this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Actually, yes. Part of the reason that fast food was so inexpensive was that fast food workers were criminally underpaid. Wages are up because of a combination of a tighter labor market and improved minimum wage laws. I've always been in favor of this, but in talking to restaurant owners I understood that they would have to pass increased labor costs on to their customers.
Continuing supply chain disruption from COVID-19 seem to also be a contributing factor, but I'm not sure what a recovery there will look like.
And now there's not as many fast food workers. They're being replaced by apps, self-service kiosks, and reduced hours.
Yup, that's often going to be a tradeoff when increasing a price floor (minimum wage) or when there is a labor shortage. In Oregon when the legislature passed the current minimum wage law, it anticipated that effect. The state's cost of living (COL) varies widely, with some parts of the state struggling more with COL and others more with unemployment. To alleviate that, there are tiered urban, semi-urban, and rural minimum wages based on the population density of each county.
Personally, I think the apps and self-service kiosks were going to happen anyway. It's just too tempting from a business perspective when you're putting in a sales computer system anyway. Versions of self-service restaurants like the automat have been around for over a hundred years. Now with computer systems able to handle orders from multiple sources (app, website, cashier, self-service POS, delivery service) it just kind of makes sense that businesses would want to minimize cashiers. And it's not like with grocery stores where the self checkout is kinda garbage.