It is pretty well understood that 25-30% percent of costs of operating a restaurant was the labor. Dont forget that things like payroll tax, health insurance, overtime, etc.. goes into that.
Food is 25-40% and the rest is rent/profit.
Food is 25-40% and the rest is rent/profit.
1. Up front payments: Parents and schools subsidized the manufacturing cost of human workers. With machine labor that cost is passed on to the buyer.
2. Energy: Employees feed themselves via their salary, or is often the case with subsidized food stamps. With machine labor the cost of energy falls entirely with the owner.
3. Replacement: If employees die or are otherwise unable to work do to catastrophic events, they can be replaced immediately with little on-boarding cost. If machines fail catastrophically the investment is lost(or needs to be backed up with insurance). Also, on-boarding the new machine requires specialized higher wage human labor.
4. Repair and modernization: As machines age they incure greater upkeep costs. They also become obsolete by newer machines. As employees age and become less capable of performing their duties, they can be let go, free of charge, for poor performance and replaced with a younger worker.
Much like was discovered with slavery and indentured servitude, ownership of labor and free labor can be fairly close in cost if you know how to really exploit workers effectively. Harvesting in agriculture is an interesting place to look at how competitive exploited human labor can be compared to machine automation.
Any business were machines having taking over, yet, is an example of that.
There is much more incentive to turn an $80K a year programming position into a $30K a year lower skilled position using point and click tools to achieve the same task as the margin differences are much much higher.
EDIT: You must remember that machine automation is not infinitely and immediately scalable the way software automation is. With agriculture, automation providers can only manufacture enough to meet current demand and cannot simply lower prices increase volume and market share because they have real raw material floors to their costs.