Carl's Jr. CEO Readies Robot Workforce to Counter Rising Wages

[Erttheking]

Oh please, you talk about how increased wages are doing this. I'd bet hard money you would've done this anyway, given the chance. You're just looking to deflect the blame.

 

[ToddBot]

We replaced dishwashers with dish washing machines.
We replaced launderers with laundry machines.
We replaced bank tellers with ATMs (automated banking machines).
We replaced couriers with phones.
We've replaced millions of jobs with machines that do far better work for cheaper.

And now we're having a hissy fit because some clever writer decided to call a hamburger grilling machine a robot.

 

[Qizx]

Perhaps you could take a pay cut yourself first, Mr. CEO? How much money do you make a year again? More than probably every single one of your employees combined will see in their lifetime? Or perhaps you could maybe raise the price of a few items by a few cents? A dime might not seem like much by itself, but if you 5,000 of them, that's $50,000.
Pretty sure it's statements like this that lead to the whole, "We are the 99%!" movement. This guy comes off as an ass. No one--except other well-off 'I-have-so-much-money-I-could-never-spend-it-all-but-I-want-MORE!' people--is going to feel sorry for this guy. He's complaining about paying people while it sits in a corner greedily hoarding his wealth.

I decided to do a little research:
-Andy Puzder (the Carl's Jr. CEO) makes about $4.5 million in salary (before taxes)
-The highest US tax bracket is 39%, so it means after income taxes, Puzder takes home $2,745,000/year.
-Carl's Jr. has about 1356 locations worldwide.
-I couldn't find exact employment numbers, but the average fast food joint has 15.71 employees, so 15.71x1356=21,303 Carl's Jr. fast food workers.
-$2,745,000/21,303=$128.85.
-A person making minimum wage ($7.25) working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year brings home $15,080.

In other words, if the CEO of Carl's Jr. gave away every penny of his salary after taxes to his low-level employees, his employees would get a whopping $129 more each year. That's an increase of 0.008%.

Saying he should "take a pay cut" is a cop-out, it would do essentially nothing.

So I tried to search, out of curiosity where did you find his income? Does it include his bonuses/incentives? Cause I am shocked to hear it's that low...

1) You assume he's paying the full taxes, a rather wishful assumption.
2) Rather than giving away JUST his salary (which I strongly suspect is significantly higher than the 2.7M after taxes) if they lowered the salary of all the other big wigs and passed it down.

Now the statement the other fellow made was clearly a hyperbole Andy is still in quite a nice boat with his income. The idea of someone making 183 times what their average worker is then having the audacity to claim that they shouldn't make more and that he'll just take their jobs away is pretty damn pathetic.

EDIT: I realized 1) comes off as a bit aggressive, what I mean is that when you have the likes of Romney paying "about 15%" it's hard to imagine any other well to do person NOT hiding their taxes.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

"Trickle down economics" originated from a joke...people that use it unironically are oblivious to this;

http://upstarta.com.au/post/imf-trickledown-economics-joke

 

[shirkbot]

I decided to do a little research:
-Andy Puzder (the Carl's Jr. CEO) makes about $4.5 million in salary (before taxes)
-The highest US tax bracket is 39%, so it means after income taxes, Puzder takes home $2,745,000/year.
-Carl's Jr. has about 1356 locations worldwide.
-I couldn't find exact employment numbers, but the average fast food joint has 15.71 employees, so 15.71x1356=21,303 Carl's Jr. fast food workers.
-$2,745,000/21,303=$128.85.
-A person making minimum wage ($7.25) working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year brings home $15,080.

In other words, if the CEO of Carl's Jr. gave away every penny of his salary after taxes to his low-level employees, his employees would get a whopping $129 more each year. That's an increase of 0.008%.

Saying he should "take a pay cut" is a cop-out, it would do essentially nothing.

I don't know how representative I am, but $129 dollars means 3 weeks of groceries for me. That's 3 extra weeks I can dedicate to whatever I want because I'm not worried about having enough to feed myself. I find it a little disingenuous to assume that because it's a relatively small sum that it would "do essentially nothing."

The math itself, and its attendant, argument also seem to have a lot of in-built assumptions.

EDIT: Qizx actually got to my first couple points first, so I'll just tack on from there.

