When Trump was “voted” out of office because of low gas prices and his historically high employment rates, especially among black, Hispanic and female workers… oops! I meant, because of his mean Tweets (some of which- according to a special report by CNN which I am NOT making up- even contained MISSPELLINGS) one of the things the Democratic left was DEMANDING was a higher minimum wage. A “Living Wage.”
People like millionaire Bernie “Mittens” Sanders was demanding that the toilet scrubber at McDonalds make AT LEAST $15 an hour. THIS, they insisted, is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT! Along with healthcare, Wi-Fi, and the password to someone’s Netflix account. EVERYONE, they insisted, deserves to make a LIVING WAGE!
In solidarity with their comrades in the working class, the millionaires running places like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities which were allowed to be burned and looted following the suicide of George Floyd, raised that minimum wage to what they called “a living wage.” Hooray! Finally, the toilet scrubber could move out of his mom’s basement, get married and raise a family without getting a different job! He can scrub McPotty for DECADES and still provide for himself and others! The distracted teen-ager behind the counter could make more than I did at a part time job I had when I also had a mortgage, wife and child. The times, they were a changin’!
So McDonalds immediately replaced the counter staff with giant smart phone apps.
Instead of a distracted teen making “a living wage” to push buttons and screw up your order, the people at Micky-D’s decided you could push buttons and screw up your own order.
Let me do the math for you: A McD’s is open 5am-11pm, which is 18 hours. Those three people who stood at the counter taking orders at $15 an hour have been replaced with three screens, saving that one location more than $800 a day. Touch screens aren’t super expensive these days. Just the savings in payroll alone will cover the cost of those things in the first week.
BUT! You are saying even though I can’t hear you, ROBOTS will never take ALL of those fast food jobs! Are robots going to MAKE the food?
And the answer is, yes. Yes they are.
Visit https://waxinvest.com/projects/800-go/ and you will see a robot making pizza. That collection of staff working at Dominos or Little Caesars? They can be replaced. One of these machines and you don’t need a SINGLE ONE of them. When those McScreens team up with Tesla’s Self driving cars and Amazon’s delivery drones, getting a pizza delivered to your house won’t involve a single other human being.
Or visit https://waxinvest.com/projects/miso-robotics/ and you will see the robots making fries and onion rings. The McKitchen staff is on it’s way out too. Get some voice recognition software, like a McAlexa, and the drive through line can be entirely automated. Do you think they will opt for paying a living wage for employees that take breaks, take vacations, need to sleep, and cost money in health care or worker’s comp when the fry grease splatters all over them, making them look like the Phantom of the Opera? Or will they install robots that don’t eat, sleep, smoke, potty or complain?
When politicians get support by shouting “We’ll MAKE your employer pay you more!” the employers ask, “What else can I do?” And then they do. Because most people who run businesses are not idiots. A person who said to himself “Oh well, I guess I just have to pay more” is not a person who is going to have his own business next year.
The lesson here, my dear children, is that when a politician says, “Vote for me and I’ll make someone else give you more money!” he’s about to get you fired and raise your taxes. He’s not Robin Hood come to steal from the rich and give it to you. He’s probably just the devil in a silly green hat. When Obama forced employers to give full medical coverage to every full time employee, most employers cut everyone to part time and hired more part timers. So then, everyone needed two jobs, and Obama got to report that employment numbers were up. Of course they were up! EVERYONE needed a second job!
But take comfort my friends. Even though McDonalds figured out how to save money, there were probably a LOT of small business which were destroyed when they suddenly couldn’t afford to pay Minimum wage because they weren’t a multinational, billion dollar company. So if you’re a toilet scrubber or a Billionaire, the Democrats totally have your best interest at heart, once they take 30-60% of your income. Just like Robin Hood. For the rest of us, we just have to hope that someone invents a robot that can make terrible decisions and rob us directly. Then we won’t need the democrats anymore.
A Bit of Orange 
WOW! I think you got every single point wrong in this article. Is that a first? Impressive.
The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office ruled Floyd’s death was a homicide caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest” complicated by “restraint, and neck compression” while he was being subdued by police.
McDonald’s did not proclaim they are “replacing all cashiers” with “robots” (or any other form of non-human technology) by the end of 2021. CEO Steve Easterbrook said the company planned to add self-order kiosks to 1,000 stores each quarter for the next eight or nine quarters, an effort which would (if fully implemented) place kiosks in eight or nine thousand U.S. McDonald’s locations by the end of 2021.
From the cotton gin to the Ford assembly line to the ATM, automation is always happening. It’s disingenuous to suggest that employers aren’t always seeking ways to streamline their businesses, no matter what wage they’re paying. there’s no correlation between the adoption of automation and the minimum wage.
Published in 2019, the single most far-reaching study on the minimum wage examined “138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016 in the United States,” only to find that “the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over the five years following the increase.”
