But did you ever stop to think about how Italy's system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.

/s (should be obvious, but I'll put it there to be safe.)

But muh freedumb

Yeah when you think about how many meals they sell in an hour, they probably only need to charge less than 20 cents more for a meal to cover the cost of employees having a livable wage.

If were charging more for your burger in Italy, the difference in price was small enough to be unnoticeable. Because when you do the math, employees wages at a fast food joint isn't a significant percentage of the price.

They still monkey around the hours in these places to avoid paying any employee too much. I’ve worked in similar industries and you have to fight for shifts, or deal with taking shifts last minute on your days off.

Of course it doesn't. The amount of money these people make is insignificant compared to the billions siphoned off by corporations to payout themselves and their shareholders. Wage suppression is about control.

In CA we'd have to pay $20 for those feces lol.

that doesn't even buy top shelf fresh organic shit

only preprocessed canned shit shipped from who knows where.

Well, there's this, and this to say you're right. Had the minimum wage tracked in line with production, it would be ~$26 today. If it had tracked in line with inflation, it would probably be closer to $21.45.

That it's been flatlined for so long means people working for minimum wage have been getting steady pay cuts for 50 years.

It also happens that this is one of the reasons social security is straining financially- they were able to predict the demographic bulge of the baby boomers well enough, but they weren't able to predict that wages would be constrained in the way they have been- and wages are the basis for Social Security's funding.

Gig workers gimped themselves voting to remain as contractors in prop 22. And now there's that stupid 80%(?) majority rule to make amendments.

Brazil have a shit minimum wage and McDonald's and other fast food restaurants are full with automated cash registries and self service.

That's always the idle threat, but the reality is that they likely don't want to invest in the machines anyway.

I think a more likely phenomenon is that some (likely smaller) chains will be like "fuck it" and close up shop in CA.

Or the most likely scenario is that they just pad the prices a little more in CA and keep the chains open.

Long term I think people will just adjust to it and it'll be normal. Chains that are looking to maintain their "value" positioning will just absorb it out of their profit margins like they do in other localities.

They will absolutely replace all the workers with robots the second they can, even at 5.00/hr wages for workers.

Might as well bleed them until then.

The "automated" stores are less about reduction in labor cost and more about improving the overall operation and growing sales (thus increasing jobs.) It does help labor cost because the labor that is staffed is more efficient, but that's more of a tertiary outcome. They still employ roughly the same number of staff, and potentially will employ even more as efficiency of the process grows.

Simplest way I can explain this is thinking about the order kiosks. One of the worst parts of fast food is that most people aren't actually trained at birth how to order right, and secondarily it introduces another couple of humans who are fallible and won't get it correct. EG: customer comes into McDonald's and says "I want the whopper basket." Crew person, internal: "wtf are they talking about, I guess I'll give them a big mac." Then the customer comes back pissed off because they actually wanted a quarter pounder with fries, it has to be remade distracting the kitchen, manager, that crew person, etc further.

Also, the entire time the customer is ordering, it's engaging a whole crew person. To scale up and take more orders, you have to add an additional crew person for each order you want to take concurrently, and because customer flow is not 100% predictable, this isn't even really possible. Most McDonalds have like 4 kiosks, and you'll only find that they're all used at the same time for maybe a grand total 3-4 hours a day. To replicate that with a human, you would have to be like "I need you to work from 7:23-7:59, and you to work 11:46-12:07, and you to work, 12:03-12:07..." which literally no one is going to do, and isn't actually that predictable regardless. No automation means some customers are going to come in, see a line, and peace out. This means lower sales, and lower overall employees.

With automation, the demand can be filled much more often and a whole massive point of complexity is removed. In the example above, the customer comes in wanting a whopper basket, looks at the menu and goes "oh they call it a quarter pounder here" and clicks the buttons. Because they can now capture more demand, kitchens are busier and there are more orders to deliver, so they move that person who was going to be extremely inefficient by comparison serving customers 1:1, and move them to a kitchen position or to an expo position.)