I would make a guess that by 2025...a hundred McDonalds will be in operation around the country with a shift of three people (shift lead, a technical guy, and maybe one single clerk to handle older folks who aren’t into automation purchases). By 2035...the bulk of McDonalds operations within the US will be the same.
Not to discourage people...but if you are born in the next five years...you will likely never get an opportunity to work at McDonalds at age twenty-five. The french-fry job....the burger flipper....the clerk at the front who hooks up the soda machines each morning? These jobs will be obsolete within two decades.
The curious thing will be those folks who are twenty years old today and trying to survive in the coming era where they have worthless skills that won’t fit into any dynamic. Maybe Hardees and Wendy’s will be a decade behind McDonalds but it’s a dying profession.
They can all work for the government. Watch TV and drink beer for EBT and rent subsidy and medical care and...
“...and maybe one single clerk to handle older folks who aren’t into automation purchases...”
Hey, I reassemble that remark.
Humor aside...the self-checkout stands at Lowe’s tend to be “overseen” by the better employees. If the four self-checkouts are occupied, the clerk tends to grab people in line and manually checks them out at her/his main stand while watching the other four stands. Good employees usually gravitate to higher positions.
I did personnel recruiting as a “head hunter” a few years after retiring from my regular chosen field of automation engineering. The easiest people to get hired were those with technical skilled degrees. I didn’t even try to place people with liberal arts degrees unless they had some technical related work in their past as it was mostly a waste of time. Automation has been with us for many many years, since the computer age has arrived, it has and will continue to sky rocket towards bigger and better things and in particular automation. McDonald’s type restaraunts as we know them today will be thing of the past. Kind of like the pickle barrel in the old country store.