[skeeter2020]

Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.

[Spivak]

That's fine, this is the natural and expected response to labor getting more expensive. The bad outcome is when government steps in to artificially push wages down.

[mrguyorama]

>It's not all automation

Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:

Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.

Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.

Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.

[spamizbad]

They correctly figured out customers could tolerate slower times for fast food because a significant chunk of their orders are delivery and pickup, so having it take 7 minutes instead of 3 won't really be noticed by the consumer.