Insane....you can ask, and the retail outlet can fire you. I´m betting there are still a few who wouldn´t mind working for a living. Don´t like it here, go somewhere else...Have a nice day

That´s right, go out on strike. I can do without a Burger King or Wendy´s a lot easier than you can do without a job when you employer goes out of business.

Striking from a fast food restaurant has got to be one of the most futile things you can do. How difficult would it be to replace you?

This notion is even dumber than the idea that striking at Walmart would be successful. This kind of stupidity makes ya shake your head don´t it?

´Inspired by Walmart strikers". Yeah, right. This stuff is ´inspired ´ by union goons who see their cushy money supply diminishing.

I get the feeling this is connected to Hostess and a bunch of other "work" actions. The result, if the workers prevail, will be the same. Investors will always, naturally, seek the best return on their investment. If that means selling off the company´s hard assets because it is no longer optimal to be an on-going operation, then that´s what will happen. I can see this happening somewhat frequently over the next 4 years. Will those investment dollars go over seas? Certainly a lot of those dollars will go to Washington to be wasted. Either scenario is not good for the general welfare of the country. Dark times indeed.

I have often thought it would be cool to have a fully automated fast food joint. You walk up, enter your order on the touch screen, or use voice recognition. Whiff your card past the reader, and voila! the robot springs into action and you can watch it being produced at blinding speed.

You only just need a human there to feed the patties and unjam the system occasionally. I think these workers are trying to tell the owners that its time to develop this technology.

I would be t this isn´t unions but health food groups organizing this.

They are assuming that the demand for fast food isn´t elastic, IOW, isn´t affected by price.

I wouldn´t bet my job on that.

As #8 points out, this issue highlights one of the many contradictions in the Democratic party; on the one hand, wanting to do away with fast food and on the other, wanting to make sure people keep buying it, but pay more.

Like tobacco products. Floor both the accelerator and the brake at the same time.

There´s a reason they are working in fast food--typical entry-level jobs......

Why should they be worth $15 an hour? They can be easily replaced for slacking, which got them there in the first place!

If you get your news about anything at all via Yahoo, this is how far off you´ll be on any subject.

Boycott the yahoos.

I believe that should be "inspired by Walmart striker" (singular)?

Some people are apparently very easily inspired.

Bring on a few high school kids to fill these jobs until they go to college. These entry level positions are designed to give people experience in the work force--they are not intended to be full-time careers.

We are looking forward to a nice little part-time job in sales or fast food after we are both retired.
Just a bit of extra cash and a way to keep busy.
Let the young kids go on strike.
It opens up opportunities for us!

I don´t think they fear unemployment checks.

0bamacare rules have ensured that fast food jobs will never be more than "part time".

#7 That automation is happening now. But it is incremental. The machines take on more and more easy and repetitive steps.

When you must have some humans there anyway using automated equipment may not be cost effective. High volume is key.

OTOH there is the advanced vending machine delivering frozen dinners, etc. heated by microwave. I suspect such machines are in use somewhere; happily I am not at that somewhere.

Ms Goodman, do you really think you are a journalist? A good one would never give any credit to the Wal-Mart fiasco flop. Secondly, asked those lazy folks you talked to, shucks even ask yourself, if they went to $15/hr what do you think the Whopper or Quarter Pounder would cost?

Don´t you remember how minimum wage increases did away with the 99 cent Whopper? How much are they today?

Hello lady.

With all those in-demand skills, why not offer them to firms that will pay what they´re worth? Hmmm?

#7: You´re probably familiar with this: "The factory of the future will have two employees: a man and a dog. The man´s job will be to feed the dog. The dog´s job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment."
~~ Warren G. Bennis

Yo Liz, You could have mentioned that most of those "Walmart strikers" weren´t Walmart employees if you had any intention of being honest with your readers. They were mainly SEIU scabs. Or that you could have mentioned that New York City has over 50,000 fast food workers and 49,800 of them did NOT go on strike. By any measure this was a total fail except for the free publicity given them by the media who are only too quick to embrace conflict.

Good catch, #21. 200 ´workers´ in the fast food industry in nyc represent a miniscule percentage of fast food workers there. And they probably were hired by the union to walk out...
this is a joke. The unions got their boy reelected, and are flailing around like fools, trying to be noticed.

Oops. 20 deserves the credit for the catch.

Fire all of them but the cook and the janitor and turn the picture order board around and let me punch in the order and swipe my card. Next rebellion, please.

The real minimum wage is zero, which is what you get after getting fired for this nonsense.

Walmart has over 2.2 million employees. What percent went on the so-called strike??? How many zero´s after the decimal point.

Kudos to #20 for reading the article.

Who do these folks think they are, public service employees? Fast food sucks anyway.

Funny, I spoke with some of the workers at our local Wal Mart prior to black Friday. Non of them had heard even the slightest rumor of a strike.

Pamela, the BK employee, says you can´t raise a family on minimum wage.

Birth control is cheaper that diapers. Should have gone back to school after the first mistake.

How many of the employees making minimum wage own the latest greatest electronics ?
Could they survive on Social Security ?

There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a machine that cooks and assembles a hamburger. It costs a lot, but according to the article would pay for itself in a year. Fifteen dollars an hour would make it pay for itself even quicker.

This is NY. You can bet your last dollar this strike is a fake. All those workers will go on NY´s gravy heaven welfare rolls - free cash, free food, free housing, free heat, free phones, free health care, free child care, free cars, free everything. They´ve figured out it beats working.