New York Times: “What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas’s workplace here on California’s central coast. She was at a McDonald’s in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo. Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald’s outlets around the country.”

Given that convicts are often employed as telemarketers, the cynical part of me thinks that this isn’t just a ploy by McDonald’s to shave a few seconds, but a way to cut out the labor quotient altogether. Why pay minimum wage to a worker when you can have a convicted felon do the same work for less?