The last two Chili’s restaurants I visited (in N Texas) had automated some of the waitstaff duties. A small terminal on the table allows ordering and paying, complete with receipt. The only interaction with a waitress was when she brought the food. I don’t know how many waitstaff this replaces, but my interactions with them are significantly reduced compared with other restaurants.
I figure they’re kinda like self-checkouts. Some don’t like them and insist on dealing with people, but they’ll get used more and more.
The burger business is on the way out, anyway.
McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King–all are losing sales, in a very big way.
Many of them are closing.
Lack of customers seems to be the issue.
I’ve been in a McDonald’s once, in thirty years! And that only because A) I was in a car accident right across the street, and B) it was December, and I was damn cold.
The Sheetz covenience stores already do this for their rather extensive menu. You don’t interact with a person until you pay. It seems to have worked very well for them and many of their stores handle large breakfast and lunch crowds.
I can actually see the burger model changing, to more of a gourmet thing. These days, pretty much every pub and restaurant I eat at has some sort of burger on the menu - although light years apart from the glop you get at fast food places, and with a gourmet price attached. This is something that didn’t even really exist ten years ago, but it seems to have caught on in a big way now.
There’s precedent for this, too; lobster (in fact, a lot of seafood) was for many years considered to be something that poor people ate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#As_food
I don’t think the problem is burgers, but the low-end burgers. Yeah, McDonald’s is hemorrhaging sales, but last I heard In & Out and 5 Guys are doing well.
Yeah, the lowest end fast food chains are doing poorly because slightly more expensive “nicer” fast food chains are pushing them aside. A lot of people have really criticized McDonald’s for selling its Chipotle ownership interest years ago, as if they had held onto it then it’d be buoying McDonald’s business right now as the mainline is declining.
Fast food has often been stereotyped as poor people food, but the average fast food customer makes like $60,000 a year. The real meat of the fast food business is actually the regular working middle class, and always has been. The true poor go for even cheaper (and possibly unhealthier) options from convenience stores and other places. Thus the traditional QSR customer has both the means and the desire to spend more money at a restaurant that is basically the same concept as traditional fast food, but with food that’s a little better and a decor that’s a little nicer. It’s the same concept as Target v Wal-Mart, essentially.
There’s nothing about the hamburger that is intrinsically becoming unpopular, other than the fact that beef prices are spiraling upward out of control. Most new gastropubs and even “fine” eateries in my area sell a fancy hamburger, and that’s pretty typical these days. If anything hamburgers are now on more menus in restaurants where before you’d get a dirty look if you asked for a burger.
You’re thinking of Burger King. It’s the only chain that flame-broils the meat.
But it’s not exactly automated–somebody needs to feed the patties into the machine, and take them off the tray at the other end. I used to do that job.
Yes that’s true, for now. If there’s a machine that can pack frozen patties it’s not a far reach to dropping thawed patties onto a grilling conveyer. The link to the machine posted above is interesting.
You’re probably thinking of Steve Bigari. He’s a Colorado Springs-based businessman who used to own most of the local McDonald’s, and pioneered that concept for his stores.
His current company doesn’t do fast food, but it does process take-out orders for several national chains. If you’ve ordered take-out from P. F. Chang’s, for example, in the last few years, you were almost certainly talking to somebody in Colorado Springs rather than at your local restaurant.
I looked at some YouTube videos of burger-flipping robots. They didn’t seem very flexible. One assembled a burger from ingredients that were already sliced and placed in a carousel.
It seems to me that given that robots are better suited for a high-volume 24x7 operation (like a factory) than a fast-food restaurant that’s lower volume with a lot of downtime. And there are, of course, many fast food restaurant locations, and you’d need one or more robots in each. So a human employee seems better suited. When it’s quiet, he/she can do other things, like prep work (prepare boxes, get ingredients from the cooler) or cleanup (wipe down tables, empty the trash.
Jack in the Box introduced self-ordering kiosks a few years before they left, but they never seemed to be very popular. The interface was simple enough, but people just plain seemed to resist using them, even when we offered enticements like a free upgrade to curly fries or the like. People also generally took longer ordering from the kiosk than they would from a human clerk, so in the end a very small percent of our lobby sales came from the machine anyway. Maybe they’ll become more popular over time as the younger generation gets more used to the technology - I’ve seen that Taco Bell lets you order via an app now, which is pretty much the same concept and would definitely save time if there’s a line at the drive-thru.
Your question is timely. There’s an article up today at Salon called “Robots Are Coming for Your Job” and it specifically talks about automating the fast food industry, including the making of hamburgers.
Side note, I can hardly stand to read Salon anymore. It and HuffPo used to be on my regular reads list but over the years have almost totally alienated me. Ever so rarely someone will tell me about an article, like this one, and I’ll go read it then run away.
It’s an interesting article. I agree with someone in the comment section there, who says it seems like it may be time to start having a serious discussion about minimum income for all Americans, since so many kinds of jobs are gradually being phased out completely. Eventually robots/automation really will do the bulk of the work. Good thing? Bad thing? You make the call.
ETA: regarding “robots aren’t cheap either” - that article quotes someone at a company that makes robots of a type to perform fast-food tasks saying that their machines/robots “would easily pay for themselves in one year”.
Sure. It’s strictly a quality vs price decision for me. I don’t see a human touch adding anything in and of itself. Machines already have massive roles in processing, packing, and shipping the majority of what would be going in to that robot making my food. The Mexican place I went to a couple days ago hand rolled my burrito. I have no misconceptions that human hands were a major part of the process that happened between the corn in the field and the tortilla used.
Regarding the automation of order taking; WaWa has been doing this for years at their delis. You order from a touchscreen, and you can even customize the order using checkboxes for the ingredients, kind of bread, condiments, etc.
As far as I know, WaWa isn’t unionized or under some special minimum wage, so apparently it’s already cost effective to automate order taking under current minimum wage laws. So do places like McDonald’s and Burger King have reasons other than cost for not doing it? Would those reasons continue to hold under increased wages?
It might not be right now, but it will be eventually. The cost of robots keeps dropping, and when the law requires higher wages for people, that low-cost person isn’t as low-cost as they used to be.
I’m just guessing, but it may be for the salesmanship.
When a human being says "do want the large coke?“or"did you want fries with that too?”, it’s an easy way to get an extra dollar from of the customer’s wallet.
