Taco Bell App

Taco Bell has come out with an ordering app that allows customers to use their smart phones to put in an order and pay for it.  As the customer approaches a Taco Bell location, the app asks if they want the restaurant to start preparing their food.  This process can involve almost no human contact (I suppose someone has to pass the food out the window, but ordering and paying is entirely electronic).

As this becomes more popular (Taco Bell is not the first to try this, and it most certainly will not be the last), a lot of jobs are going to be lost.  Eventually, most drive through orders will not require a cashier, because most of them will already be ordered and paid for before the customer even enters the drive through.  This will allow the drive through cashier position to be combined with another position.  It is also likely that the added convenience will reduce the need for inside cashiers.  Eventually this is going to spread to all fast food restaurants, because otherwise, they will not be able to compete.  This is going to add up to a lot of jobs that are lost.

It is about time!  Fast food restaurants severely underpay their employees.  They claim that they cannot afford to pay more.  I have argued this before, and I will repeat it again: A business that cannot pay employees enough to survive on is not worth existing.  Work that is not worth a living wage is not worth doing at all.  Pay that is below a living wage is just plain not sustainable.  A business that cannot pay a living wage is not profitable enough or valuable enough to justify its own existence.  Fast food is practically the bottom of the barrel (ok, agriculture is far worse, but also far less prominent).  Current Federal minimum wage, which most fast food places start at, generates well under the poverty level in income, even full time.  One of the most effective ways of reducing costs (so that employees can be paid fair wages) is automating processes and eliminating unnecessary employees.  Food assembly is hard to automate (though, certainly possible).  Automated order taking is now very easy to automate.  It is the low hanging fruit.  It is nice to see that fast food is finally figuring this out.

There is a catch.  The most common response to increased profits through automation is faster expansion and better shareholder payouts (or, even worse, increased CEO salary).  If Taco Bell choses to take this route, then not only is it not worth existing, it is actively worth destroying.  Why?  It is already vastly underpaying its employees.  It should take this opportunity to make its employment system more sustainable by raising wages.  Admittedly, eliminating maybe two or three employees will not save enough to pay all of the rest a living wage.  An effort, however, would be nice.  It would show that they care about paying their employees fairly.  If, instead, they spend the profits on something else, then they are showing that they could care less about their employees.  If this is the case, then the business does not deserve to exist, and additionally, it deserves to die so society no longer has to pay the costs of its freeloading on our unpaid labor (if it pays less than a living wage, then it is not paying for all of the labor it is getting).  I hope they do the right thing, but I am not holding my breath.