MCDONALD’S CEO CHRIS KEMPCZINSKI: TECHNOLOGY IS NO ‘SILVER BULLET’ FOR LABOR The burger chain’s executive once again dismissed the prospect of robots and other automation for solving the industry’s labor woes, saying the economics “don’t pencil out.” By Jonathan Maze on Jul. 26, 2022
JUST what we need, our CEO takes away the threat of automation, the only thing that could possibly deter union organizing efforts. Proof positive that he is pro-union! Chris, who's side are you on???????????????????????????????????
A leftist will always have a soft spot for organized labor. In high school they volunteer for union picket lines and protests. Socialist college professors lock in that loyalty. As an adult they earn their points by raising money for union-supported political candidates. Where does a leftist go to learn the truth about unions? .
“The economics don’t pencil out” because they aren’t allowed to pencil out.
I’ve heard rumors that the automated DT Siri or whatever in the heck they’re calling it cost, “roughly the equivalent” to an hourly employee.
Somehow I don’t believe that the price of the “monthly service model” that just happened to become the pricing model used “just happens” to “pencil out” at “just about” the cost of a human doing the job. There is NO WAY that this should cost this much.
Imagine 10,000 restaurants are signed up and replacing ONE crew job for 20hrs/day. That works out to $3m/day or $1b/year in ANNUAL REVENUE.
Let’s see…
“ The US government is announcing $1 billion in new funding for multidisciplinary AI and quantum computing research hubs today.”
“The Army plans to invest almost $1 billion in cloud, data and artificial intelligence over the next five years”
That’s just a couple of recent headlines to put this into perspective.
And we are a McFamily.
Ok, a family does the opposite of squeezing everyone within for every dollar they can, a family doesn’t position and encourage vendors to use predatory pricing models. A REAL McFamily would do like Wal Mart does with it’s vendors, and that doesn’t include turning them loose to scrape every dollar that they can from every store in the system. Seems like an upfront cost and a reasonable monthly maintenance cost is reasonable and one would think that the company would have vetted the numbers to our benefit. I guess that this stopped when they quit running restaurants and benefitting from avoiding cost pressures.
I saw this coming years ago. Yes, it would work but it would NEVER offset costs and McD’s corporation would somehow get a sizable piece of it on one end or the other.
What a terribly dysfunctional and disgusting relationship- franchisees have absolutely zero trust and with good reason. The SLT are untrustworthy, the values they blabber about are not applicable to them and this is NOT a mutually beneficial relationship, far from it.
This is a group of people who take advantage of anyone and anything that circles their orbit (especially us…they loathe us) and will squeeze anyone dry that they think that they can, especially franchisees.
A one to one cost relationship between "IBM's Watson" taking orders vs an employee taking orders is ridiculous. Oh, and the current "test" results are returning order accuracy reports of +/- 80%. Go online and google it. Customers aren't loving it.
If my drive through was inaccurate 20% of the time.....my customers would stop coming. This is the third recent iteration of remote drive thru order taking testing. 2015 & forward. The first one tested in Chicago had 100% drive thru accuracy and was projected to be a 2 for 1 labor change out. Oh, and it grew average drive thru check by over 5%.
But it was not brought forth by the corporation, it was started by owner operators. It was eventually turned aside in favor of Apprente's technology, which McDonald's acquired for Millions and subsequently sold to IBM in the deal that established IBM as the technology leader for automated drive thru order taking.
FYI; Watson failed in it's medical diagnostic application. "One of Watson Health's biggest setbacks was the revelation that its cancer diagnostics tool was not trained with real patient data, but instead with hypothetical cases provided by a small group of doctors in a single hospital."
No question at all that this is about developing technology that drives revenue versus bringing forward technology that relieves pressure from the owner/operators.
4 comments:
MCDONALD’S CEO CHRIS KEMPCZINSKI: TECHNOLOGY IS NO ‘SILVER BULLET’ FOR LABOR
The burger chain’s executive once again dismissed the prospect of robots and other automation for solving the industry’s labor woes, saying the economics “don’t pencil out.”
By Jonathan Maze on Jul. 26, 2022
JUST what we need, our CEO takes away the threat of automation, the only thing that could possibly deter union organizing efforts. Proof positive that he is pro-union! Chris, who's side are you on???????????????????????????????????
A leftist will always have a soft spot for organized labor. In high school they volunteer for union picket lines and protests. Socialist college professors lock in that loyalty. As an adult they earn their points by raising money for union-supported political candidates. Where does a leftist go to learn the truth about unions?
.
“The economics don’t pencil out” because they aren’t allowed to pencil out.
I’ve heard rumors that the automated DT Siri or whatever in the heck they’re calling it cost, “roughly the equivalent” to an hourly employee.
Somehow I don’t believe that the price of the “monthly service model” that just happened to become the pricing model used “just happens” to “pencil out” at “just about” the cost of a human doing the job. There is NO WAY that this should cost this much.
Imagine 10,000 restaurants are signed up and replacing ONE crew job for 20hrs/day. That works out to $3m/day or $1b/year in ANNUAL REVENUE.
Let’s see…
“ The US government is announcing $1 billion in new funding for multidisciplinary AI and quantum computing research hubs today.”
“The Army plans to invest almost $1 billion in cloud, data and artificial intelligence over the next five years”
That’s just a couple of recent headlines to put this into perspective.
And we are a McFamily.
Ok, a family does the opposite of squeezing everyone within for every dollar they can, a family doesn’t position and encourage vendors to use predatory pricing models. A REAL McFamily would do like Wal Mart does with it’s vendors, and that doesn’t include turning them loose to scrape every dollar that they can from every store in the system. Seems like an upfront cost and a reasonable monthly maintenance cost is reasonable and one would think that the company would have vetted the numbers to our benefit. I guess that this stopped when they quit running restaurants and benefitting from avoiding cost pressures.
I saw this coming years ago. Yes, it would work but it would NEVER offset costs and McD’s corporation would somehow get a sizable piece of it on one end or the other.
What a terribly dysfunctional and disgusting relationship- franchisees have absolutely zero trust and with good reason. The SLT are untrustworthy, the values they blabber about are not applicable to them and this is NOT a mutually beneficial relationship, far from it.
This is a group of people who take advantage of anyone and anything that circles their orbit (especially us…they loathe us) and will squeeze anyone dry that they think that they can, especially franchisees.
A one to one cost relationship between "IBM's Watson" taking orders vs an employee taking orders is ridiculous. Oh, and the current "test" results are returning order accuracy reports of +/- 80%. Go online and google it. Customers aren't loving it.
If my drive through was inaccurate 20% of the time.....my customers would stop coming. This is the third recent iteration of remote drive thru order taking testing. 2015 & forward. The first one tested in Chicago had 100% drive thru accuracy and was projected to be a 2 for 1 labor change out. Oh, and it grew average drive thru check by over 5%.
But it was not brought forth by the corporation, it was started by owner operators. It was eventually turned aside in favor of Apprente's technology, which McDonald's acquired for Millions and subsequently sold to IBM in the deal that established IBM as the technology leader for automated drive thru order taking.
FYI; Watson failed in it's medical diagnostic application. "One of Watson Health's biggest setbacks was the revelation that its cancer diagnostics tool was not trained with real patient data, but instead with hypothetical cases provided by a small group of doctors in a single hospital."
No question at all that this is about developing technology that drives revenue versus bringing forward technology that relieves pressure from the owner/operators.
Frustrating.
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