CNN.
Self-service kiosks at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have loomed as job killers since they were first rolled out 25 years ago. But nobody predicted what actually happened.
In one of the earliest mentions of kiosks in fast-food settings in 1999, now-defunct trade industry publication Business Information said that McDonald’s was working to “develop an electronic order-taking system that may eventually replace some of its human equivalents.”
Instead, touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register. The kiosks show the unintended consequences of technology in fast-food and retail settings, including self-checkout. Chains are now experimenting with artificial intelligence at drive-thru lanes, and the experience with kiosks holds lessons for them.
Today, instead of replacing workers, companies deploy kiosks to transfer labor to other tasks like handing off pickup orders, help increase sales, easily adjust prices and speed up service. (Many chains, including Subway, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks, don’t use them much or at all.)
Kiosks “guarantee that the upsell opportunities” like a milkshake or fries are suggested to customers when they order, Shake Shack CEO Robert Lynch said on an earnings call last month. “Sometimes that is not always a priority for employees when you’ve got 40 people in line. You’re trying to get through it as quick as possible.” Kiosks also shift employees from behind the cash register to maintaining the dining area, delivering food to customers or working in the kitchen, he said.
The whole ‘automation as job killer’ is a popular trope in the Narrative Media, most of whom are ignorant (sometimes willfully so) of how businesses actually operate. Shallow-minded people typically mistake the map for the territory and think of a ‘job’ as a thing that can be created, killed, shipped overseas, brought back from overseas, or I suppose thrown overboad like a cargo container.
A ‘job’ is merely a convenient expression for ‘a person performing a service’. If a machine can perform that service, then is it still a ‘job’? Not for those who think of ‘jobs’ as something pertaining to ‘workers’, who must be defended by the Forces of Progress and Enlightenment.
There are services that people can perform better than machines, and there are services that machines can perform as well as people. When machines can perform a service adequately at lower cost than hiring a person to do that job, then the machine is substituted for the person, which process is characterized by the convenient expression ‘automation’. But the service remains; it is merely performed by a machine rather than a person–the ‘job’ itself remains, just performed by a different operator. Whether a ‘job’ can be ‘automated’ depends on the state of technology, and as technology gets better, more and more ‘jobs’ can be ‘automated’ successfully. But no ‘jobs’ are harmed by this process; each step remains and needs to be accomplished unless the process itself is changed.
Labor unions throughout history have been built on this mistake-the-map-for-the-territory brain fart. They act to protect the ‘jobs’ of their members even when those ‘jobs’ are merely make-work and actually damage the business process of which they are supposedly a part. History teaches us that areas of activity in which unions come to predominate become increasingly inefficient and incompetent. In a business that needs to deal with competitors and attract customers, unionized companies eventually lose customers to competitors who are more efficient or more competent (or both) and, if they don’t fix things, die. The auto industry is the poster child for this natural evolutionary process.
In areas where customers are not free to go elsewhere, as with government, unionization merely makes everybody suffer from the effects of inefficiency and incompetence, which is why, in the Good Old Days government employees weren’t allowed to unionize. (Democrats eventually got that changed, with results as you see them.)
Automation makes goods and services less expensive, or higher quality, or both. Anybody who knows anything about business knows this–but that excludes most ‘journalists’, which is how we get articles like the one referenced in this post.
