There will soon be children alive who don’t remember the McDonald’s serving counter. Those uncertain seconds as you decided which till to queue at, that nervous wait as the last Big Mac got snatched before your server could grab it.

The whole frenetic, nylon-clad performance is being replaced by touchscreens. You take a ticket, scan your contactless card and wait. The food giant plans to roll out the screens at the vast majority of its UK stores.

Inan influential paper this month, Morgan Stanley economists Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan and Pratyancha Pardeshi argue that we are on the verge of a global turnaround in wages. For the past 30 years, business profits have surged on the back of a demographic glut of labour: the babyboomers of the west augmented by the newly urbanised workforce of the global south, plus millions of women brought into the labour force.

Now the catch-up effects of urbanisation will peter out, they say – and, at the same time, the falling birth rate will create a shortage of labour, triggering a rise in the bargaining power – and wages –of workers. That, in turn, will trigger the rollout of innovations such as McDonald’s touchscreens across the economy.

bbabo.Net