Fast food Jihad: How Raising the Minimum Wage Destroys Jobs

Equal pay for everybody!

- McDonald's announced this month that it will deploy computer kiosks at 7,000 restaurants in Europe, allowing customers to place their own orders and pay by swiping their own credit card. Another restaurant chain, Panera, is deploying the computer kiosks for customers in the U.S., a development that Bloomberg News reported under the headline, "More Kiosks, Fewer Cashiers Coming Soon To Panera."

The fast-food trade publication QSR reports that a McDonald's in Laguna Niguel, California, is experimenting with iPads that let customers customize their hamburgers. A White Castle in Columbus, Ohio, has deployed computer kiosks that let customers place their own orders, unassisted by a paid human being. "Both Chili's and Applebee's recently announced that they are adding tablets throughout their restaurants, allowing customers to order and pay at their tables," the QSR story says.

Nextep Systems, a Troy, Michigan-based firm that specializes in touch-screen self-order systems, says its sales for 2013 were up 50 percent from the prior year. At some point, you won't even need the kiosk—you'll be able to order from an app on your smartphone, maybe even before you arrive at the restaurant.

And it's not only restaurants. Even Costco, a firm that President Obama has praised for its labor practices, features self-checkout lanes where customers scan the bar codes on their own purchases, then pay by swiping a credit card and signing on a computer scanner. No cash-register employee needed, whether at minimum wage or "living wage."

For the restaurants and customers, the technology has potential benefits besides savings on labor costs. Accuracy is supposedly improved, and the restaurants seem to hope they can sell more food to customers who don't have to worry about being embarrassed when they ask out loud for that supersize fries.