[spamizbad]

What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it.

We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.

[jedberg]

> We heard this same argument about automation in food service.

Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.

[nine_k]

Ordering from a machine actually makes sense, and, crucially, is easy to implement.

Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.

[skeeter2020]

this doesn't happen with a literal human flipping burgers replaced with a robot flipping burgers. It's complex drinks made with a button push instead of mixed by hand, more of the delivery chain pushed to the left of the restaurant, like Tim Horton's making all the donuts in factories and "finishing" them in store instead of hiring bakers, shifting traffic to drive through, and gig-delivered take away. Having customers order and queue up, etc. There are way less employees and they are only doing the "hard" work, massively parallelized.

[spamizbad]

That might be what you see but during your rush shifts you're looking at 10+ at places like McDonalds with 6-7 during less busy shifts and those 6-7 people are busting their asses. Churn has also jumped way-up post-COVID. A bunch of once-reliable food service workers moved up the labor value chain and left the industry and this has left the F&B industry with some pretty major staffing problems.

[hackable_sand]

This is just not true.

Maybe your area suffers from that, but mine doesn't.

[Symbiote]

There are robot grocery warehouses in England: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE (5 minutes, Tom Scott video).

Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.

[skeeter2020]

Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.

[Spivak]

That's fine, this is the natural and expected response to labor getting more expensive. The bad outcome is when government steps in to artificially push wages down.

[mrguyorama]

>It's not all automation

Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:

Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.

Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.

Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.

[spamizbad]

They correctly figured out customers could tolerate slower times for fast food because a significant chunk of their orders are delivery and pickup, so having it take 7 minutes instead of 3 won't really be noticed by the consumer.

[55555]

Amazon warehouses are heavily automated and they’re increasing the automation all the time

[irq-1]

(off topic) I was thinking today about how robots should throw packages to each other. It'd be faster and it's all the things robots are great at: hand-eye coordination, weight and holding angle, and group coordination.

[skeeter2020]

think of how you do any similar activity; is the slow part walking a short, line of sight distance?