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by 6ren
4944 days ago
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Interesting, you don't think of Krispy Kreme as making robot donuts. Curious that Macdonald's, with so much careful specification of all processes, hasn't done this, at all. e.g. fry/remove/salt fries. (though their standard coffee is mostly automated). Macdonald's is so well-placed, I can only assume it isn't actually cost-effective for them. Maybe it's worth it for Momentum, for the PR? Or, by starting from scratch, they can make radical changes? Or, it isn't happening? (it's just a "concept" so far). Finally, Larry Niven wrote a short story about automated restaurants "Intent to Deceive" (1968). |
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The trouble with robotics is that it's expensive and time consuming to scale, and deals poorly with variance, at least for now.
If your McDonald's is a smash hit and you're experiencing much higher than expected traffic, you can scale horizontally by quickly hiring more workers. All of the tricky bits of producing the product (e.g., correct portioning, correct frying, correct cooking) are already automated, so this labor force is easy to bring up to speed.
Compare with a robotic McDonald's, where you'd freak out, order a new burger-maker-matic from your vendor, and wait 6 months for it to arrive.
Or perhaps worse, you have a maximum capacity of 1000 burger/hour, scaled for your lunch-time rush, and those machines are idling the rest of the time. In a normal human environment you just bring in fewer people during the off hours - but with a robotic work force you are always scaled for peak demand. In businesses that are periodically peak-y this is incredibly inefficient.