Quote:
Originally Posted by c1pher
One aspect of the cost of living rising that isn’t considered is the cost of technology woven into everything. From fast food to cars, technology adds to cost quite a bit. Technology certainly adds to our quality of life overall but it’s also more costly. Consider any car today. It has many safety and convenience feature not present in a car from the 70s. I am certain that if you made an exact car from that era, other than inflation, it would actually be cheaper due to manufacturing efficiencies rather than including all those doodads in your car. I think fast food is similar. From the cash registers, self service kiosks, screens to monitor order flow, safety requirements and many more on top of the grills they’ve always had.
Sometimes simpler is better.
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While there is an impact from entertainment technology, a lot of the increased costs of cars is due to advances in safety and fuel efficiency, many of which are mandated by law and generally benefit society. Cars would be less expensive without these but I don’t think there is any denying some of the advances over the past 50 years or so have saved lives. So simpler is not really better in those cases.
Self ordering kiosks and self service beverage counters in a fast food restaurant are less expensive and result in less mistakes / waste than high turnover, expensive and disinterested employees to handle those tasks, especially as technologies advance and employee costs go up. Eventually it will also make sense to automate fast food preparation on a wide scale too.
That said, I think there are examples that align with your point. Personally, I prefer self checkouts in store because I can make sure the price scanned is what I expect concurrent with bagging the way I want everything. Unfortunately many thieves also seem to like them and retailers are scaling back on those, so that is an example of where the security of a regular checkout process beats the technology, at least for now.