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Object Lessons in the Minimum Wage
Today is the sort of day that demands a quick and easy lunch. You see, I’m preparing for my company’s annual financial audit and I really just don’t have the time to wait around. (I usually try to get this audit done in February, but the birth of my anchor baby got in the way of that.) So, come 12:30 pm I hauled myself away from my desk and off to the nearest fast food establishment to grab a quick bite.
The restaurant is called CaliBurger, a not very subtle rip off of the great In-N-Out Burger, located near my office in Pasadena, CA. I’ve eaten there before but its usually not my first choice, the quality isn’t great and it’s a tad expensive compared to the real deal. What I like about it is that it’s close and they serve you quickly. The staff was always attentive and the service pretty good for a fast food joint. Lo and behold, when I arrived there today my experience was entirely different.
First, there was the person who greeted me and took my order:
Well, that’s new. Not that I’d never experienced an ordering kiosk at a fast food place before, it’s just that this place always had four employees at their various cash registers to take orders and keep up with the lunch rush. I looked around and saw one person milling about behind the cash registers, but he seemed to be doing other work. Ordering took about 30 seconds, a beep as my apple pay was charged and the machine spits out a receipt. There were no lines.
Ten seconds later the gentleman from behind the cash registers rushed over to me with a cup for my soda, which I filled at a self-serve station. He asked me if I wanted to watch my burger being made by “Flippy”. Well, I thought, that’s an odd and very specific nickname for the chef at a fast food burger joint, only to turn around and see:
Meet Flippy: the burger flipping robot. Equipped with a vast array of cameras and sensors Flippy can cook up to 300 burgers an hour to the exact same specifications every time. No more underdone or burnt burgers. He will even switch utensils for different jobs automatically and clean the grill in between each batch. Not only does he cook a pretty decent burger (it was the best one I’ve had at this restaurant) but he also is equipped with a sophisticated cloud-based AI that can learn from his surroundings and experiences and acquire new skills over time.
Well, damn.
Oh, that guy in the background? He’s Flippy’s assistant and puts cheese on the burgers when needed. I guess Flippy hasn’t acquired that skill yet. Other than the gentleman who brought me my cup and Flippy’s Sous Chef there was one other employee I could see, a nice lady who assembled the finished burger once Chef Flippy was done cooking the patty. The same gentleman from earlier brought my burger to my table.
All told, only three employees and a robot were there to serve me my lunch. Total time from order to first bite: about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. In a restaurant that used to employ four cashiers, nevermind the rest of the back kitchen staff required to make a burger.
Thank you, California’s $15 minimum wage.
Published in General
I, for one, welcome our robot burger-makers.
It really helps income inequality when half the population is outlawed from work.
Here’s hoping Flippy is confined to burger duty and has a friend named Scrubby who handles the rest rooms.
The National Labor Relations Act does not cover robots or kiosks. That leaves California free to adopt its own legislation covering this area. I expect the state will either put an outright ban on the technology, or will require the restaurant to pay $15 per hour to a random illegal alien or homeless vagrant for each machine being used. California will never be satisfied until it drives every business out of the state.
Excellent piece, Jamie!
I live in Jersey, and haven’t been to a fast-food place in a while. Had not known that they have robots flipping the burghers. I guess they all will be doing that. Where do kids go these days to get work experience? Why aren’t the perils of the minimum clear, so clear to people who really think about it, enough to make people realize what we are doing to the kids?
Thank you, indeed. This is exactly why I’m in favor of $15/hr minimum wage – increased productivity, zero demand for illegal immigrant labor.
Great post Jamie.
As this impacts low-wage teen workers, what’s the over/under when the first ‘ageism’ civil rights lawsuit will be filed against restaurants?
I’ll bet those guys are pissed.
The minimum wage is $0.00. Always has been.
Simplifies tipping. 20% of $0.00.
Merit-based, high skills immigration reform please.
Thanks for the on-the-ground reporting.
Illegals don’t normally get paid minimum wage. They’re paid under the table. Higher minimum wages only incentivizes employers to go that route to keep costs under control.
Can Flippy learn to cook my Mongolian grill order without losing half my noodles and replacing them with the previous guy’s onions (allergic) and broccoli (hate it)?
If so, he’s HIRED.
MrsCheese has a golf outing this evening so for the first time in about a year I went to McDonalds. I went to the drive through . 25 minutes for the five cars ahead of me to be served.
