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An ironclad law of economics regarding employment is this: To be retained, an employee must return value to the employer in excess of the cost of employment. Minimum wage laws place an artificial floor on the cost of employment; these laws not only price the entry-level job-seekers out of the market but they force employers to seek alternatives to hiring people.

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Now, Chick-fil-A, while not citing any minimum wage laws as a reason for implementing this, has introduced the automated lemon squeezer for their vaunted lemonade prep.

Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A Inc. is cutting nearly 10,000 hours of work per day at its locations through the automation of lemon squeezing, which produces the juice used in one of the fast-food chain’s most popular drinks, according to reports.

Bloomberg reported the company, which branded the slogan “Eat more chicken,” has a plant just north of Los Angeles with machines occupying space larger than a typical Costco Wholesale.

The same machines occupying the space are tasked with squeezing as much as 1.6 million pounds of lemons before bagging the juice and sending it off to Chick-fil-A locations all over the country. Once at the restaurant, staff members add sugar and water to create the company’s trademark lemonade.

Previously, lemons were squeezed by hand in each Chick-fil-A location, which seems inefficient.

Prior to incorporating the robots into the process, staff members at restaurants were responsible for squeezing the lemons, which sometimes resulted in injured fingers.

What makes this story interesting — and what makes it relevant from the minimum wage standpoint — is that it is another example of automation taking over low-skill tasks from humans.

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Automation has already taken hold in the world of fast-food burger-flipping.

On the 24th, Aniai announced opening a demonstration space for their hamburger-cooking robot, Alpha Grill, in Times Square, New York. The company plans to expand its business by establishing a local network.

Aniai has created a demonstration space to prove their cooking robot meets kitchen requirements and production volumes.

At the New York demo center, visitors can experience Alpha Grill’s capabilities, such as simultaneous two-sided cooking of hamburger patties, automatic patty transportation, and Maillard reaction analysis. The center also provides opportunities to test temperature, cooking time, and patty thickness according to potential customer’s hamburger cooking methods.

This is the way of the future. And minimum wage laws will only turbocharge the race to automation.

These burger bots and lemon squeezers will price the low-skilled worker out of a range of jobs. True, to some extent, the move to automation is inevitable; automation increases efficiency, which every business seeks. Even so, there was a time, not all that long ago, when many young people’s introduction to the workplace as entry-level workers was a job in a fast-food joint. Increasingly, automation, in order-taking and food preparation, is taking over from those young people and depriving them of valuable experience. Minimum wage law accelerates the loss of these entry-level jobs.

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This is why, whenever a minimum wage law is proposed, the question to ask is, “Do you want more burger bots? Because this is how you get more burger bots.”

Chick-fil-A is not claiming this step of automation is a response to minimum wage laws. However, it is difficult to believe that these laws around the nation were not kicked around in the corporate boardroom when making the decision to adopt these machines.