-This is a national/international corporation, and the cost of living is not the same in all locations.
-The number of employees covers a range of people from cashiers to management, who are making fairly different incomes.
Then there is the underlying assumption that past events can accurately predict the future, which is always dangerous. Doubly so as recent research indicates that unemployment resulting from displaced workers has been increasing and there is no way to be absolutely sure if it's short-term (as per usual) or if this is a shift towards a long-term problem. There is a pretty even split among economists about which is more likely, and it would seem prudent to at least have a plan because people do not simply disappear when they have been replaced.

And even ignoring all that, it does come off as a little hypocritical for the CEO with a multi-million dollar salary to say people are losing their jobs because they cost too much when he alone costs the company as much as almost 300 of those same employees. He may well deserve every cent, but that doesn't make it sound less callous.

 

[owbu]

Robots are/will soon be cheaper (depending on the field) than any person could ever live on.
To what extend does that guy think wages can sink? People are taking second jobs already, with how low minimum wage is. This seems to be nothing more than "hey, blaiming the evil goverment for my unpopular but lucrative move!"

 

[Ihateregistering1]

So I tried to search, out of curiosity where did you find his income? Does it include his bonuses/incentives? Cause I am shocked to hear it's that low...

http://www.epi.org/blog/romney-economic-advisor-andy-puzder-overtime/
"Andy Puzder is the CEO of CKE Restaurants (Hardee?s and Carl?s Jr.). Bloomberg reported his 2012 salary and other compensation as $4.485 million,"
Granted, this is from 2012, but his job title is still the same, so I can't imagine it's changed that much. Likewise, the majority of CEOs don't have salaries as high as people think. The primary reason they are worth so much is because:
A: They're often paid in stock as well as salary, which means if the company is soaring, so is their net worth.
B: They usually invest a large portion of their money as well, and most of these guys/gals are pretty smart, so they invest wisely and make even more money.

1) You assume he's paying the full taxes, a rather wishful assumption.

Now the statement the other fellow made was clearly a hyperbole Andy is still in quite a nice boat with his income. The idea of someone making 183 times what their average worker is then having the audacity to claim that they shouldn't make more and that he'll just take their jobs away is pretty damn pathetic.

EDIT: I realized 1) comes off as a bit aggressive, what I mean is that when you have the likes of Romney paying "about 15%" it's hard to imagine any other well to do person NOT hiding their taxes.

Even if he didn't pay 1 cent in taxes, if he distributed every penny of his salary, each worker would now get...$211 more per year, a 0.01% increase. Again, doesn't even come close to drastically changing their economic status.

The reason people like Romney pay 15% in taxes is because most of their money is made through investments, in which you pay capital gains taxes instead of standard income tax (I think capital gains is 20% right now, but I'd have to check). I could go into an entirely different rant regarding the capital gains tax, but here's a good way to imagine it: imagine you went to a Casino and you put $5 on a hand of blackjack. If you lose, the Casino takes your $5. If you win, the Casino gives you $4, and claims they're keeping $1 as a "Casino fee". How much longer are you going to keep going to that Casino?

I don't know how representative I am, but $129 dollars means 3 weeks of groceries for me. That's 3 extra weeks I can dedicate to whatever I want because I'm not worried about having enough to feed myself. I find it a little disingenuous to assume that because it's a relatively small sum that it would "do essentially nothing."

I don't mean literally nothing, but I mean that a 0.008% pay increase is not going to take anyone from being poor to being middle-class. Think about it: if I came in and told you "Hey Shirkbot, congratulations, you're getting a raise of 0.008%!" how would you react? If you were making $10.00 an hour, you're now making $10.08 an hour. Better, but the overall effect on your income is extremely small.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

"They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," he explained.

They also don't buy hamburgers. Or houses, or medicine, or TVs, or video games. The more people you put out of jobs, the less money is getting spent- and since a simple truth of the free market is "my spending is your income and vice-versa", more and more people are going to see their jobs done by robots so that their employers can save a buck in hard times.

But we've got plenty of market "experts" who'll say "just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get another job". Even if it requires moving across the country (which costs money), or going for higher education (which costs money). Can't afford it? That's your own fault; enjoy living on the streets, and do try to die quietly somewhere where I don't have to see you.

 

[weirdee]

Tying human worth to income is probably going to turn out badly for us in the future.

