Secretary-Professor Reich nails it again

Mr. Jack Box, Job Slaughterer

She's already assistant manager

While on a long drive a while back, I stopped in to grab some caffeine at an off-the-interstate Jack in the Box. While I only bought a soda, I noticed something a little disturbing. It was a machine in the lobby that looked like an ATM, but apparently had something to do with placing an order.

I didn’t give it much thought until reading a book about automation. Given my interest in the Jetsons economy, I decided it was important to investigate further.

Apparently, these have been around at some JitB’s for years. Starting in San Diego, they just now seem to be taking off. There is much speculation that the economic downturn has made these kiosks a worthy investment as businesses seek to cut labor costs.

Yelp.com told me that there was one at the store on Maryland Parkway, near UNLV. Unfortunately, their kiosk was broken. Which really sucked because I skipped lunch that day.

Two days later, I was passing by the store at Torrey Pines & Charleston, and saw one of these machines near the counter. I pulled into the parking lot, grabbed my camera, and decided that dinner was going to be a little different tonight.

When a human says this? Creepy.
When a robot says this? Adorable.

The machine was quite inviting. In fact, it went out of its way to remove any doubt.

And so the adventure began. I progressed through a series of screens, with numerous options. Given that I’m a slightly picky eater, I loved that I could easily take things off the pre-set recipe without having to make up an allergy to fend off order-taker judgment.

After cycling through my order, including options for upgrade (i.e. more calories at a discount!), I was ready to pay. Having no “Jack Bucks” I chose to use cash. Soon after my order was placed-I was lucky 909-I played the exciting “waiting game.”

Where's the "hell yeah!" button?

The people in the back did their work, while the guy behind me took to the screen, while the front counter remained unoccupied. Within a few minutes, I was handed my food and I was ready to go.

Before I walked out I chose to inspect the product, something fellow picky eaters will understand must happen before you leave, lest they’ve soiled a good meal with unwanted ingredients. Jack-in-the-Box is notorious for selling the two tacos for 99 cents, yet forgetting to add them to the bag, so it never hurts to check the order anyway.

Despite having pressed “no” to the Add Cheese screen, there was cheese on my sandwich. Not the end of the world, as I was just trying to avoid those calories. So I left and pondered what had just went down.

Some dismiss the impact that ATM’s, automatic check-out stands at the supermarket, and other machines have had on our economy. In many cases, technology has enhanced our ability to do things and increased our quality of life. When President Obama made a remark about ATMs, those forces questioned his judgment. Rather, they used the opportunity to continue their mission to discredit the man.

On a recent Fareed Zakaria special about jobs, a commentator explained the difference:

            When you use technology for innovation, you create jobs…In the last decade, [the

            move to technology] was more “efficiency-driven,” not so much by innovation.

Less order-takers means smaller payroll, less shifts to be covered when someone calls in sick, less time taken to replace employees who leave or are fired, and higher profits. Scaling up the machine technology creates short-term jobs for machine makers-assuming they’re not themselves made by robots-and a handful of maintenance guys to keep them up to date, or repaired when somebody spills their milkshake on it. Can an order app be far away?

Human error=diet plan thwarted!

Overall, I have to believe that the trend towards automation is quickly eliminating low-wage, entry-level and part-time jobs. All those jobs creating and maintaining the Orderbots require higher levels of skill and education. How many Orderbot repairmen would you need, after all, if these things work well, even with all the restaurants in town?

"Job-creator" no longer?

The most frightening part-the one that sent a chill up my spine-was the cheese making it onto my sandwich. That was a HUMAN error.

Which led me to wonder-how long until Mr. Box-who sought the Presidency in 1996-replaces all those food preparers in the back with Burgerbots & Frybots?

The Jetsons Economy

(This was originally written November 9, 2010)
(Cross-posted at NV-CA Politics)

Quick quiz, hotshot: How many hours a week did George Jetson, patriarch of a typical middle-class family in the year 2062, actually work at Spacely Sprockets?

Nine. Just nine hours a week. Yet he had a home, a car, a maid, was raising two kids, and a wife who worked as a homemaker. An old-fashioned one-income family that thrived off of the salary earned through just nine hours of work a week.

Yes, that was a 1960’s-era utopian view of the future. But it raises an important question: As we seek some magic wand to brush over the economy and create jobs, what if there simply aren’t forty hours a week per person to be worked anymore? Is the combination of technology and a rise in worker productivity slowly closing the door on work that can be paid for? If so, how do we change and sustain our quality of life?

Author Jeremy Rifkin wrote about this phenomenon in “The End of Work” back in 1995. Rifkin pointed out that Industrial Revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries reduced the eighty-hour work week to sixty, and sixty down to forty, respectively. Fifteen years after that book was published, we’re in an economy where we’re encouraged to “go online,” get that easy-to-use iPhone app and do things with a few gadgets that used to create lots of work for people to do.

As I sit at McCarran Airport in Vegas writing this, I think back to a conversation I had over lunch with a Monte Carlo bartender. He noted that the moment the big casinos moved from the traditional clang-clang-clang slot machines to ones that printed receipts for your winnings (a trend that is prevalent in Nevada casinos now), hundreds of cashiers and change-makers lost their jobs as the receipts made their jobs irrelevant. Perhaps it was a long time coming, but the industry cut down on costs and raised profit margins by automating this work to machines.

Not only is this trend slowly working its way in-it’s actively being encouraged. Recently, I called Comcast to get my bill adjusted. I was encouraged to pay online or over the phone. But if I wanted to do the latter, I was subject to a $5.99 fee for the privilege of a live person. Customers are being handed an incentive to send those jobs out the door! Live employees still blessed with those jobs are often now filling time in-between those calls taking calls for other companies who did the same thing. Or are only working part-time to begin with.

Michael Bernick, a former California Employment Development Department Director, took to the Fox & Hounds blog a few weeks ago to assure everyone that such hysteria accompanied previous economic downturns, yet we always bounced back.

Can we afford to be so sure? Certainly, the current downturn is unlike any other we’ve experienced. Neither period Bernick mentions had game-changers like the internet revolutionizing the nature of business. Plenty of workers in the private and public sectors are experiencing furloughs right now and taking pay cuts. For those employees, if the companies prove they can get by without the extra work, the 32-hour work week (with diminished pay) might be permanent.

Assuming this is another Industrial Revolution, finding a new model for assuring a suitable quality of life-including a decent paycheck, a right to health care, and a retirement-with a shorter work week must be developed.

While Americans are loath to adopt the structure of other places, many already operate under such conditions. We’re told some employers aren’t hiring, they say, because of the marginal cost of bringing on more employees. If we’re going to need them to spread out their available hours among more workers to lower unemployment and dependence on government assistance, do we finally have a civil discussion of the government taking on the costs of health care and retirement (by expanding Medicare to all and making Social Security the de-facto retirement plan), as competing nations have done? Or will business reflexively reject attempts to relieve them of those responsibilities like they have for decades?

This month, the Democratic Party lost control of the House of Representatives because the economy isn’t working the same anymore. Perhaps if they had stepped back, stopped fear-mongering against Republicans, and came out with a plan to re-organize society around keeping George and Jane employed while helping Mr. Spacely and Mr. Cogswell spread out the work amidst a reasonable safety net, voters might have reconsidered voting to take them out of office and projecting a vision for the Jetsons Economy.