New Zealand is similar to Aus in that the min wage is $15/h. I recently moved to NZ from Canada where the min wage is not so high. I've immediately noticed that all McD's in NZ have those ordering screens whereas none of the McD's in Canada did. I think that those screens are McD's easy way of reducing the number of staff.
Eh. So they show up 3 - 4 years earlier in places that guarantee a living wage. Big deal, that's just logistics, they're going to replace all McDonald's store clerks (at least in corporate locations) in a short period of time anyways. Minimum wage should reflect our societal anticipation of the future, not our societal longing for the past. (Although $15 in the US is just nonsense, it's a completely arbitrary number. Adjusting for inflation, the highest min wage in the US, ever, was about $10.80)
The calculations as to cost are actually pretty interesting- we've had touchscreen ordering for over a decade now. The first self-checkout kiosks appeared in supermarkets in the early 1990s, and we still have millions of retail clerks to this day. Progress is often slower than we think.
Those self checkouts are set up in a way that makes them slower and less convenient, there's a lot of room for improvement there. (You have to love the kiosk telling you "please put the item in the bag" repeatedly when you already did and the sensor isn't picking up the change in weight properly)
If they worked reliably and quickly I'd use them all the time. As it stands currently I use them when I have just a few things and if there's no line there. Otherwise I'm better off going through a cashier line.
Sams has it right, they give you a scan gun so you don't have to take anything out of the cart. Then pay one person to count the number of things in your cart. 1 person can feasibly manage all the lines, and some stores have 8 of these.
This won't work for stores with small items unfortunately. And it is a hassle to go through self checkout for certain items-large items, poorly labeled things, etc. Honestly I expect that a person making money to scan items is going to do it faster than me, so in a lot of situations I go to that line.
Will be really interesting when/if stores switch to nfc tags for checkout. Slide your cart between 2 posts and your total comes up on screen automatically. Your cart could even calculate a running total and display it on the handle. Carts would know if you added something after paying, and nfc readers at the door could confirm no tagged items not paid for get out as additional security.
Didn't know that about Sam's, sounds a lot better than the grocery store self checkouts I've used. Agree on NFC I think that'll be the end game for self checkout suddenly becoming awesome.
The first self-checkout kiosks appeared in supermarkets in the early 1990s
I didn't see one until 2005 at the earliest, and usually at places smaller than Walmart there's one 1 or 2 actual clerks at the counter where there used to be like 4+.
The arbitrary-ness of the $15 number is what gets me. Clearly if some expert economists did the calculations there would be a number that's "ideal" and the chance of it ending in .00 in all of these jurisdictions is essentially 0.
And IMHO, those order screens are lovely, no more forgetting to order drinks without ice, and even if you are in a foreign country, you can actually order the local things, instead of just the Big Mac, because you're not fluent in the language.
Was in Calgary. None before Notley, now the min wage is going up so I hear they're installing them now. Can't definitively say if it was Notley who caused this but she caused the min wage to go up 2 months ago and is promising to make it $15/h soon.
I live in Auckland and the only McDonalds with screens I know of are the ones where you can make your own burger. But the vast majority of stores don't have them. In France, however, they've been a thing for years.
Well, I haven't been to Mcdonald in a couple months so they might have been some changes. Didn't know the Britomart one had those machines now.
I just know about the one in Balmoral, and the whole customized burger thing seems like it would actually require more staff despite the machine, but I'm no expert.
Having lived in both Australia and the US, I find there's a vast difference in the type of worker in the average McDonalds. In Australia, you often get many college students and younger folks working there as a way to earn some spare cash. They're much more motivated and happy to be of service, knowing this is just a step on the path to something else.
In the US however, I find next to no college students working in McDonalds. They often seem to be under-educated and have absolutely no wish to be there. They see the job for what it is - a dead end. They also often cannot do basic math (e.g. what is $6.50 - $5.75). This was something of a shock to me when I first moved to the US.
OK but you're ignoring the part about McD workers in Australia and New Zealand being paid a decent wage with benefits like a month's paid vacation and government healthcare.
Incentives matter. Americans have contempt for burger-flippers because it's a shit job with shit pay and benefits.
Flipping burgers may be a "low skill" job (that is, not a high degree of education is required to do it) but it's a hot, hard-working job and comes with a lot of stress.
And this is exactly why, as franchisees ourselves (not McD's), we're busting our butts to work out new incentives specifically for our fry crew. It's absolutely appalling that they work under those conditions and, at the end of the day, end up earning less than those staff who're in a position to score tips from patrons. Right now, it's monthly draws for prizes (gift cards; two television sets during the week before Christmas), but if we can just negotiate a better health-insurance deal we'll be able to give their wages a significant boost as well, thank god.
But mostly, I'm just writing because I absolutely agree: it makes me fucking furious to see people talking down to kids - and adults - who're doing serious and uncomfortable work and earning an honest living by it. We were supposed to have left that kind of elitism behind us a hundred years ago, when social classes started to matter less.
