$15 min wage for burger flippers will automate the industry

I like fast food.  I rarely eat it.  I stop mostly when on a road trip.  I stop because it’s fast, consistent and cheap.  To my horror, fast food workers went on strike yesterday.  The 16 year old high schooler or 40 year old high school drop out apparently thinks a gig a McDonald’s is worth $15 an hour.  Unless you’re the owner of the establishment, it isn’t.

Simple question, if a burger flipper is worth $15 an hour, what’s certified plumber or electrician worth?  It’s gotta be in the hundreds of dollars an hour.  Of course paying $15 an hour to burger flippers would mean an end to the burger house itself.  Who’s going to pay what it would cost for the McDonald’s kid to make $15 an hour to get your order wrong?

These economic realities rarely have an affect on the mind of a Lefty Lib who hears, “raise the minimum wage” and reflexively responds with a “Hell yeah!”   I’ve offered Lex jr. and a neighbor kid $2 an hour to sweep and pick up sticks around the compound.  That is all those two particular tasks are worth to me.  No one has taken me up on it.  One kid said he’d do it for $3.  I suspect he wouldn’t, but I didn’t take the bait.  It’s mindless work worth 2 bucks an hour.  Because it’s mindless, sometimes I enjoy doing it myself.

So with the threat of a $15 an hour min wage for burger flippers - which is only about a step and half up the ladder of success from picking up sticks and sweeping at the compound – the death of fast food loomed in my mind.

Then halleluiah, I read this.  Someone finally put their engineering degree to a good decent use.  I see a Nobel prize in the offing for this humanitarian effort that will save the fast food industry.  They have a robot that can flip 360 perfect burgers per hour.  And – the owner doesn’t have worry about some disgruntled teenager showing up on YouTube spitting on the grill.  If they have a burger flipping machine, you already pour your own drink at most these places, can deep frying machine and smoothy machines be far off?  I see the day where you plug your order into a electronic box and your CORRECT order comes off a conveyor to your place in line within a minute. 

The people going on strike for a $15 an hour min wage to flip burgers cannot be the smartest bunch on the block.  They wouldn’t be 40 years old flipping burgers if they were.  Then they wouldn’t be stupid enough to give the owner good reason to fire their worthless azzes if they had an ounce of common sense.  Besides isn’t the unemployment rate still well above 6%?  Aren’t illegal kids flooding the border?  Do these dumbazzes seriously suppose that if they walked off the job permanently tomorrow it take more than a few minutes to replace them?

I actually heard one idiot woman from NY complaining that she had 5 kids and couldn’t make ends meet on the $8 an hour McD’s is paying her.  Three questions came immediately to mind, where’s dad(s)?  Why did you have 5 kids?  Why can’t you get a better job?  The fact that she’s striking a fast food establishment generous enough to hire her gives some insight to why this woman will always be dependant on government or someone willing to give her something for nothing.