Oddly, while living in The Philippines Island I noticed they were installing self ordering kiosks in Fast Foods just before they unleashed COVID Scamdemic. At that time the workers were earning 7 bucks a day pre-taxes. So there's a lot more to all the automation than the wages. A densely populated country, the amount of business their fast food shops do would be a wet dream in the USA. Oddly McDonald's food quality seems slightly better than here and prices are lower, much lower.

A big part of the cost here is the commercial real estate prices. My niece works for Ihop and corporate wanted to open a new shop, it was going to cost them 350,000 rent a year. So rent far exceeds payroll.

In the Philippines when we moved there in 2017, there was a shop in town that had an owners apt. above and was asking 350 a month rent.

A small business here has what under 100 employees, in the Philippines there are a lot of 1 person or 1 family businesses. We don't have small businesses here...