[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.