The Expert Podcast

…Here's another one of those unintended consequences. Of labor movements that somehow in some cases might actually have backlash. A couple of years ago. I was driving and, needed. Cook drive through. To get something to drink. And normally would it go through a fast food Drive-through however, this was during…COVID pandemic where there was lockdowns and you really couldn't walk into a lot of places nor did I want to. So there was a McDonald's that was, you know going right by where I was driving in I pulled through the drive through to get a bottle of water. And I noticed that when I went to the drive-through window to collect the water that I had paid for, there was a little carousel. That had all the drinks in it So when orders came through the window and somebody ordered you know, a big Mac with a Coke or happy meal with a Sprite or whatever it was, the little carousel automatically took a cup. And went through the carousel. It filled it with ice put the drink in it and then it put it where the. The person who was handing out the food could just grab it and hand it out the window. And granted. The people at the McDonald's still have to make the food and hand take the money and hand it out but it took one step of the process away from somebody having to fill the drinks. Right. And I was thinking well gee, they're taking slices of the labor out of the process. They're taking slices of the paid cost. Out of employees. job responsibilities and I was wondering. How big of a deal That was well here we are three years later that was in 2019. And here's an article from Reuters where robots are actually now doing French fries better than humans faster. Less waste less errors. And there's a robot that has an arm that puts the basket in fries. You know wait for the fry that happened pull it out and then dump it into the buckets. Well…This may not seem like a big deal. But little by little. As different industries. Food service hospitality programming. Find ways to take slices of labor. Away from humans and automating it. It's going to need less hours for employees in the environment For example. employees may only be 10% of the hours of cooking the fries, but now that you have that done automatically, you can have 10% less employees in that store Maybe now they work on something else or you don't need that extra staff for that shift. Part of the reason is because of the labor costs have gone up with higher minimum wages more benefits. And, you know it's one thing to actually just pay them while you have to, but it does put the pressure on companies to accelerate adoption of these technologies to reduce their costs because. Look they're not going to be able to if the labor rates go up, take French fries and take it from $2 to $10. Certainly we have inflation and part of inflation. is from this labor cost part of it's from supply chain and other things. But anything that. A business can do to help offset some of that through automation. Then that's what's going to happen because the comp the customers who are buying the products are demanding. The least amount of price that they can write. They don't want to pay $10 for a bag of fries. So these automated processes whether you like em or not whether you think they're good or bad for society, this is what happens When one cost goes up you try to offset it somewhere else. So you don't end up being out of business because you're not making any money. but it was just interesting to see that. Now they're cooking the fries with a robot. As opposed to having labor do that tell us what your thoughts are in the comments or what'd you think about this development of automation of previously human interaction?