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Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

Demand curves have negative slopes.

The esoteric reading of minimum wage is it is a accelerationist policy aimed at subsidizing automation.

The realistic reading is that it mainly just transfers money from profits to wages. Demand for minimum waged labor is very, very inelastic.

Is it? In countries with higher minimum wages, McDonald's uses kiosks for ordering. I'm guessing, but it feels like 1/3 of fast food staff mans the registers.

Do you have a citation for this? Tokyo has a high minimum wage (and low enough unemployment that most employers have to pay more than minimum wage), but I've yet to see an automated kiosk here.

Though in support of your point, when I went to Korea last year there was a large number of automated kiosks, and I know the minimum wage there is fairly high as well. So, Japan's lack of those kiosks may have to do with a preference towards cash/human interaction in the culture.

Isn’t Japan famous for manning a lot of jobs, culturally?

Around here (Central Europe, Austria, Germany, Italy too IIRC) I don’t see non-kiosk McDonalds anymore, as they went through the kiosk upgrade in the past few years. Noticeably fewer employees.

It takes a long time to develop and plan a rollout of those kinds of automated kiosks for large companies. They've clearly been planning such a rollout for many years. The fact it's coincided with a lot of discussion of minimum wage increases is either a complete coincidence or an example of correlation not implying causation -- mass layoffs usually result in discussions about labour laws.

I would argue that the job losses to automation would've happened anyway without any discussion of wage increases -- kiosks are cheaper than even below-living-wage workers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds-sa...

Though I was specifically thinking Sweden.

I haven't been to Japan in many years, but they had plenty of kiosks for ordering food from restaurants. You put in money, hit the button next to the pic of the food you want, it gives you a ticket and you take it to the cook.

Automated kiosks for ordering aren't new - they date back about to the 1890s. They actually went out of fashion in the 1950s-60s when wages grew the fastest and died out entirely in 1991.

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