Wendy’s follows McDonalds in moving to automated kiosks in its thousand and thousands of restaurants:
After New York City and California mandated $15 minimum-wage laws, fast-food chain Wendy’s reacted, announcing Thursday its plans to make available self-serving kiosks in its 6,000-plus restaurants across the country by year’s end.
In addition to using the technology to cut down on labor costs, Wendy’s President Todd Penegor noted on the company’s quarterly conference call, that some of its franchise locations have been raising prices to offset the minimum-wage increase, according to Investor’s Business Daily.
“Wendy’s Penegor said company-operated stores, only about 10 percent of the total, are seeing wage inflation of 5 percent to 6 percent, driven both by the minimum wage and some by the need to offer a competitive wage ‘to access good labor,’” IBD reported.
Why, it’s almost as if you’d think the left would have to know that artificially raising the minimum wage without increases in skill and productivity is going to increase unemployment among low-skill, low-wage workers, thus increasing dependence on government (thus increasing employment for government workers and their unions) or something.
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.
-Nancy Pelosi
The streets of America will soon be chock-full of artists, photographers, and writers.
I pump my own gas. I bag my own groceries. I mow my own lawn and shovel my own driveway. I don’t do those things because I want to, but because I can’t afford to pay a kid $15 an hour to do them. So I do them myself and the kid earns zero, learns nothing.
Not much of a leap to ordering my own burgers. Kid still earns zero, learns nothing.
JD, I think you are on to something. I think your catchphrase can become a libturd motto: Earn Zero, Learn Northing.
But this can’t be! Krueger and Card proved that raising the minimum wage has no effect on employment in the fast food industry!
http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-aer.pdf
Krueger and Card’s research showed that increasing the minimum wage did not decrease employment, raise prices or reduce profits! It’s frikkin’ magic!
Kruger was the chair of Obama’s council of economic advisers.
Krueger is also one of the people who believe that a program that payed payed for poor people’s college would reduce crime and the program would pay for itself.
Real scientists do research to find answers. Krueger is one of those economists who designs experiments to prove what he already believes is true.
Seems to me that fast-food workers earned more than minimum-wage well before the hike. It is an unpleasant job and the market demanded that to attract workers the franchises needed to pay more to compete. Heck, my oldest daughter’s first job was as a cashier at Target and she started out at a $1.50 more than minimum wage. Automation was coming regardless of the minimum wage, but this has certainly provided added impetus to the trend.
For unions other than the SEIU this was more about bumping their pay since many of their contracts base their pay off a multiplier of the minimum wage.
Tellingly, unions in LA and San Diego were trying to get themselves exempted from the $15 minimum wage law and have their members make less than a “living wage.” Union boss is a good job if you can get — union member, not so much.
All centrally forced compensation schemes are only “work” in an inflationist economic model. Globalization and technology are forcing the Fed’s easy money in to ASSETS far ***more*** than CPI. So rent is going up And government borrowing is cheap.
Stuff you are FORCED to buy, education, health insurance, food is going up.
This is going to end badly.
This is the hot article in hedge fund circles http://bit.ly/1TlPVtU
Speaking of failed libturd policies and boondoggles ’cause they cannot comprende economics 101 – Burlington college is feeling the Bern!
I guess that I missed the part of econ 101 where students were taught the secret: supply, demand, and cost are completely unrelated variables, but only when liberals want them to be.
Marx argued that economics was history in action. History is about change (no change, no history). From that POV, economics is the great solvent. It has brought down not just nations, but civilizations and cultures. The drive to increase marginal return on investment is relentless. It cannot be withstood for long. In the 20th century there were countries that tried to start over again, sometimes literally at a new year 0, without market economics. Economics destroyed them.
Marx had the right idea, perhaps, but he made the mistake of believing that economics was therefore the most important feature of history. Instead he should have looked at the features of humanity had withstood economic reduction.