In April, California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour—the culmination of a long campaign by fast food workers across the state. Even in the state’s rural inland counties, where the cost of living is lowest, the new rate isn’t enough for a single adult without children to survive working forty hours per week, every week, for the entire year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s cost of living calculator.
The fast food industry and its defenders argue that raising the minimum wage any higher will lead restaurants to hire less and maybe even lay off workers. And to underscore their disdain, they’ve made a predictable threat: automation.
It’s predictable because the industry has tossed the word around before.
In the early 1960s, in response to increased wages, the American Machine & Foundry Company built a highly automated “drive-in restaurant” called AMFare in Levittown, New York. Customers entered an order into the system via buttons on a box and a mechanized kitchen prepared it for them.
AMFare drew a lot of attention from industry minders, but it was too costly. Whereas a similarly-sized drive-in operated entirely by human hands required ninety hours of labor per day to operate, AMFare needed forty hours from highly-trained machine operators. Forcing a menu change was also nearly impossible—a problem in an industry that has long depended on novel menu additions as much as consistent service to keep customers returning.
Menu changes have undercut the fast food automation dream ever since. But industry leaders never stopped raising the specter of automation.
“The fast food industry has no alternative. It will have to robotise,” Joseph Durocher, a professor of hotel administration, told The New York Times in 1988. “No longer can they afford the luxury of having human workers standing at the beverage bar with a cup or watching hamburger patties on a grill.”
The labor problem had become worse, the Times noted, because of recent changes in immigration laws that made it “more difficult to employ illegal aliens.” (Immigrants being the original robots, apparently).
Since the 1980s, the robotics field has come a long way, and the fast food industry has only become more lucrative and sophisticated. But full automation remains an industry pipe dream. Like a national missile defense system or self-driving cars, a kitchen where robots do most of the work is one of these things that’s perpetually around the corner yet never seems to be within reach, no matter how much the industry would like it to be.
So why does the industry keep telling us otherwise?
While fast food executives often speak of the exciting possibilities of adding more robots to their kitchens, they are more likely to speak of automation as an unfortunate but necessary reaction to a workforce asking for more. During a 1993 hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee, for instance, David Scherb, a vice president at PepsiCo—then parent of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut—threatened automation as a reaction to Bill Clinton’s proposal to require low-wage employers to cover health care costs.
As usual, Wall Street came first: PepsiCo would do nothing to “compromise business growth or shareholder returns” or raise prices for customers. But someone would have to assume the new burden, and that someone would be fast food workers. In the event that PepsiCo and its franchisees were forced to cover healthcare, “We’d hire fewer people, and let high employee turnover do the rest,” Scherb said.
To fill the gap, Scherb continued, PepsiCo restaurants would seek out ways to make its restaurants less reliant on people, with such cutting-edge technologies as “touch-screen computers to place orders” and “automated credit card units.”
Clinton’s proposed employer mandate never passed. But as anyone who’s been to a fast food outlet in the last ten years can attest, the technologies Scherb talked about found a place in the fast food kitchen anyway, right alongside the usual workforce.
Despite its claims of social responsibility, the fast food industry has never employed as many people as it has because it is altruistic, and it hasn’t avoided introducing new technology to protect workers’ jobs. From its inception, it has added machines and workers in tandem, with people taking a subordinate role to the gadgets they operate.
By touting the grand possibilities of automation, fast food executives have echoed delusions first voiced by the factory barrons of the industrial revolution. As French sociologist Georges Friedmann wrote in 1955, “The theory of automation gives hope of the total disappearance of unpleasant work . . . and the transformation of the man at work into a sort of demiurge or creator, making and minding machines. But these are technicians’ abstractions which the actual evolution of capitalist societies since the beginning of this century has cruelly contradicted.”
With the advent of fast food, history has only repeated itself in the service sector. When speaking with investors, fast food executives talk excitedly about self-service technologies like kiosks: Such installations offer customers “choices” and “options,” they say, making it easier to turn moments of temptation into a sale.
But when staving off advances for their workers, the industry execs deploy the same technologies with a heavy heart—the sad response to a workforce unwilling to accept the wages they’re offered.
The “touch-screen computers” that PepsiCo’s Scherb warned of in the early 1990s are illustrative.
It took some time for the technology to advance enough that franchisees could justify the typically enormous cost of a single unit. (Today’s self-service kiosks can cost a franchisee up to $60,000.) But by making use of customers’ loyalty accounts and tempting them to buy more with animated depictions of menu items, a franchisee doing good business can more than make up for the added cost. According to one 2004 study, check sizes for orders placed at kiosks were 30 percent higher than for orders placed at the counter. In 2018, McDonald’s announced plans to add a thousand kiosks to its stores every quarter for at least two years.
But in 2013, when the Fight for $15 movement for higher wages and a union was growing throughout the United States, the industry presented the same technology as a response to a potential wage increase.
That year, an official-sounding group called the Employment Policies Institute bought a full-page ad in USA Today showing a fast food worker with an iPad for a face. It was a warning to anyone sympathetic to the plight of the workers who served them lunch: Higher wages would take the humanity out of fast food.
(The Employment Policies Institute, it turns out, was a front group for Berman and Company, a Washington public-relations shop that acts as a hired gun for food companies.)
Automation has undoubtedly made fast food more efficient. At the McDonald’s I briefly worked at two years ago, machines poured drinks the moment a customer ordered one. Like a rising number of fast food outlets, there were also self-service kiosks available to walk-in customers, and customers could place orders over their phone for delivery to their parking space.
Still, a person had to deliver the order, just like a person had to pack the fries and make the burgers. Technological advances might enable a quicker pace in the restaurant kitchen, but it takes human hands to realize those gains.
This is why, contrary to the industry’s recurring claims, more technology doesn’t mean fewer workers. While the average number of workers stationed at each restaurant has fallen slightly, the rise in technology has accompanied a rise in the number of people in the industry’s overall workforce.
In 2011, there were an estimated 3.5 million fast food workers in the United States at 148,000 restaurants. Ten years later, there were an estimated 4.9 million workers—a 29 percent increase—at 188,000 restaurants, despite the fact that Congress hasn’t increased the federal minimum wage ($7.25 is still the wage floor in twenty states) since 2009. For the industry, automation isn’t a means to reduce its workforce; it’s only a way to get more labor out of its workers.
The sweeping automation that fast food executives propose as part of an exciting new future or an unfortunate but necessary response to workplace advances is, in reality, nothing more than an aspiration, or a cudgel to wield against workers’ pleas for better pay. I have no doubt the industry would trade its entire workforce for robots overnight if it could. Until then, fast food workers are, to industry leaders, nothing more than a necessary burden.