Burger King slashes worker hours & speeds up self-serve kiosks over California’s new wage law

A Burger King franchisee announced that they will be slashing workers’ hours and expediting the rollout of self-service kiosks to cut costs. 

The franchisee owner, Harshraj Ghai, owns 180 fast-food restaurants throughout California, and 140 of these are made up of Burger Kings’.

In an interview with Business Insider, they explained the situation, stating: “We can’t move fast enough on this.

“We have kiosks in probably about 25% of our restaurants today,” he said. “However, the other 75% are going to have kiosks in the next probably 30 to 60 days.”

“We are installing kiosks in every single restaurant,” he went on to say. Ghai raised prices between 8% and 10% in the past year, and said that getting rid of overtime, and limiting the amount of workers’ hours will mean that he will be able to expand the breath of his restaurant empire. 

Speaking about potentially increasing menu prices, Ghai responded saying: “I can’t take more price than that… Anything more than that is going to result in [a] significant impact to our traffic.”

Talking about his plan of action Ghai said, “Now we are just going ahead and installing the kiosks in every single restaurant in response to the legislation to be able to balance some of these labor costs that are hitting us.”

Burger King also made headlines in April, after people questioned whether or not the famous Whopper was being taken off of menus.