[milhous]

While everyone's heard the minimum wage-automation argument many times over, wasn't POS kiosks the inevitable next step regardless of wages? Sheetz and Wawa have been doing this for decades in the Northeast US, so why hasn't McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, etc followed suit? Is it due to public pressure, and/or the cost of deploying infrastructure?

[jbuzbee]

The equation is pretty direct. When the cost of an employee is greater than the value the employee brings to the organization, something has to change or else the organization goes out of business. I'm not familiar with Sheetz and Wawa, but maybe these companies felt that the novelty or accuracy of Kiosks brought additional customers in, justifying their expense even with a low labor cost. Other companies may not have felt so. But now that minimum wages are being pushed higher, these companies are going to re-evaluate the cost vs. value equation. When the local Dairy Queen in Fresno, is forced to pay a High School kid a rate of $31,000 a year to hand out soft-serve ice-cream cones, you can bet that the owner is looking at self-serve options...

[edit for typo]

[Torgo]

Tax breaks in exchange for bringing jobs to a community? I'm sure government largess focuses into the equation. "Free market", haha. Programs originally meant to help people tying them to pyramid-construction projects.