Fast Food Kiosks killing jobs? Current events beg the question, but the facts say otherwise Reprinted with permission Dec. 12, 2016 | by Elliot Maras We at the Kiosk Industry Association have seen the news media running controversial headlines and opinion pieces by CEOs and ex-CEOs decrying the minimum wage increase and attributing loss of jobs to self-order.… Read More »
California’s plans to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022 could spur a move in the restaurant industry toward automation.
Source: www.computerworld.com
Nice article on impact of minimum wage and automation. Now we just need to automate manufacturing automation…
Minimum Wage Kiosks and Kiosk Self-Order From Marketwatch an article referencing new study on Minimum Wage impacts — nice article from Marketwatch looking at the results from 2021 Princeton study on the effects of raising minimum wage. The usual most vocal critics are people like Andy Puzder back in the day that he ran Carl Jrs. Labor costs… Read More »
NEW YORK – The CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s says he sees automated restaurants as the future of the industry and a solution to rising minimum wages. “I want to try it,” Andy Puzder told Business Insider.
Source: pix11.com
More news from CKE owner (Hardee and others)
Analyst: Dunkin’ Donuts tests grab-and-go options – Retail Automation
Source: retailsystems.org
Dunkin’ Donuts is testing kiosks with a selection of sandwiches at some of its locations, according to a research analyst who suggested that the effort could boost sales at the coffee chain.
Calls for a minimum-wage hike nationwide and in Illinois are increasingly met with businesses’ use of technology to cut costs.
Source: www.illinoispolicy.org
The store, which is anticipating Chicago’s minimum-wage increase to $13 an hour by 2019, is testing out coffee kiosks in the restaurant instead of having employees serve it. The kiosk features a touch-pad for ordering and paying. The screen also prompts customers to answer questions about their kiosk experience, giving the impression this is something that could be adopted as an alternative to hiring. This kind of automation, which replaces a human employee with technology, is one of the unintended consequences of Chicago’s minimum-wage increase.
It may not just be a coffee machine either. Other McDonald’s locations have used self-service kiosks with touch-screens for paying. And while self-serve kiosks don’t seem too unusual, San Francisco-based Momentum Machines has created a robotic hamburger-making machine the company claims can produce 400 high-quality burgers in an hour with minimal human supervision.
Recently, a few (very few) restaurants have begun offering a fully automated, Jetson-like food experience (think eatsa). The futurism is pretty cool, but what does today’s workplace automation really look like?
Source: www.foodabletv.com
Excerpt: “At a bank, you can opt for traditional teller service, an ATM, a drive-thru, or online/mobile banking. Restaurants are doing the same by offering traditional counter service, ordering kiosks, touchscreen/video drive-thru, as well as online/mobile ordering. All orders are funneled to production for fulfilment and real-time inventory management,” explained Tommy Woycik, founder and president of Nextep Systems, whose tagline is “Order Food Faster.”
“Automating the ‘simple’ tasks like order entry and counting change will allow restaurants to provide improved speed-of-service and more value to their guests,” Woycik said. “Customer service means different things to different guests (e.g., Baby Boomers versus Gen X versus Gen Y) and doesn’t have to be face-to-face (e.g., eatsa and drive-thru). All guests value food quality, order accuracy, and speed of service, which is what smart technology is improving.”
Rest of the story on Foodable.
Since 2012, Panera Bread has been driving growth in their restaurants and have invested in tablet kiosks (which is part of their Panera 2.0 initiative) to increase their sales and customer experience.
Source: www.linkedin.com
Nice breakdown on the positive “consequences” of expanding customer choices (aka omnichanneling if I may). In Panera’s case the increased rate of return is what counts to investors (and the Board of Directors).
More ways to order mean more orders in this case right?
Wendy’s will make self-service ordering kiosks available to all of its franchises later this year as minimum wage hikes help market push labor costs.
Source: www.investors.com
6,000 plus restaurants getting selfservice kiosks. Adoption rests with the franchisees. Most have been raising prices. Most of minimum wage is phased in years from now and virtually unchanged in California.
Wendy’s President Todd Penegor said, “wage pressures have been manageable both because of falling commodity prices and better operating leverage due to an increase in customer counts. Still, the company is wary about both wage hikes and a possible recovery in commodity prices and is “working so hard to find efficiencies” so it can deliver “a new QSR experience but at traditional QSR prices.”
In addition to self-order kiosks, the company is also getting ready to move beyond the testing phase with labor-saving mobile ordering and mobile payment available systemwide by the end of the year. Yum Brands and McDonald’s already have mobile ordering apps.
McDonald’s is simply responding to competition from other chains that have offered “enhanced burgers,” said Hilda Fahey, a company representative who was in Simcoe to help with the changeover to the new services at the Queensway East restaurant.
Source: www.simcoereformer.ca
“We have 35 different people we didn’t have before,” Maskell said on a Wednesday afternoon while preparing for an opening that night for the new services.
More people are needed in the kitchen, he explained, to service the customers out front.
BY ED RENSI — The real faces of the Fight for $15 are the young people and small business owners who have had their futures compromised.
Source: www.forbes.com
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This may be a smartphone age, but our lives are becoming a series of kiosk stops, from ATMs and supermarket checkouts to airlines and gas stations. And now, increasingly, there’s the fast-food kiosk. Kiosks have one main purpose: to save time. And an industry that dubs itself “quick service” has zero choice but to pay serious attention to any device that espouses to shave seconds—if not minutes—off each order. That might explain why such familiar names as McDonald’s and Panera Bread are spending millions of dollars to roll out touch-screen kiosks in stores.
Source: www.qsrmagazine.com
For Panera, it’s all about giving consumers digital ordering choices.
Then there’s that 500-pound gorilla in the room: Aren’t kiosks really about cutting back on labor costs? “How much labor can we remove from the service package until customers finally decide that self service means no service?” Muller asks.
Hurst insists this is not at all the case at Panera. In fact, he says, Panera locations that have kiosks typically spend more on labor costs than those without them.
On the whole, customers mostly love touch-screen kiosks, Hurst says, adding that “the kiosk is basically an iPad.”
Which is why Millennials, in particular, can’t keep their mitts off of them. “Kiosks are a way for us to be even more isolated from random human contact,” Muller says.
Amid nationwide calls for significantly higher wages for fast food workers, Wendy’s and McDonald’s are testing self-service ordering kiosks.
Source: www.phillyvoice.com
Another testament by the companies on how kiosks are not aimed at minimum wage or instigated by that issue.
