The wage increase is the agent here? More correct to say that owners did these things in response.
Automating the order flow avoids even higher wages for good English speakers and kiosks drive higher margin via up sales. Automation of drink pouring reduces shrink. Eliminating cash reduces cash handling expenses and reduces refunds.
I have a friend who owns a few McDonalds in a high expense state. He bitches about marketing expense share and supply cost.
Ignoring the link in that chain wherein corporations chose to take various unnecessary and punative measures as retaliation against having to pay their workers more is intellectually dishonest, at best.
The owner of a restaurant who lays off waiters in order to spend less on salaries is not punishing the waiters. Nobody thinks that the waiters have broken any rules. The definition of “punitive” is that it is a punishment for breaking the rules. The waiters might think it’s unfair or niggardly, of course, but that’s not what “punitive” means. Pick a more appropriate word.
It's punishment for demanding better pay. That makes it punitive, whether the mechanism for negotiating that better pay is "we voted for (people who will vote for) a minimum wage increase" or "we formed a union so we can collectively bargain for a wage increase" or what have you.
> Pick a more appropriate word.
Okay, then:
- Retaliatory
- Self-serving
- Douchebaggish
Do those work better for you? Or are you going to find some other excuse to nitpick and distract from the core issue of employers being full of shit when they blame wage increases for "needing" to lay people off?
This is a business functioning as it should.
This sounds like all around progress to me. As always, the trick is getting the political will to take care of those displaced by progress rather than stiffing them with hard knocks until their resentment builds into support for more destructive policies like the current Great Leap Backwards.
No, did I state or imply that? A private organization was paid by an industry to produce a report, and that report overwhelming supports the industry that paid for the report. How do weigh such data in your own decision-making? I give data from a public university, produced by individuals we could email right now if we wanted, individuals who presumably have reputations and career trajectories, a pretty hefty weight. Not above suspicion and not devoid of bias, but worth parsing. Is an industry report, by the industry for the industry, really worth parsing to you?
E.g. if California restaurants automated, but Texas ones did not, then you can attribute it to policy differences. Otherwise, it’s just guessing why restaurants took these measures.
The industry does price segmentation now, so it’s hard to measure the prices anyway. If you order two egg McMuffins and two coffees at the counter in my city, it’s $13. With the app… $8.
Im in California a few times a year. The prices if different are very marginally so.
"We find that the policy increased average hourly pay by a remarkable 18 percent, and yet it did not reduce employment,” a study by the UC Berkeley Institute for Research and Labor Employment concluded. “The policy increased prices about 3.7 percent, or about 15 cents on a $4 hamburger (on a one-time basis), contrary to industry claims of larger increases."
This is one of those situations where everyone seems to see what they want to see. (The article notes that "Both pro and con studies used roughly the same employment data generated by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The agency does not collect specific data on the fast food chains affected by the minimum wage legislation, so the rival researchers had to extrapolate what they contend are valid statistical bases... without some reliable data on effects, everyone involved is shooting in the dark. It will be politics, rather than fact, which governs the outcomes.")
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qwllx1iv8q1ecudz6z59v/BRG_Imp...
https://epionline.org/release/new-data-staggering-16000-jobs...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/20/icymi-after-raising-minimu...
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/02/fast-food-minimum-...
>On Tuesday, the industry released its own impact study, conducted by the Berkeley Research Group, a private consulting firm. It found that wage increases have reduced fast food employment, shortened the hours worked, compelled fast food franchises to use more automation and resulted in markedly higher consumer prices.