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Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich supports raising the minimum wage — and he has every reason to.

Panera’s 1,800 nationwide locations are at the forefront of modernizing the way customers experience fast food restaurants. As soon as 2016, the bread and pasta joint will have replaced all of their cashiers with kiosks.

Shaich, who donated $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund, told USA Today that the move is part of an effort to “never have a customer wait,” but there is growing evidence that as pressure to raise wages builds, employers will turn to wage-free robots to avoid dramatic payroll hikes.

Fast food establishments in European countries with high minimum wages have already begun to replace some of their workforce with automated employers.

All of McDonald’s locations in France, for example, have installed kiosks to substitute and supplement human employees. The kiosks have allowed McDonald’s to avoid some of the high payroll costs of dealing with France’s minimum wage, which currently sits at $12.22 an hour in U.S. dollars. The European country is also suffering from an unemployment rate of over 10 percent.

Although the technology has not been widely adopted, equipment exists to replace almost all of the fast food workforce.

Momentum Machine’s meat-flipping robot, which can turn out 360 juicy burgers in an hour, could “allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients,” based on the labor costs, the company estimates.

Some companies abroad have already fully replaced human workers with robotic substitutes.

A well-recognized sushi-chain in Japan currently has robots making food while customers order on a touch screen. In lieu of human servers, a conveyer belt delivers their food and a computer tracks customer purchases and automates their bill payment at the end.

Despite the threat of the growing number of cheap and efficient technological opportunities available to restaurant chains, fast food workers, labor unions, and members of the political left have ramped up efforts to pressure lawmakers to raise the minimum wage in recently.

Over the past year, hundreds of protests to hike wages have been staged outside of fast food restaurants across the country, organized by the labor-back groups Fightfor15 and Fast Food Forward, among others.

On Thursday, labor groups plan to expand their campaign to raise the minimum wage to an international level, with protests demanding a $15 hourly wage scheduled to take place on six continents.

Although multiple states and local governments have passed wage hikes since the start of 2014, any initiatives to raise the federal minimum wage are not likely to make it passed Congress.

Currently, there is a Democratic-sponsored bill to push the national minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour, but the legislation has already failed to make it through the Senate and stands little chance of getting approved in the Republican-controlled House.

people are still resistant to automated services though. retailers have tried this for some time and it's not exactly perfect.

The robots capability is increasing by day. I wonder what would my sons do in the future if most jobs is filled with robots.

Homeless.

But who will buy their products if most people don't have money?

But who will buy their products if most people don't have money?

There is certain scale that is still workable. It's way too complicated situation in general...

It's not all bad, automation increases efficiency and thus purchasing power.

On other hand, there needs to be solution for people who can't find work any more.

Then as the time passby all jobs will be taken by the bots, the peoples money has been all spent. Next is chaos?

The governments will provide the needs of the people but the people will be dependent on the government the rest of their life. And the government has 100 percent control of the people.

okay, so if you're against welfare (which i understand), and you're also against a minimum wage.. how do you expect poor people to survive? and how do you expect the economy to continue rolling if the the middle class is hamstrung?

The robots capability is increasing by day. I wonder what would my sons do in the future if most jobs is filled with robots.

"There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers," Obama said. "You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don't go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate."

It's not all bad, automation increases efficiency and thus purchasing power.

On other hand, there needs to be solution for people who can't find work any more.

With respect to the fast food jobs that are being lost, this is 100% caused by being priced out by government intervention in payroll related costs. It's ridiculous to force employers to pay above market wages for jobs like this and expect to not have consequences with respect to job loss.

Automation isn't inherently a bad thing. It creates a lot of abundance and value for people. The problem is that our current system is wholly unprepared for this. Free market will adopt automation as fast as it can because it's so profitable. But those profits aren't going to be routed back to the society in which they're integrated.

This means that as we stand now, our economy has not a single clue about what to do with 80% of humanity being out of a job within a decade or two. Our response is going to be much slower than the automation trend so we'll end up lagging way behind in adapting to this game changer.

With respect to the fast food jobs that are being lost, this is 100% caused by being priced out by government intervention in payroll related costs. It's ridiculous to force employers to pay above market wages for jobs like this and expect to not have consequences with respect to job loss.

Your sons should learn robotics, so they can repair the machines vandalized by the unemployed neo-luddites, thus getting a good salary :).

It boggles my mind that some people don't see this coming. The only reason this technology wasn't being developped earlier was because it was more profitable to just employ people. If you push the minimum wage up, you're just accelerating automation. Ironically it leads to fever jobs, but the people who do have jobs will be paid higher  ;D at the low end anyway. (This is in the short term, in the long term, automation may actually create more jobs, but the price of that is heavy)

I mean come on, if someone is not producing over say $7 of value per hour, and you're suddenly forced to pay them $15, that just doesn't seem like a very sustainable business model, does it now?

As much as I understand why companies would do it and how technology progresses, this is the start of something bad to come. The last thing we want is less jobs, period.

This is insane logic to me.But this logic, you think people should still be working 15 hour days in a pre-industrialized factory .I'd rather deal with a machine than a barely literate person that clearly doesn't want to be there.I'm okay with this.

People need to be working, getting paid, and being able to afford food to put on the table and a house to live in. They're not going to get a paycheck if Wall-E takes over their job.

I'm looking forward to more automation in the fast food industry. Less mistakes with your orders. Faster. More sanitary.

We should all look forward to being lazy, useless layabouts? or like what the founders of Google said along with Carlos Slim...we should place more importance on activities outside of work?