There's lots of money that goes to franchise owners though.
An operation like McDonald's will end up paying higher wages due to automation, but to fewer employees. As the revenue per employee goes up things like training and churn become more expensive than increasing wages.
> McDonalds made $11 billion in 2019. They employed 210,000 people. They therefore made ~$52,400 per worker in profit.
Don’t forget that McDonalds is mostly a franchise business. They could have 0 people flipping burgers and still make 10 billion profit
I'll try recalculating for Starbucks, since not having franchisees makes the calculations easier:
Starbucks in 2019:
* Made $26.5 billion dollars
* Employed 346,000
* Average barista wage ~$12 / hour = ~$25,000 per year
* Average profit per employee = $76,589
Hold on a minute, that's Starbucks' revenue, not profit. You haven't accounted for any non-labour expense.
From its financial data (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SBUX/financials?p=SBUX) (Yahoo link for convenience), that $26.5b revenue is directly offset by $19b in cost-of-goods-sold (including some salaries already paid). Other overhead and depreciation accounts for another $3.5bn, and interest expenses contribute $235m.
The net pre-tax profit for Starbucks is $3.9bn, and if that were distributed equally among all employees (from your figure) it would result in about $11,200/worker over and above their existing salary.
That's closer to the break-even-wage-rate that Starbucks could conceivably offer, if it's intended to have zero return on capital (about $19bn in current assets for FY2019). And that figure is volatile; if you repeat for this fiscal year you'd calculate about $3200/worker.
When Amazon made zero gross profit for a decade (or was it two?) it wasn't because they weren't making profits.
Check the financial statements again. The $26.5b figure you cite is gross revenue, of which $24.4b is operating revenue. From that revenue you deduct the $19b cost of goods sold (including salaries) to find $7.5b of operating profit, and from that you deduct depreciation and administration expenses.
New investment does not show up as an expense on a financial statement, since it builds capital -- at the accounting level it's a transformation of one asset (cash) to another (land/equipment/etc).
McDonalds made $11 billion in 2019. They employed 210,000 people. They therefore made ~$52,400 per worker in profit.
A $10 / hour burger flipper makes ~$19,500 per year.
Those burger flippers are compensated poorly because of labor market competition. The value they provide only puts a ceiling on what it is possible for them to earn for their job to exist.
The actual prevailing wage is determined by, frankly, how desperate the low skilled pool of labor is. If unemployment goes up, that means greater desperation. If public sector compensation goes down, that means greater desperation. If social services are cut that means greater desperation. If overseas workers in a country that practices chattel slavery starts taking orders, that means greater desperation. If prison workers start getting in on your industry, that means greater desperation.
All of these things mean wages go down.
This all has absolutely fuck all to do with automation. It is largely about power.
The Roman empire also had mind-bendingly high levels of income and wealth inequality and they weren't exactly automating everybody out of their jobs. They were a society built on the selective application of extreme violence.
Automation does provide the perfect excuse for paltry, declining wages though, largely because it's nobody's fault. If I were an industrialist I'd for sure be gently guiding the pointy pitchforks in the direction of the robots while I outsource, use prison labor, lobby for reining in public sector wages/pensions, cutting social services and gorging myself on gargantuan profit margins. I'm squishy and they are not.
The other useful aspect of the automation narrative is that it plays well with outsourcing. Americans don't see the labor intensive factories that leave its shores in search of more impoverished, cheaper, possibly even slave labor.
What they do see are the factories that didn't bother offshoring - the ones that required a small amount of highly skilled labor to maintain automated production lines, where the headache of offshoring wasn't worth the hassle.