6 years ago
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Subway Refreshing Store Designs With Self-Order Kiosks That Support Apple Pay
Subway today unveiled an all-new "fresh forward" redesign coming to 12 pilot locations at its restaurants throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which includes self-order kiosks in select locations that support checking out via Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. Subway has long supported Apple Pay as a payments option during the traditional check-out process in its restaurants.
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I feel like just talking about wanting a $15 minimum wage and "living wages" has made this practice increase so much faster than it was before. This is the future of fast food, all those people working in these jobs that need these jobs are in trouble more than ever thanks to this.
On the other hand, thank the lord, I think I'm going to love these kiosks... until my order is still always wrong.
Then there is the business aspect, this means that a machine and the customer are going to be doing the work that they used to have to pay a worker to do, they've gotta be laughing to the bank on this because the price won't go down because they don't have to pay wages any more.
I fundamentally disagree with you about a minimum wage. Subway will adopt automation as soon as they think it'll make them one thin dime more. This repackaged Subway press release can be seen as more of a threat to automate than news that automation's arrived. This is a threat meant to keep wages suppressed.
There isn't one state in this country where having one full-time minimum wage job means you can rent an apartment with a bedroom. To me, that's a sign wages are too low. How many jobs should Americans have?
Yes, they were always going to eventually adopt automation, I believe that it's happened faster than it would have because of the push for higher wages. Within a year of the push for 15, several restaurants have pushed announcements of this type of technology, even sit down places are in on it, Darden I think it is, is putting tablets at the table to order with.
I'm not saying wages aren't horribly bad, I never said that; I believe we need annual COLA on wages to bring them in line with actual living, I'm just pointing out that a business isn't going to like this at all and thus introduce or threaten to introduce technology to not pay people any more.
Fair enough. Still, we've seen ordering kiosks being threatened decade after decade after decade after decade, and I see zero in the wild. My guess is that ordering may be where automation can take over, but it's not where the costs are. I wouldn't've minded ordering kiosks at fast food places back in the Eighties when bank ATMs took off, but at some point I stopped expecting them any day now. I'll grant you that I'm maybe a bit jaded in my old age, but to me the giveaway that this tarted-up press release was advertorial was when they wet their pants over Apple Pay. Not even Apple gives a shit about Apple Pay. It's just their brand of NFC.