A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier • Hacker News Board

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#521

Post by larnmar » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:27 AM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #258

larnmar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think the solution is emigration. There are places in the world where you can make a living without any particular skill set, but I don’t think the US, or any other first-world country, should really be among them. The US needs immigration reform to bring more high-skilled people into the country, but it also needs emigration reform to find new homes for people who can’t necessarily make a reasonable livin…

Why would an unskilled poor person do better in an environment with worse resources to help them? In a poorer country they would have a decreased cost of living but a decreased earnings and fewer family and friends. I cannot comprehend the thought process that leads you to come to this conclusion. Example my wife is disabled we live on my very modest income due to costs of life and medical care we have zero wealth of…

To be fair I never said it would be to the advantage of the people we relocate, but it would be to the advantage of the rest of us. Imagine a society with no poverty, no homelessness, next to no crime, etc.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#522

Post by JordanFarmer » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:29 AM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #136

duxup wrote: post #112

I worked a pizza (among others) job through high school and college. I've been overworked at many professional technical jobs in different roles before. I'm paid a great deal more now, and yet I was never more tired or worn out or found it hard to study than when I worked the ovens at the pizza place. I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their tim…

There is no bigger lie than hard work = prosperity. It is literally the exact opposite. Think of the hardest shittiest jobs and they are almost always the least paying. The richer you get the less hard work is, until you're able to reach the pinnacle of doing absolutely nothing but managing your money and taking advantage of discounted cap gains taxes. I grew up rich with every opportunity and never had one of these…

hard work = prosperity, I don't think I have ever seen or heard that without further advice or instruction. Hard work is only one component toward advancement. You have to have a plan to advance and make good choices as well.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#523

Post by wolco » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:38 AM UTC

eyepea2007 wrote: post #271

jackhack wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll un…

...and imagine if the moonlighting software devs were only getting paid what the warehouse workers were receiving, instead of their normal developer pay.. the work becomes a lot "harder" / more thankless when your pay is 1/3 or 1/4 as much.

Guess you never tried upwork. Lucky to get warehouse worker salary.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#524

Post by astronautjones » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:40 AM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #508

I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 14 years—about half my life Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? For starters, I've always heard that commute time is inversely proportional to career mobility. I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I…

> My mother has worked at the same minimum-wage food joint for almost eight years. She tells me it's because she's "comfortable" and friends with everyone there. Personally, I think it affords her the time and lack of responsibility needed in order to engage in non-moderated drug use. This was certainly the reason she was usually unemployed and unable to provide the most basic resources for me as a child. If I bring up this or her other time-sucking addictions such as mobile gaming / simulated gambling, she becomes very defensi

a lot of society's problems come from people in power and/or wealth projecting their anecdotal, perhaps personally bitter experiences (like yours with your mother) onto everyone that isn't making a healthy wage. It's over 40 million people, we are not all like your mother.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#525

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:48 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #467

Consultant32452 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What standard of living do you consider "livable" and what percentage of the 7.7 Billion people on the planet actually live at that standard? The "living wage" thing is a marketing weasel phrase. It's intentionally non-specific and encourages the listener to fill in their own idea of what kind of lifestyle a "living wage" entails. I would encourage everyone to ignore "living wage" marketing weasel-speak and only list…

Try at the very minimum matching to inflation, and adjusting the current wage to what it would be if it were. Then all you have to decide is whether the minimum wage should’ve been a thing in the first place.

[deleted]

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#526

Post by sgallant » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:51 AM UTC

jackhack wrote: post #207

derg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue. Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll un…

I love this. The best software is created by people who intimately understand and live the problem it’s trying to solve. A+

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#527

Post by Consultant32452 » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 5:55 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #467

Consultant32452 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What standard of living do you consider "livable" and what percentage of the 7.7 Billion people on the planet actually live at that standard? The "living wage" thing is a marketing weasel phrase. It's intentionally non-specific and encourages the listener to fill in their own idea of what kind of lifestyle a "living wage" entails. I would encourage everyone to ignore "living wage" marketing weasel-speak and only list…

Try at the very minimum matching to inflation, and adjusting the current wage to what it would be if it were. Then all you have to decide is whether the minimum wage should’ve been a thing in the first place.

I feel like there's a lot of assumptions in that suggestion that I don't necessarily accept. The biggest is the assumption that the minimum wage sets the market rather than the market setting the minimum wage. I believe the market conditions during a period of time have heavy influence on the legislated minimum wage.

Imagine if 50 years ago you could easily import millions of impoverished people willing to work for a lower wage and could also force your local worker to compete against a $0.15/day ($1 in 2019 adjusted for inflation back to 1970) foreign worker. Do you think that would have impacted 1970s minimum wage regulations? I do.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#528

Post by zhoujianfu » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 6:03 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #500

excalibur wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You suggested that this existing tax credit that we've all been accustomed to since the '70s was a suitable replacement for a decent wage. Completely aside from the SUBSTANTIAL increase in cost it would take to make the numbers fit, what leads you to believe that an annual tax refund is an appropriate substitute for a regular paycheck? Do you expect them all to save it all in a bank account and only spend a set weekl…

It doesn't have to take the form of an annual tax refund. It could take the form of lower, or negative, paycheck withholdings. The hard part is making sure that people don't end up owing a bunch of money at tax time, of course, because they're not going to have it lying around.

Looks like we’re all talking about essentially UBI (Universal Basic Income) here... which I at least think is the solution to a lot of this!

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#529

Post by sosodev » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

kevinqiu1 wrote: post #230

Even though it seems like she lives in an urban area (or urban enough to be squeezed by rising home prices), the public transit is so poor that she spends 3-5x more time getting to work without a car than with one. Sometimes she can't even get home. That's crazy, the car dependence of America means that you need to pay for insurance + a car to even function in society. That is the opposite of freedom

It’s pretty awful. I ride light rail to university because the parking costs are insane. Choosing to ride the train doubles my commute time and often leaves me in a terrible mood because of the trains awful service. It’s even worse because they recently increased the cost significantly with no improvement in quality.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#530

Post by zhoujianfu » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 6:13 AM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #223

Slartie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like they can replace human personnel that easy. Ordering kiosks are the low-hanging fruit, and then comes a long, long stretch of nothing, because it turns out that developing McDonalds-compatible robots capable of preparing burgers and packing up meals is about as easy as developing actually-working autonomous vehicles. And about as expensive. It's probably easier to automate the managers away. Meaning the…

I would argue it's substantially easier to produce a fully-automatic McDonalds than it is to produce an autonomous car that can actually deal with any reasonable situation in the real world. With a McDonalds restaurant, you can control your environment almost perfectly. If you throw away the kitchen that was designed to be used by humans, and then develop a kitchen never intended to be used by humans, you can drop a…

100% agreed. A friend of mine is doing a food automation startup and in 6 months they’ve basically got it working. They’re planning on six more months of nailing it all down and launching. Based on what they’ve done I think they could do a fully automated McDonald’s in about two years. I would imagine it would then take another 5 years for such a system to spread to nearly all fast food restaurants... which implies to me within 10 years it’s pretty likely we won’t see humans in the kitchen at quick service restaurants..

And I think it’s more than that before we have no humans behind the wheel of cars!