My fellow Americans, where are you?
That question ran through my mind as I sat in a mostly empty McDonald’s in frenetically growing Dripping Springs.
To be sure, it was a lull period – after the Suburban Mommy school rush and well after the construction workers’ breakfast rush.
But still. An empty McDonald’s in one of the fastest growing counties in Texas, the fastest growing large state? Really?
So, in case you hadn’t noticed, the removal of humans continues. The best way to do business efficiently is to have as few of those pesky creatures involved as possible.
Here’s what I observed in the time it took me to do the following:
— order at one of the kiosks.
— choose one of the many empty tables and sit at it. (For the record, I chose a two-top.)
— have the manager (yes, the manager!) deliver my Egg McMuffin with sausage and a small orange juice to my table.
— have a few deep thoughts while wolfing down my late breakfast.
Three people entered while I was there. Two for order pickups. One person sat down. She waited at a table while her order was readied and left well before I did.
No one sat at a table to eat, except me.
That’s the new model for fast food: Remote. You order from an app, you pick up your food at a window from a structure that is not equipped for seated customers, and you (most likely) eat in your car or somewhere else. Skeptics should visit a Chick-fil-A, P. Terry’s or an In-N-Out Burger.
But there is a deeper question here. How many hours must a fast-food worker put in to provide someone on Social Security with the cash to buy, say, a Big Mac meal?
Here’s the math. According to McDonald’s, which is pushing back against complaints that its prices have risen wildly, the average price of a Big Mac Meal is now $9.29, up from $7.29 in 2019. With the Social Security part of the employment tax at a total of 12.4 percent of wages, a worker needs to earn about $75 before Social Security collects enough cash to buy one Big Mac meal, excluding sales tax.
According to ZipRecruiter.com, the average wage of a McDonald’s crew member in October was $12 –$11.93 if you want to be picky. That means each crew member needs to work about six and a half hours to put enough cash into Social Security for a retiree to buy a Big Mac Meal.
Since most crew members are part-timers and are unlikely to work a full eight-hour shift. That probably means a crew member puts in a shift to provide the cash to Social Security that allows a retiree to buy one Big Mac meal.
That’s scary if you happen to be retired and counting on Social Security.
It’s more scary if we scale up. According to the Social Security Administration, the average monthly benefit in August was $1,783.55. So, Texas McDonald’s crew members need to earn $14,383.47 to provide Social Security with the cash to pay the average monthly benefit. That translates into about 1,200 hours of work.
A lot of hours.
About 30 weeks of full eight-hour shifts, in fact. Or about seven full-time equivalent workers, figuring 4.3 weeks in a typical month.
So it takes a whole lot of workers, mostly young, to feed the old. Yet workers are scarce to invisible. But kiosks and robots are abundant.
To be sure, there are millions of workers earning far more than McDonald’s crew members and they contribute handsomely to Social Security, at least for now. But while we aspire to “reshoring” manufacturing jobs with good pay, you can be sure that someone is figuring out how to automate/robotize the substantially greater proportion of jobs that could never have been offshored.
Hard to say “Bon Appetit” when you think about that.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “Meditation on McDonald’s,” 2/22/2009: https://scottburns.com/a-meditation-on-mcdonalds/
Scott Burns, “Meditation on McDonald’s, Part 2,” 4/17/2011: https://scottburns.com/meditation-on-mcdonalds-part-2/
Scott Burns, “Meditation on McDonald’s, Once More,” 11/1/2013: https://scottburns.com/meditation-on-mcdonalds-once-more/
Scott Burns, “Meditation at McDonald’s, 4” 8/26/2018: https://scottburns.com/meditation-at-mcdonalds-4/
Scott Burns, “Meditation at Chic-fil-A,” 3/26/2023: https://scottburns.com/meditation-at-chick-fil-a/
Sources and References:
U.S. Pricing Myths vs. Facts, on the McDonald’s corporate website: https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/corp/nfl/pdf/McDUS%20Pricing%20Myths%20vs%20Facts%20052924.pdf
Zip Recruiter website: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Crew-Member-Mcdonalds-Salary–in-Texas#:~:text=As%20of%20Sep%2028%2C%202024,Texas%20is%20%2411.93%20an%20hour.
Social Security website: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo by Brett Jordan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sky-during-daylight-823661/
(c) Scott Burns, 2024