News

A former McDonald’s CEO warned that robots will take over staff jobs at the fast food empire – because it’s cheaper than employing humans.

Wendy’s (WEN) said that self-service ordering kiosks will be made available across its 6,000-plus restaurants in the second half of the year as minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market push up wages.

Emeryville, California-based Jamba Inc. — which owns and franchises Jamba Juice stores — plans to relocate its headquarters to Frisco, Texas, taking 100 corporate jobs to the city north of Dallas.

Travelers in the Bay Area spent more than $33 billion in 2015, which supported 248,300 jobs for residents and provided $2.8 billion in state and local tax revenue, according to Visit California’s annual economic impact report. The Bay Area was the largest regional contributor to a statewide tourism economy that topped $122 billion, sustained 1,064,000 jobs and generated $9.9 billion in state and local tax revenue – all record figures. 

CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. on Wednesday announced the company will relocate its corporate headquarters from Carpinteria, Calif. to Franklin.

Carpinteria-based CKE Restaurants, which also owns St. Louis-based Hardee’s, is consolidating both offices in Tennessee, where it has several company-owned restaurants. All senior executives, including Chief Executive Andrew F. Puzder will be moving to Nashville, Chief Marketing Officer Brad Haley said.

. . . San Francisco has passed more laws than any other major city to improve the lives of low-wage workers such as dishwashers, bussers, line cooks and waiters; Berkeley, Oakland and other Bay Area cities are not far behind. . . How much more expensive is dining out becoming? To get a sense, The Chronicle examined 20 years’ worth of menus from restaurants that hold steady spots on the annual Michael Bauer’s Top 100 Restaurants list.` After tracking 22 signature dishes or prix-fixe menus from 14 restaurants, we found that prices have risen, on average, 26 percent since 2010 and 52 percent since 2005 — up 7.5 percent in the last year alone.

The owners of two high-profile Orange County restaurants are taking a stand on rising labor costs by implementing controversial changes that could lead to sticker shock on your next dining bill.

You look at where you can afford to open restaurants. We have one restaurant in Seattle, and we probably won’t be expanding there. That’s true of San Francisco and Los Angeles, too. One of the unintended consequences of rising minimum wages is youth unemployment. Almost 40% of our team members are under age 21. When you start paying $15 an hour, are you going to take a chance on a 17-year-old who’s never had a job before when you can find someone with more experience? . . . We are testing server hand-held devices for order-taking in 30 restaurants now, and we’ll roll them out to another 30 in the next month and another 30 by the end of the year. Servers like it because they can take on more tables and earn more tips. Eventually we’ll have tablets where guests can place their own order from the table and pay for it.

Restaurant operator DineEquity Inc. said Thursday that it would move the headquarters of its Applebee’s International Inc. chain from suburban Kansas City, Mo., to its Glendale corporate home. . . about 80 to 90 people will stay put, consisting of workers in its backend support, help desk, guest relations and accounting departments.

New, final number show the number of visitors to the county hit 44.2 million, up 4.8 percent from the previous year. Of those, foreign travelers accounted for 6.5 million visits, up 5.6 percent from 2013.

About 251 million people – visitors and residents – traveled in California in 2014, spending an all-time record of $117.5 billion, according to a new report released by Visit California, the nonprofit that helps develop the state’s travel and tourism marketing programs

Out of the 96,600 net jobs added in Los Angeles County last year, 25,300 were in the leisure and hospitality industries, according to the California Employment Development Department.

Region is on track to greet 50 million visitors a year, and these visitors spent more than $18 billion in our economy this year.  At the same time, the hospitality and tourism industry also serves our 10 million local residents.  Accordingly, the report delineates the two separate components (traded versus local-serving), which are very different in terms of their composition, workforce needs, intermediate purchases and economic impacts — distinctions that have clear implications for how policymakers and stakeholders formulate programs to encourage not only more jobs but also better-paying jobs.

The California travel industry expanded for the fourth consecutive year following the 2007-2009 recession. In terms of both employment and real inflation-adjusted dollars, the California travel industry exceeded its pre-recession levels in 2013.