On April 1, more than half a million fast-food workers in California got a raise, with minimum wage across the sector bumped up to $20 per hour. That same week, the self-proclaimed “world's first fully autonomous restaurant” opened its doors for business in Pasadena.
Integrating automation in the service sector often results in fewer workers doing more work, as I observed at CaliExpress. Economists have clocked this phenomenon as well, documenting enormous growth in revenue-per-employee in fast food over the last five years. This indicates that productivity and wealth concentration are already growing hand-in-hand, even before any automation — a sobering finding that chafes with the narrative that unsustainable labor costs are automation’s main driver.