In other words, the gold-standard study, using 40 years of data from around the United States, found that basically no jobs were lost when the minimum wage went up.
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Hey Dudapottamus,
Starting out with another cheap, grade school insult? I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
Does it make you feel better about yourself? Does it make you feel SMART? Or do you just want people to think you’re a jerk? Like, does that do something for you?
Hey, great. You do you.
Anyway- let’s hit some of your points here:
1. I have an article coming out soon about George Floyd. I see you have a LOT to learn about that. You might want to be wearing a diaper when you read it. Maybe put it on now in anticipation, if you aren’t already wearing one.
2. I never said McDonalds made any proclamation about what they are doing to ALL of their restaurants in 2022. But, thanks for bringing up something I didn’t say. I mean, it was related to the context, so that’s something I guess. though, not something I said.
3. Well, yes, automation and technological upgrades are always happening, but WHY do you think they happen? It’s because someone at the top sees a way to save or make money. And one of those ways is by replacing hourly employees with a one tile purchase of some machine that can do their job.
Also, do you think I said that “employers aren’t always seeking ways to streamline their businesses” or are you replying to someone else’s article? I would think you would read my article carefully before you reply to it, especially since you started off with that sarcastic quip about me getting “every single point wrong in this article.” I would hate for you to look stupid while trying to prove that I’m an idiot. And when you keep debunking points I never made… it doesn’t make you look like the smart one. Even if you’re wearing a stylish diaper.
OH, I see. You just Googled “Minimum Wage,” found an article from Business Insider and have been copying and pasting from it as if you understand what the author was saying. Oh. That is so sad. You started off by telling me I was wrong about EVERYTHING, and you decided to answer by plagiarizing an article you didn’t understand or research in ANY way.
Does that make you feel smart? It shouldn’t. You’ve just been caught in a rather embarrassing lie. But, HEY, at least you decided to start off by being really rude. At least you have that going for you. I guess you can brag about it on Twitter or something.
ANYWAY, I guess I’ll continue replying to Paul Constant (Note: A book reviewer who co-hosts a podcast about economics- so, not actually an economist).
4. Sure, basically no jobs were lost when the minimum wage went up. Unless you count all of those jobs where people were replaced by machines or touch screens. Also, if you look at the “gold-standard study” Paul references, it says “we find no indication of any employment changes in the upper part of the wage distribution.”
So, this study doesn’t prove that minimum wage hikes don’t hurt employment. It proves that it doesn’t hurt the employment of people already making significantly MORE than minimum wage. And, uh DUH. The manager didn’t get replaced by a touch screen. No kidding.
I see you plagiarized this article (https://www.businessinsider.com/debunking-common-arguments-against-15-minimum-wage-2021-2) which seems to have been written by a Seattle Leftist who seems to have failed to notice that Seattle’s minimum wage hike cost nearly one in 10 low wage workers their jobs, and millions more full time hours. But, hey, facts can be SO inconvenient. You should look up the effects it had in Seattle and see what a liar this guy is.
Also, your “gold-standard study” (according to an ignorant Seattle Leftist) is screwed by leftist politics, as explained in this article:
“Liberal economists, such as Paul Krugman, often claim that “There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.” But that is not a fair reflection of the academic literature.
“In a recent working paper, economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley assembled the entire set of papers that examine the impact of minimum wage hikes on employment outcomes at the subnational level in the U.S. since 1992. Their overview of the results was clear: the overwhelming majority of studies showed a negative effect on employment of minimum wage hikes (79.3 percent of them). That impact was stronger for teens, young adults, and less‐educated workers.”
https://www.cato.org/commentary/case-against-15-federal-minimum-wage-qa
And then there’s the big names on the left who accidentally tell the truth sometimes: “You have to be a bit careful: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution and you’re going to go buy machines and automate things — or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. And so within certain limits, you know, it does cause job destruction. If you really start pushing it, then you’re just making a huge trade-off.” Bill Gates
And other economists agree that the hardest hit are those at the economic bottom: “Employers respond to higher labor costs by hiring fewer workers. Higher minimum wages eliminate entry-level positions that provide unskilled employees the opportunity to gain experience. Less experience makes it harder for workers to become more productive and earn higher wages.”
James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation
https://www.dailysignal.com/2014/01/23/bill-gates-raising-minimum-wage-can-destroy-jobs/
Maybe look into the work of Thomas Sowell- a brilliant economist and social commentator:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thomas-sowell-on-the-differential-impact-of-the-minimum-wage/
https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/thomas-sowell-minimum-wage/
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thomas-sowell-on-the-minimum-wage/
Sorry to ruin your boffo sarcastic opening. I have developed this horrible little habit of learning about a subject before I write an article about it. As long as you’re already wearing a diaper, you might want to give that a try. Who knows? Once you see what it’s like, you might even come to enjoy it.
Or you can keep plagiarizing ignorant dishonest book reviewers from Seattle. Hey, you do you.
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