Fast food Casual dining is a place where you see one of the biggest variations in employee quality on any given day.
My cousin was just telling me about a friend of his who started at McDonald's in high school and took every
Hamburger University class he could. Now, his entire post-high-school business education having been at Hamburger U, he is a wealthy guy who owns four restaurants. More generally, I am often really impressed with the quality of employee at the local Taco Bell. Excellent customer service skills and they seem diligent and smart.
Then there's the night we stopped at a highway Wendy's and the manager and one employee seemed to be having a a bad night and the person ahead of us very politely said his coffee was cold. The employee didn't even look at the customer and yelled, "Manager!!" The manager showed up, the employee said, "He says his coffee is cold," and without a word to the customer, the manager snatched the coffee from his hand, dumped it down the drain, went to the register, rang up his refund and handed him the cash. No eye contact was made and no words spoken to the customer. That's the worst, but I've seen roughly similar scenes roll out and I am a very rare fast food customer.
Anyway, the point being that some percentage of employees at McDonald's and Wendy's are way, way better than can be achieved by current robot tech and some are way way worse. For the time being, the ones who are good will still have jobs and, we can hope, will get $20/hour or $25/hour as they are the ones with the skills to step in and defuse the situation when the robot screws up a customer order.
The US has tended to focus on job quantity not quality and tried to create more jobs without worrying about wage suppression, but
after 40 years of wage suppression, more and more Americans see the lottery as the best path for social mobility (Did you know that Texas has or is proposing a $100 scratch ticket?)