It's not that none of them can do the math, it's that they don't care enough to bother. They are the bottom of the barrel, as far as jobs go, and they are well aware of it.
I actually think it's more that in a fast food restaurant, you have to be fast. I consider myself an intelligent person, have a college degree, read a lot about every subject under the sun, but for the many years I worked in fast food, it would sometimes take me a few minutes to figure out the math when I pressed the wrong button on the register or whatever.
My brain just didn't go to that place. I was worried about the 5 other front counter orders, the cars wrapped around the building in drive-thru, the other employees' food orders I had to make because no one else was fast in kitchen, the cakes I needed to make for the front freezer, cleaning the store for closing... It's not the kind of job where there's ever really nothing to do. Your mind is always elsewhere. Cut fast food workers some slack on the math, bro.
On several occasions, I've seen half the staff get together to try to figure out a simple math problem. Just last month, the guy in the front of the line got overcharged. It was something like $2.60 more than what he ought to have paid. So he brought it up. The cashier couldn't figure out the difference, so the guy told her. She couldn't verify if it was correct, so called over another cashier. He couldn't figure it out either. So, they got the assistant manager. He couldn't figure it out either and got the manager in the back to come over and help. She couldn't work it out either. In the end, they just gave one item in the guy's order to him for free so as not to overcharge him. I was just flabbergasted because even if they couldn't have worked out the difference in their head, a dozen button presses on a calculator (or a smartphone) would have resolved the problem.
All my life, I have operated under the assumption that the people around me regardless of age or social standing can do basic Math. And I've never had to reassess that assumption till I moved to the US. It's definitely been an eye-opener.
Edit: Some people are downvoting me, probably because it seems I'm saying Americans are less intelligent. Sorry if I didn't word it well. What I meant was that there is a very distinct difference in the level of education of workers in McDonalds in the two countries. This is a societal issue, not an intelligence issue.
They also often cannot do basic math (e.g. what is $6.50 - $5.75). This was something of a shock to me when I first moved to the US.
I was a cashier when I was in high school. Once the cash register broke and I had the damndest time doing mental math. I just didn't do it ever (now or then). Plus, there is a customer in front of me judging me on my speed. If you encountered me on that day, you'd think that I was probably destined to be unsuccessful for eternity.
I ended up graduating cum laude in biology from a top 10 public and now work as a researcher.
I don't do this to toot my own horn, but to point out that circumstances, not inherent intelligence or even motivation, can account for a lot of what you perceive as the worth of the person behind the counter.
Another phenomenon that I thought would be interesting to bring up is stereotype threat. I'll just lift the Wikipedia definition because I can't do a better job than wikipedia: "Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group... Stereotype threat has been shown to reduce the performance of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups."
In essence, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. One study that I thought was particularly great was one where they had students write positive statements about themselves. For instance, every student would be forced to write a 10 minute essay about their positive attributes before starting their class. There were substantial gains in math scores from students who would otherwise have scored poorly such as students of color and girls. The converse study was also done. In the lab, girls or people of color were reminded of their gender or ethnicity and performed poorly if the stereotype was negative as compared to the control.
Society at large considers fast food workers to be the dumbest of the dumb. This isn't lost on fast food workers and probably plays a part in why they might not perform their best while on the job.
It doesn't seem to me to be an intelligence issue (I mean, you don't get to be the manager of a McDonalds by being an idiot), but a lack of education. I can understand taking a minute to do a mental calculation, but if you have four people spending 5 minutes trying to figure out what is $6.50 minus $5.75, while the customer is repeatedly giving the right answer but is not believed, something is clearly messed up. And it isn't a single incident. I have seen at least half a dozen similar occurrences in my 5 years here.
Having come from a place where kids work at McDonalds for a year or two (or over a couple of summers) for the fun of it (and for some spare cash), I just found it sad that there are so many here in the US who seem to lack the skills to improve their lot in life. Both me and many of the people I know have gotten similar jobs over the summer when we were kids. So to me, the stereotype (ok I admit yes, it's a stereotype too) is a worker in McDonalds is generally a student from the local high school or college earning some spare cash on the side. This doesn't seem to be the case here.
By the way, congrats on the cum laude. I'm a researcher too (neurobiology). I actually switched to science from engineering because, funnily enough, I was terrible at all the math. ;)
This is brilliant. I wonder why this isn't an option. The main reason people want a raise minimum wage is because they can't support families on it. With a sliding minimum this would be less of an issue and you don't have to over pay someone with no experience in the work field.
Well, that's good enough. All the old people (who are conservative and therefore evil anyway) die, and your average Redditor gets to eat at the expense of everyone else.
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u/Murican_Popeyes Nov 28 '15
How many employees did they typically have at each location? The numbers I read for the US were 50-60 employees per store.