Robots pick up slack as wages go up

Washington

CROWDED. That's how Ed Rensi remembers what life was like working at McDonald's back in 1966. There were about double the number of people working in the store - 70 or 80, as opposed to the 30 or 40 today - because preparing the food just took a lot more doing.

"When I first started at McDonald's making 85 cents an hour, everything we made was by hand," Mr Rensi said - from cutting the shortcakes to stirring syrups into the milk for shakes. Over the years, though, ingredients started to arrive packaged and pre-mixed, ready to be heated up, bagged and handed out of the window.

"More and more of the labour was pushed back up the chain," said Mr Rensi, who went on to become chief executive of the company in the 1990s. The company kept employing more grill cooks and cashiers as it expanded, but each one of them accounted for …