Shake Shack Launches Order Kiosks To Eliminate Minimum Wage Workers

Fast food workers who enthusiastically joined the “fight for $15” are about to get the latest lesson in life’s numerous ironies: Shake Shack has become the latest fast food purveyor to launch with order kiosks, which the company said will help it minimize its “largest P&L headwind”: People. In an investor presentation released Wednesday, Shake Shack touted its first “cashless shack” – located at the company’s Astor Place location – which opened in New York back in October. As we pointed out last year, self-order kiosks have already become a staple at thousands of McDonald’s restaurants, and Shake Shack is rapidly catching up. As a result, the company says it has been testing the sleek-looking kiosks at six restaurants. And here things got confusing: people are Shake Shack’s “most valuable asset” – the crucial component to the company’s theory of “enlightened hospitality,” it said in its presentation. And yet, by “valuable” it turns out the company actually meant “expensive” thanks to to rising rising cost of unskilled labor – thanks to movements like the fight for $15, which has pushed several large US cities to raise the municipal minimum wage, in some cases all the way to $15.

“People are our most valuable asset…and our largest P&L headwind for the foreseeable future.”

What’s worse for workers, the kiosks aren’t the company’s only experiment with integrating more high-tech solutions to make minimum wage employees redundant: Shake Shack launched an iOS mobile app last year, which has been incredibly successful, according to the company. Orders placed on the app typically generate 15% more revenue. Because of this, the company is planning to expand its ability to “connect directly with guests” by adopting more desktop and mobile-based ordering options. Translation: making human workers even more obsolete. (Read more)

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