Automation Replacing Jobs at Panera?

tags: restaurants

There is significant conservative spin on this article, clearly, but it summarizes what apparently happening on an earnings call for Panera Bread.

[…] the CEO of one large restaurant chain warns that customers are now comfortable enough with automated systems to allow another huge round of job cuts in the near future, To put it simply, the government is pricing labor out of the market, and machines are standing ready to fill the gap.

And, the conservative summary on the end:

This is a paradigm shift, and it will never be reversed – once the huge capital outlays for automation have been made, and customers have grown comfortable with it, those jobs will be gone for good, Contrary to left-wing rhetoric about “burger-flipper” jobs, young people in many demographic groups will miss these low-skill on-ramps to employment, And, unlike the banking industry and the automated teller machines President Obama once ignorantly blamed for the high unemployment rates of his presidency, these service industries won’t find new uses for the labor displaced by automation, They’re explicitly seeking ways to make do with fewer hours of high-cost, heavily burdened human labor… and, as the digital generation comes of age, such methods will be found.

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