Which makes the amnesty movement curious. If they are here legally, they can petition for proper wages which would cost them their jobs…
Indeed. Reminds me of the billboard:
Septic Tanks Emptied!
Swimming Pools Filled!
Not Same Truck!
Likely Flippy v. 2.6. But soon.
And Flippy will NEVER do anything immoral!
Sez you. Never underestimate the possibilities of a really ticked off programmer. One could make Flippy quite evil indeed. Not Terminator level (probably, maybe), but at least a low grade sort of evil.
There is a connection between this post and a clip I recently viewed of Jordan Petersons’ discussion of the US DoD work on IQ. I hope I’m literate enough to illustrate the connection. According to Peterson, the DoD research revealed that a person with an IQ of less than 83 is incapable of being trained to do anything of use to the US military. He rightly regarded this as a “scary” statistic because it means that if one takes the complexity of the US military’s environment to be roughly equivalent to the complexity of society as a whole, there is no place for one of every 10 people. The connection, I believe, is this. One doesn’t have to be a mental giant to flip burgers. It is honest work and provides an income for those who either lack ambition or maybe lack the training and, more important, the intelligence to do much more complex and demanding work. There is however, an upper limit to how much one can expect to be paid to flip burgers. People will pay only so much for fast food.
When a union or politicians demand that burger flippers be paid more than the market will support, those people are out of any work. And there may be no other work for them. That is a real problem. Jordan Peterson said in the conclusion of his talk that no one knows how to address this situation. I have nothing useful to add because I am among those who do not know how to address the situation.
Easily solved with some high-profile prosecutions and multiple-year jail time for former shop owners.
I just read about something similar in Boston. And of course, we’ve been ordering by screen at Sheetz forever, though they can be a little slow on the human back end.
Side note – congratulations on the little one! Our first just arrived in February as well, and she is an adventure.
The real victims are the people who need the job, whether they are teenagers trying to grab that first rung of the ladder, or the elderly who need to supplement their income. The greed of politicians (We’re helping the poor! Vote for us!) outweighs the need of the young or poor.
As for the businesses, they’re simply trying to stay in business, and high minimum wages greatly reduces the chance of survival . . .
Robots and globalized labor = wage deflation.
We need to switch to a much freer, purchasing power-oriented economy. They will never do it until the bond market collapses. Inflationist government is going to die the hard way.
And you are unlikely to get Hepatitis or Salmonella from him….
They don’t only mean wage deflation, they mean cost of living deflation. When people worry about the robots and start bringing up things like UBI, they seem to neglect that even if you’re not making much money (assuming you’re allowed to work in a non-minimum wage environment) the amount that you will need to make to meet your basic needs will be so low as to swamp any reductions in your absolute wage.
Now, people might bring up human nature and income inequality leading to pitchforks, but that’s a different issue than the plain economics of the situation.
I’ve seen that clip. I think the big slight of hand he does is in the “if one takes the complexity of the US military’s environment to be roughly equivalent to the complexity of society as a whole…”
This seems a little like when articles compare minimum wage to median house prices as a way to deceptively argue that you can’t afford to live on a minimum wage. You don’t need to be able to function in the highly ordered military or even be able to navigate the “complexity of society as a whole” (whatever that means) to be able to function enough to eek out a living.
[My bold.] I think that’s not a fair assumption. There are many low-skill tasks consumed in a service economy that aren’t applicable to the military, because the military expects its personnel to handle those tasks for themselves as part of the mission. Employability of low-skill / low-IQ people is hammered by the minimum wage, yes, but also hammered by the impact of the regulatory state on the complexity of work environments. (See The Bell Curve, Part III.)
That’s what I meant with the rest of my post. If we had the brains to switch back to a pre-Fed deflationary economy, a million things would take care of themselves.
I had a feeling that’s what you were going for, which is why I liked your post and just wanted to spell out your point in different words.
I’ve read and listened to some of the sources you provided previously in support of deflationary economics and I’m not convinced. Deflation is a far greater threat to the economy than low level inflation. What matters is growth and deflation is a cancer that destroys growth.
I need all the help I can get.
You can have deflationary growth. It happened all of the time prior to 1914.
People are rightly scared of uncontrolled deflation. I’m talking about the natural increase in purchasing power from progress and trade. Our financial system, government, and political system can’t hack it right now, though. It all has to be overhauled. The old debt based inflationism system can’t cope with robots and globalized labor.
Get rid of the cartels, inflationist Fed, and big government.
In the mean time you get Trump, socialism, social problems and UBI paid by robot taxes. GOSPLAN.