McDonald's opens their second all-robot store. The last thing you see before you feel a pair of robotic hands around your neck....
Actually, it wouldn't take much to automate a burger joint, and all it would take is someone to keep all the ingredients filled and clean. You could even do a "build your own" quite easily, with the burgers being put together on a kind of assembly line.
I think we will see more self order stations and probably in the next 10 years we will see the wide spread roll out of cooking robots at fastfood places but cusyomers are going to demand human interaction.
my bullshit meter was pegged but I kept on looking for a way to refute this. Thanks STP. And no, the economics of employing a small staff to make sure the robots keep running correctly doesn't work. Nor does the health grade with all the food falling in the cracks. Besides, we already have robotic restaurants. They're called vending machines.
I actually thought this was real until I clicked on the link and read the article. Good one @Tuckerfan
"FORGET the planned siege of Mickey D's HQ tomorrow guys! Turns out the McBots story is horse hockey!"
The Click and Order thing has already been in use around the world. I saw a lot of places in Japan where one can order food via a kiosk system with pics, which was a godsend for us Muricans, and placed our money into the machine. It worked pretty well and not once did I ever get a screwed up order.
Some of the grocery stores I shop at have that system for sliced deli goods. It's great -- you hit the kiosk, order your cold cuts, go select your shelf items, then come back to pick-up the salami and such. But it's still a person running the slicer.
Not quite. There were still people who cooked and served the food, but there was a machine where we put the order in to. ETA: like this
As someone who makes equipment for the food service industry, and who has worked in various high precision (aerospace, for example) industries, that's not really a big issue. Back in the mid-90s, the Taco Bell where I lived was somewhat automated. Instead of talking to a cashier, you punched in your order via touchscreen. You'd have to pay a person, and it was people who made your food. It didn't always work, but the technology has advanced a lot since then. Even if the minimum wage doesn't get bumped up to $15/hr. people in fast food joints are going to be replaced by machines. That's how things work.
The one I remember was where you put your money in the machine, you selected which order you wanted, and it printed out a ticket you gave to the cook. The problem was everything was in Japanese so I had to just select, at random, trying to eye the options other people were picking.
They could easily use robots to make the food. They already have them doing all of that with premade frozen foods. It would be cheaper and easier. With technology today probably a lot better too. This is why we could have socialized food service.
