THE AUTOMATION OF McJOBS?: I just saw these statistics on Wikipedia: In 2013, McDonald’s had 35,429 locations, a net income of $5,586 million and 440,000 employees. In 2019, it had 38,695 locations (more locations!), a net income of $6025 million (more profit!), and 205,000 employees (less than half as many employees!). (Update:  A reader tells me that much of the decrease comes from McDonald’s selling off company-owned locations.  Still at the location near my mother’s home in Virginia, the advent of “tablets” for ordering soon resulted in a very significant decrease in workers.  It wasn’t subtle.)