Minimum Wage Backfire: McDonald's Goes Touchscreen

The rise of the machines may be here sooner than we first thought. And it’s showing up the most in two places: Wall Street and the minimum wage movement. It’s the ultimate battle of class warfare, now complicated by the tech industry.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the fast food industry is forced to get creative. Corporate executives in companies like McDonalds argue that entry level workers don’t add much more value than they’re already worth.

In fact, McDonalds top boss, CEO Donald Thompson told the Wall Street Journal, he plans to “make it easier for customers to order and pay for food digitally and to give people the ability to customize their orders.” Thompson also said, he feels customers want to “enjoy eating in a contemporary, inviting atmosphere. And they want choices in how they order, choices in what they order and how they’re served.”

All of those problems could soon be solved with technology. Now, with so many workers clamoring for higher pay, many other executives in the fast food market are also looking toward ROBOTS and advanced technology as their next new-hires. Sure, a burger-making robot could cost millions to develop, but it would cure the problem of employee turnover and could even limit loss prevention, two of the biggest problems facing fast food restaurants.

One tech company called has already made a robot that can crank out one burger every 10 seconds. And, it can do things from mixing and grilling custom order meats, to preparing and placing all of the condiments, right on the spot.

Plus, McDonalds already published their plans to add another layer of touchscreen technology to the drive thru window. The updated drive thrus should start popping up around July of next year, and it’s just one more advance that could be pushing entry level employees out of a job.

Eventually, if McDonalds could completely automate the connection between placing the order on a touch screen, and producing the order with a robot, the fast food giant would be almost entirely independent of entry level employees.

Either way, with McDonald’s third quarter profits plummeting 30 percent, something has to give. The only thing left to learn is whether it will be the humans or the machines.