of the buzzwords you know about minimum wage increases, and throw them out the window. Everything becomes more expensive every year. Period. We have roughly 2% inflation of our money year over year. It’s not a Trump thing, it’s not an Obama thing, this is how our economy has operated for decades. If you work at a job for a year, and next year you don’t get a pay increase, you got a pay decrease. By definition. Period.
Minimum wage increases are going to happen. If a company is in the business of paying people minimum wage, then minimum wage increases are a cost of doing business. To actively seek ways to cut minimum wage positions because of minimum wage increases is to actively opt out of our economy in the same fashion that World Market did.
/rant
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My local McDonalds has these. They are pretty cool. Although sometimes they can be laggy as f*ck.
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i can agree to a point but i also say that just because we can automate it does not mean we should. yes there are some places where automation is great but then there are places where i just scratch my head and have to ask why. robot in a nuke reactor sure go right ahead ( granted i would be one of those people that mandate maintenance on them) keep people out of harms way. robot in a kitchen in a burger joint i go get that shit out of here. there is a place for it but it does not need nor does it deserve to be everywhere.
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have not willingly gone to a mcdonalds in over 5 years they lost my money years ago and have never earned it back.
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Yes absolutely, the issue is, those leading the charge to automate have no qualms with automating the burger joint. Point being, while not preferred, at the end of the day they are trying to give you a product you’ll want for a price that costs you as little as possible, and benefits them the most.
We can not stop them by any ethical means, and we shouldn’t attempt to. There is no solution other than support businesses that you love for as long as you can and hopefully they will persist without the need for automation to compete with their more aggressive competitors.
we can stop them by voting with our wallet and helping others to do the same. and those with weak willpower will bend and let it go but some will not and if nothing happens other than a few places keeping the hired hands then those will be the only ones i frequent. i have the will power to vote with my wallet. still on my boycott of most AAA studios even games that i have bought from them i dont play so i dont add to there metrics.
and i know not all consumers are willing to go through these steps or lengths but i dont mind doing it to make a point to my self and to others.
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You have more faith in humanity than I, though far be it from me to being a voice of discouragement. I too live in a similar fashion, not because i believe it will do any good, but rather i would like to live the right way, regardless of outcome.
i’m not saying that those who can’t live in such a way for various reasons are doing wrong, I’m saying that given my circumstances it would be wrong for me to be so cheap as to further damage industry i claim to support.
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lol my faith in humanity is low. i still live my life in a way that i will not regret. if i had an option to shut down the worlds networks destroy every computer and put the world back to the stone age i would almost do it with out a second thought. privacy would come back full swing people would have to communicate face to face. i know there are thousands of other things that would happen for better or worse but for me these two aspects trump almost everything else.
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Hmmm sounds like a certain character from a certain crappy publisher’s bastardization of a good concept.
“When the lights go out, bad things tend to happen.” ~ Raymond Kenney
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never heard of raymond kenney. but a good quote.
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