Wendy’s Serves Up Big Kiosk Expansion As Wage Hikes Hit Fast Food

Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages. It will be up to franchisees whether to deploy the labor-saving technology, but Wendy’s President Todd Penegor did note that some franchise locations have been raising prices to offset wage hikes.
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It begins: In wake of California $15 minimum wage, garment firms moving out of Los Angeles

To the surprise of nobody but leftists, Governor Brown and the California State Legislature Democrats, jobs are beginning to evaporate visibly in the wake of California legislating a phased-in $15 an hour minimum wage. Even the Los Angeles Times can’t help but notice:   Last week American Apparel, the biggest clothing maker in Los Angeles, said it might outsource the making of some garments to another manufacturer in the U.S., and wiped out about 500 local jobs.Read more at American Thinker Read More......

Workers in NY, California Are Guinea Pigs in a Grand Experiment

In a less cynical age, the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that each of the 50 states that make up the U.S., "may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” These days, any reference to states as the “laboratories of Democracy” is as likely as not to be ironic — just Google the phrase plus the word “Kansas” if you need evidence.
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Carl’s Jr. CEO wants to try automated restaurant where customers ‘never see a person’

A CEO of a fast-food company is causing a stir on social media after claiming that he wants to create a fully automated restaurant.
“We could have a restaurant that’s focused on all-natural products and is much like an Eatsa, where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person,” Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder told Business Insider.
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Fight for 15 update: Seattle employment craters after minimum wage hike to $15/hour

Science! (Is economics really a science? I’ve long felt it should be taught alongside astrology or some related field.) In any event, the continent sized Petri dish which is the American jobs market has been the subject of much speculation since the Fight for Fifteen muscled its way into the presidential campaign debate. It’s a very populist position which the Democrats have been riding like rocket. At the same time, people who actually study such matters have been warning that it would backfire spectacularly...
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4.9 Percent Unemployment Rate? Over 80% Of Jobs Added In January Were Minimum Wage Earners

Jobs were good; earnings were a disaster - that's the best summary of today's jobs report. As we noted earlier, February suffered the biggest ever monthly drop in average weekly earnings, because not only did hourly earnings drop but so did hours worked, resulting in far lower overall weekly wages.
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Data Show These 6 Big Cities Aren’t Faring Well After Minimum Wage Hikes

Data shows a downhill economic trend for six big U.S. cities that hiked the minimum wage to $10 or more an hour in 2015.
“Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—all on the leading edge of the push for big minimum wage hikes—all show worrisome job trends,” wrote Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily.
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'One size fits all' minimum wage proposal is 'catastrophic,' restaurant owner says

      Restaurant owners are calling Gov. Kate Brown's minimum wage hike proposal a one size fits all plan, and one that could actually hurt Oregon's local businesses as well as its employees.
      "We wanted to make sure that families, working families, single parents that are making minimum wage, could meet their housing and food costs in the Portland-metro area," Brown said.
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A higher minimum wage doesn't reduce poverty, says ... the federal government

We reach the end of the year with yet another tale of crazy, one percenter wingnuts trying to claim that jacking up the minimum wage won’t do much to alleviate the issues facing the poorest Americans who the Democrats are seeking to help. This time the hateful claims are coming from… a study published by the federal government.
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Minimum wage hike: Hidden costs of compensation

Oregon currently has the second-highest minimum wage in the nation, behind only Washington State. That is due largely to the 2002 passage of Measure 25, a Constitutional amendment that raised the wage and requires it to be increased annually to adjust for inflation as it is measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Since then, Oregon’s minimum wage has increased, from the $6.90 per hour level set in 2002, to the current $9.25 per hour...


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Minimum-wage offensive could speed arrival of robot-powered restaurants

Crowded. That’s how Ed Rensi remembers what life was like working at McDonald’s in 1966. There were about double the number of people working in the store — 70 or 80, as opposed to the 30 or 40 there today — because preparing the food just took a lot more doing.
“When I first started at McDonald’s making 85 cents an hour, everything we made was by hand,” Rensi said — from cutting the shortcakes to stirring syrups into the milk for shakes. Over the years, though, ingredients started to arrive packaged and pre-mixed, ready to be heated up, bagged and handed out the window.


