ull confession. I really like fast food. I love McDonald’s. I love Burger King. I love Wendy’s. I love the newer breed of fast food too — like Chipotle, Panera Bread and anything else, really. I realize it isn’t the healthiest thing ever, and it’s more money than I like to spend, so our family considers it a treat.
Therefore, on a recent trip to France, when my children begged for McDonald’s it was pretty easy to get me to acquiesce. It was an easy decision, really. I like McDonald’s and there was one, right there. We could get food quickly and then go to our hotel and go to bed.
The only problem is, I don’t speak French, not even a little bit. So, I was thrilled when I found a touch screen computer with the option to choose my language. Not only did I not have to make a poor cashier suffer through my lack of language skills, but I could easily customize my order. My kids could even change their minds 6 times before I hit “finish and pay.” Once I paid (with a credit card), we just had to wait for our number to be called.
To keep reading, click here: Fast food protesters may get less than they expected
Awesome post, Suzanne! These are points that most people don’t consider in the current argument.
$8 really is tough to live on. Perhaps, $15 is too high of a jump for businesses, but maybe the protest will help the 2 amounts meet somewhere in the middle? There really are a lot of skills to learn in fast food jobs. You have to learn to multi-task, think on your feet, work quickly, efficiently, accurately, follow instructions, customer service on the front lines…. and it gives you little glimpses, first hand & face-to-face, of what happens when something goes wrong – and how to fix it. If the burger is made wrong, the chicken nuggets are not cooked all the way through, the fries aren’t crispy – you WILL hear about it from your customers and have to fix it, right? And dealing with it person-to-person you hopefully learn the empathy that goes along with it. So you’re not necessarily ONLY learning how to flip a burger at McD’s. You are learning many life skills to go along with it. Hopefully the corporations never replace the people with machines, because a robot won’t care when it makes my sandwich wrong! 🙂
The problem is this, People who have education, who went to White suburban, middle class schools say simply go get a new job if you cannot make enough money to survive. Forgetting that many of the people who work these jobs went to public schools that were more warehouses for children than educational facilities. Unlike most developed nations, the United States spends more on educating wealthy children than disadvantaged children who need more support and then end up in these poorly paid no benefit , I need to work 3 jobs and then die when I try to take a nap in by car because I am exhausted positions. What these worker really want is the ability to support themselves on ONE JOB not 3 and work ONLY 40 hours a week INSTEAD of 100 like in order to make basic rent. France by the way has a minimum wage twice that of the U.S. and mandatory time off as do most other developed nations. As to the $15 an hour comment, independent economic studies have shown that married couples need to each be making that amount for financial security. If you are single the amount rises to $22.50 an hour. Please get your facts straight before writing these articles.
I think the part that you are missing is that these jobs were never intended to be full-time wage earning jobs. They were intended for students, part time caregivers, retirees. The old style jobs (manufacturing) have gone the way of the Dodo bird, which means that there are no entry level non-skilled jobs left. That is the crux of the problem – there are very, very, very few jobs for unskilled labor. They’ve gone overseas.
I do think it is a bit of a cop-out to blame the public school system. Most of us went to public schools and got a free education that was OK. Not great, but OK. And some of us put ourselves through school by working part time (at McDonalds), living in a tiny house with many roommates, and scrimping by.
Ah but did you go to a warehouse or a middle class school with resources. The point I am making is that not all public school education is the same. Case in point is an initiative that was attempted in PA. The state wanted to distribute all the education funds based on need instead of by land value (higher land value meant more funds for the district). Who complained? The wealthy of course because their children would not have a better education than the poor people. I paid back my student loans for 20 years. Most of the people at these jobs did not even have a chance to try to get into a school – there was no one to coach them on the admissions process etc.
I went to a rural school that had rats in the girls locker room. The local McDonalds was one of the very few jobs available that wasn’t farm labor (picking strawberries, blueberries, etc.) You know how much coaching I got from our school guidance counselor? Zero. I was a woman and expected to get married, not get a career. I was explicitly discouraged from my dreams because I’d be “taking away” a job from a “hard working man”. I worked 36 hours a week, went to school part time, took 6 years to graduate. Those horrid low paying jobs with abusive management were a huge incentive to do well and graduate.
BTW, NO ONE coached me in the admissions process either. I had to figure it out myself.
Sure, maybe short-sighted employers will go to machines over people. However, there is mounting evidence that the income gap is a major contributor to the uncertainty of our economy. That probably has something to do with the fact that machines don’t buy burgers and fries. Neither do desperately poor people. Some people really need to get over Reagan’s crazy ideas about how the economy works.
It’s not only fast-food places. People are being replaced by machines in all sorts of places. I used to go to CVS and see three or four cashiers. Now there’s one cashier who handles only people who are buying an item kept behind the counter – everyone else is directed to the self-checkout. There are still two clerks at the library- who sit behind the counter reading magazines and act as though patrons are disturbing them if they need help with the self-checkout, self-return or self-pay machines. The clerical staff in the government agency where I work no longer type – due to recent hiring the professional staff is younger than it used to be and find it easier to use Word to prepare a report rather than handwrite it and give it to a typist.
Now some of these people can re-define their jobs to an extent and make themselves more valuable – the cashiers and library clerks can decide that they are really there to provide customer service, not just ring orders up or just check books in or out. and the clerical staff at my job might decide that they can do more than type,file and answer phones. But if they don’t, as a group they’ll be in the same boat as McDonald’s workers will be in when the minimum wage gets raised to $15/hr- half as many people will have jobs..
Wow, I think people in Australia make more than $15/hour at fast food joints (even close to $20)! $8 an hour might be illegal here.
But I have noticed a lot of retail/service jobs are being replaced by computers. Supermarkets are now using self-serve checkouts and reducing their cashiers. Haven’t seen McDonalds using self-service, but that’s probably the future. Even factories are automating heavily and cutting basic labour jobs.
Funny thing is, people are still complaining about outsourcing and immigrants, when in reality their jobs are being stolen by machines. But I guess that’s nothing new – you don’t see many weavers or stablehands anymore these days.
The reality is, anything that can be done by a robot will be done by a robot, eventually.