As for "working harder to escape a poor excuse for minimum wage", there's ALWAYS going to be terrible jobs that require low amounts of skill but HIGH amounts of effort, and there's always going to be a lowest paying job, which because people value skill over effort, will never leave that price. Somebody will have to do that job until robots are capable of doing that job, and if that's not going to happen in a decade (developing automation is complex and requires much trial and error), that still means that somebody will have to do that job for one reason or another, and trying to ignore that this conflict exists now is pretty much "not my problem" levels of pissery that does not fulfill the needs of a community.

EVEN THEN

In a theoretical world where automation makes everything cheaper to do anyway, that would mean there would be more money to pay people! If we aren't using money to pay everybody more, then what's the point of automation if that money just gets wasted by sitting somewhere that isn't doing anything???

Any system that is designed to run off of abusing a significant portion of the population until they die from health problems is only one step removed from slavery, and in theory, if everybody did pull themselves up by their boostraps in that situation, that civilization would collapse from having nobody left to abuse. People having to elevate themselves to escape poverty implies that there always has to be poverty in order for the system to exist. This "meritocracy" is basically a pyramid scheme.

 

[shirkbot]

I don't know how representative I am, but $129 dollars means 3 weeks of groceries for me. That's 3 extra weeks I can dedicate to whatever I want because I'm not worried about having enough to feed myself. I find it a little disingenuous to assume that because it's a relatively small sum that it would "do essentially nothing."

I don't mean literally nothing, but I mean that a 0.008% pay increase is not going to take anyone from being poor to being middle-class. Think about it: if I came in and told you "Hey Shirkbot, congratulations, you're getting a raise of 0.008%!" how would you react? If you were making $10.00 an hour, you're now making $10.08 an hour. Better, but the overall effect on your income is extremely small.

Don't get me wrong, I know it wouldn't save the world or anything, but if you look at it in terms of what it can buy people you realize how little it can take to make a tangible difference. You tell me I'm going to make $10.08 an hour as opposed to $10.00. That's not much, certainly nothing to write home about, but in a 40 hour work week that extra 8 cents becomes $3.2 ($2.7 for the actual min. wage), and that's enough to buy an extra meal I otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. It just seems pretty tone-deaf to say employees cost too much when he makes so much money that he could take a pay cut of 50% and give every worker what amounts to extra week and a half of groceries. He would still be making over $1 million a year after taxes, and all his employees get to live just a little bit better.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I'd bet good money that if you raised prices by a few cents per item you could afford it too. Back during the healthcare debate, Papa Johns claimed that it would be prohibitively expensive to provide all of their workers with healthcare. Turns out, you just need to raise prices by something like a dollar per pizza. I'll pay a dollar more for a $25 pizza if it means people get heath coverage. These are not poor, barely-getting-by mom and pop businesses. These are multi-million dollar entities. Most of the "if you raise wages I'll fire people" arguments are complete BS. They just don't want to take the tiniest hit in profits to actually provide for their workers.

Person 1 "Hey did you hear Carl's raised the salary of it's workers"
Person 2 "That's good"
Person 1 "Want to go eat there?"
Person 2 "No way they charge to much this other place is cheaper"

Extra Credits episode on what a 1 cent price increase can do to a multi billion dollar company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxfkWZPAUg4&list=PLB9B0CA00461BB187&index=140

Except you're building a strawman here; and you're being deceptive with your citation.

First the fundamental idea that a lot of people are debating is NOT a company voluntarily putting up wages but the absolutely godawful effect of a terrible minimum wage. If the minimum wage goes up ALL companies are obliged to fulfill it. Which means everyone would have to either take a hit to their profits or put their prices up; not just one company.

Secondly, you entirely missed the point of your own citation. It was nothing to do with the 1 cent price increase and EVERYTHING to do with human perception that ?4.99 is a significantly better deal than ?5.00. Even if its damn near the same. Its about how it "feels" to the customer, not the absolute difference of value. In fact the video points out that exact same issue. A ?60 pair of jeans apparently reduced to ?20 "feels" better than paying ?20 for the exact same pair of jeans without them being marked as on sale.


On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo. Or even accept the collapse of the very underlying concept of international economy of paying someone to work a set amount of hours to do a certain thing. Because inevitably we're going to hit a point where there simply will not be enough jobs of certain types and there'll be more people than there are jobs for them to do.