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Company’s $70,000 Minimum Wage Works Out Just Like Atlas Shrugged Predicted

Some have called Ayn Rand a prophet. But her powers were not mystical. They were rational. She observed human nature with a discernment matched by no philosopher before or since.


In her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, Rand presented a fictional town called Starnesville, a Midwestern ruin where an important and profitable motor factory once stood. The 21st Century Motor Company was the best in the business, run with efficiency and purpose by the Starnes family patriarch. Unfortunately, when he died, the company passed to heirs who held to a different philosophy.


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McDonald’s outlook bleak in face of minimum wage hikes

The Golden Arches are looking a little less shiny this year and McDonald’s franchise owners see hard times coming. This time it has nothing to do with the raging national debate over whether or not the McRib is awesome or awful, however. The vast majority of their fast food outlets are not owned by the corporation, but by franchise operators. Those entrepreneurs are regularly polled about their outlook for the coming year and most of them aren’t putting on their happy faces. (From CNBC)


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McDonald’s Announces Its Answer to $15 an Hour Minimum Wage – Touch-Screen Cashiers

This is exactly what the left pushed for… Fast food chains were never meant to be a place for someone to raise a family of 6, they were to be part time positions with some full-time advancements. Mostly the fast food restaurants were for school aged kids to learn how to interact with people, with a job, to offer spending money, and to begin responsibility learning for their future.


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Di Leo: Would You Like Fries With That Demonstration?

On a cool May morning, as McDonalds’ shareholders met to determine the fast food giant’s future course, some 2000 protesters, hailing from as far as Kansas City and New York, descended upon them to present a list of demands. Raise the starting wage to $15/hour, they threatened, lest the company be forever branded with such monikers as Exploiter, Villain, Robber Baron and Tyrant!


The Chicago Tribune, newspaper of record in the blighted metro area that McDonald’s calls home, was happy to give front page coverage to these protesters, telling their tale and helpfully spinning the story as favorably for the protestors as any could hope. The days of restricting opinion to the Opinion page are long gone indeed.


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The Young Lose From a Higher Minimum Wage

Warm weather is coming, and with it the perennial student search for a summer job. Though often seen as an economic cure-all, minimum-wage requirements have the unintended consequence of decreasing economic opportunity for young workers and making that treasured summer job harder to find.
Over half of those who earn at or below the minimum wage are between the ages of 16 and 24, many in the hospitality and leisure sector. Since the majority of those earning minimum wage are younger workers, increases in the minimum-wage rate affect them the most. Negative effects extend into the future, because young people often use minimum-wage jobs as steppingstones to better careers.


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Thomas Sowell: Mob Rule Economics

Excerpt: "In 1948, the year I left home, the unemployment rate among black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was 9.4 percent, slightly lower than that for white kids the same ages, which was 10.2 percent. ✧ Over the decades since then, we have gotten used to unemployment rates among black teenagers being over 30 percent, 40 percent or in some years even 50 percent. Such is the price of political 'compassion.' ✧ Whatever the good intentions behind minimum wage laws, what matters are the actual consequences. Many people have ideological, financial or political incentives to obfuscate the consequences."

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Study Shows Increased Minimum Wage's Destructiveness

Jobs: The country's biggest employment agency warns that 38% of private employers will lay off workers if Congress raises the minimum wage. Once again, wage earners are the casualties of waging class warfare.  The White House website's slick presentation on the minimum wage says: "No one who works full time should have to raise their family in poverty." And it promises: "It will lift wages for 28 million Americans. It will give businesses customers with more spending money. It will grow the economy for everyone — and we can do it right now."  Gee, if you don't like your wage, Uncle Sam can raise your wage. Just like he made sure you could keep your health plan.

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Get set for the rise of the machines

After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots?

But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain.

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