Ideally it'll turn into a Star Trek like social utopia. More realistically society is probably going to go to hell in a handbasket. Honestly I fundamentally think that capitalism in general has no place in a truly utopian society. Until then, however, we have to live with it.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

 

[Einspanner]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

How is not obvious that the way we look back at people slaving away in the fields day in, day out, making their own thread, making their own wooden pegs... that's how people are going to look at us. "So wait, they had to just work to survive? What if you were a brilliant mathematician, or gifted artist? What if they were stupid or crazy? They didn't work to get luxuries or recognition, or respect, but just to live? Savages."

It's not hard to imagine. You're already going to live through a similar transition when people stop driving their cars. Do you have any idea how many people around the world are injured or killed every year in automobiles? When a generation grows up without that, in the same way some people now grow up with the internet or mobile devices, what do you think they'll make of those of us who drove? We'll be seen as lunatics who took our lives into our own hands. We'll be looked at the way you or I would look at a Russian having a bit of fun making his own bungee from bed sheets.

It's also pretty clear that moralists, and especially religious people are going to lose what minds they have over the concept. Until they lose their jobs, then of course, they'll have their hands out. You'd better just hope that we're post-scarcity by that time, or you can assume that's when humanity fights its last wars.

 

[gonenow3]

This is a good thing I'm not sure what the issue people are having with this. The more jobs that are automated the less we have to work and end up going towards a fully automated society.

A robot will always be superior / cheaper than you. You are not better than a machine and we should accept that and find other pursuits rather than working.

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

The machines? its not that complicated. Farming is already pretty automated.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

The machines? its not that complicated. Farming is already pretty automated.

And when those machines break down or need maintenance, who will repair them? According to the logic I'm questioning, no human being has to work, everyone simply sits around and expects to be taken care of, so what happens when an issue pops up that a machine can't fix?

 

[hentropy]

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

It's a good question, and answering it brings us to what could be uncomfortable conclusion. When there are simply not enough jobs to employ everyone in society, which it seems like where we're going with a service economy and one tending towards automation, the economic system of capitalism as it was devised in the 19th century simply is not going to work. Back then, we needed everyone to work to function and progress as a society. The vast majority of people made something. Now we're the opposite.

The uncomfortable truth is that socialism and forms of communism is the only way out of this. What will bring it on is not some working class revolution, with everyone pissed off at fat cats, it will happen because there is literally no other option.

What it will "look like" will be that some people will have a "base standard of living" and those that contribute, in whatever way that might be, will get a higher standard of living. There is still incentive for those that want to attain more to work and provide value to society, without punishing those that don't want to slave away at two jobs with minimum wage at a job that contributes little to society in order to just eat. The ideas of working to produce income which is then taxed to provide for government services are ideas that will have to be rethought at their most fundamental levels.

And yeah, that scares the shit out of people who have both been told and have told others about the virtues of capitalism and work ethic, as well as more esoteric ideas of individualism and self-sufficiency. I'm not saying this because I'm some radical communist and grinning over the idea of it being inevitable, in fact it will likely be a painful transition that is going to have a lot of drawbacks.

 

[gonenow3]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

The machines? its not that complicated. Farming is already pretty automated.

And when those machines break down or need maintenance, who will repair them? According to the logic I'm questioning, no human being has to work, everyone simply sits around and expects to be taken care of, so what happens when an issue pops up that a machine can't fix?

Machines we already have robots repairing other robots in remote locations as its just the easiest way to go about things. I'm not sure why you'd think we'd need people for something like that.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

The machines? its not that complicated. Farming is already pretty automated.

And when those machines break down or need maintenance, who will repair them? According to the logic I'm questioning, no human being has to work, everyone simply sits around and expects to be taken care of, so what happens when an issue pops up that a machine can't fix?

Machines we already have robots repairing other robots in remote locations as its just the easiest way to go about things. I'm not sure why you'd think we'd need people for something like that.

Isn't this what led to the Morning War in Mass Effect?

 

[FalloutJack]

Robots working at a burger place...

"Welcome to Borg Burger. Our way is the only way. Your way is irrelevent."

 

[Parasondox]

When the machines rise up to rebel against use, then we may realise how stupid we have become.

But hey, I am just insane, right?