I totally expect McDonalds to replace the cashiers with automated kiosks. Probably within the next couple of years. There would be a button to summon the manager if you absolutely must talk to a human being, but mostly you would touch the screen to order, the either swipe a card or insert cash into the machine to pay.
As it is, take a look inside the window the next time you’re in the drive-thru. The drink-filling process is already mostly automated. Not for cappucinos or lattes, but if you’e just ordering a Coke, the only thing the person at the window does is pick up the cup and hand it out to you.
It comes down to how much capital you want to invest.
AFAIK, most if not all McDonalds locations use clamshell grills that cook both sides of the burger at the same time, so there’s no more flipping. The attendant just shuffles cooked burgers off and raw frozen patties on.
McDonalds has engineered a lot of the upkeep of fryers away as well. They’re running “LOV” or Low Oil Volume fryers that use 40% less oil and automatically keep the oil level right and periodically self-filter the oil. They also have machines that portion out and load fries into the fryer baskets. Like the grills, someone just has to put empty baskets at one end and retrieve filled baskets from the other side, and dump a sack of frozen fries into the hopper now and then.
I don’t know if McDonalds uses them, but there are automated fryers where you put a basket on the carrier, press “COOK” and the basket is lowered into the oil, and with a mix of timing and fuzzy logic, the basket is lifted when the fries are done. It wouldn’t take a whole lot more engineering to have the mechanism that pulls the basket out of the fryer flip it sideways to dump out the cooked fries, then return it to the loading machine.
McDonald’s has already developed an automated kitchen. The maintenance issues with systems like that will probably prevent their usage for some time. As already mentioned they use automated fryers although I don’t believe they are self filling, and they have automated drink filling machines for take out. There are several general problems to overcome, a restaurant can’t afford to shut down in the major rush times due to a machine failure, the machines still need to be supplied with the raw materials, and for a lot of automated food equipment there is a major cleaning task needed. This is done by cooks and other personnel now during their normal work.
That’s the real problem … machines don’t have any personality. I like the young pretty girls that wait on me at Mc Donald’s, Carls Jr, Burger King etc.
Rumor has it that the new gourmet hamburger places are taking business away from the old fast food places with people wanting more quality.
By the time all the fast food workers get up to $15 an hour we will be paying $15 for a burger fries and a shake :smack:
It’s about the growth of factory robots in China. Over the past couple of decades, salaries for factory workers have increased to about $500 per month in some areas of the country. And because of the one-child policy there are fewer young adults to work in the factories. And those young adults are better educated now and less willing to do factory work.
So Chinese companies are adopting factory robots in a big way.
Automats were big in the 50s and 60s. Horn & Hardart was a big deal at one time. They didn’t automate preparation, but they largely eliminated human interaction from ordering and paying. Granted, you couldn’t “have it your way” but the varieties of foods available was greater than current fast food restaurants, and they were very popular at the time so the food must have been at least acceptable (which is about how I’d rate most current fast food fare).
Why do we no longer have automats? Why did Horn & Hardart go out of business? Are we undervaluing the importance of human interaction?
The real pushes for automation are first, to reduce cost, by eliminating staff, and second, to make a more predictable and consistent product. I suspect the latter is why McDonald’s has already mostly automated their fry production.
The second part is really the tricky part- I suspect that the single-purpose nature of most of the proposed kitchen machines means that it’s not a situation where you install the BurgerTronic-5000 to cook the patties, and your staff level goes down by one. More likely, some critical mass of automation needs to be in place before a restaurant could reduce their staffing levels- if they just automated one task, they’d just have the existing people do other stuff more- clean, sanitize, pick up garbage from tables, etc… because their burger flipping task turned into feeding frozen patties into the magazine, and only takes 1/4 the time.
Past a certain point, it would be time-efficient to drop a person, but I suspect that it isn’t currently cost-effective to do so, except maybe in some very sustained high-volume situations (like exist in factories that we see on “Food Factory” or “How it’s Made”).
So until automation becomes less single-task and more flexible, we probably won’t see too much of it, even though it’s possible to do with present-day technology.
That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that McDonald’s can actually compete for that business. McDonald’s has decades of inertia and a brand built around “cheap, quick, and easy”. If they change too quickly to try to hit “quality”, they may lose a bunch of their current customers (who want “cheap”, and the particular menu items they currently buy) without actually moving the needle on what the people who aren’t their customers think of them.
Look at what happened to JC Penney when they tried to go upscale. They alienated their current customers and failed to really attract any new ones.
It could be that if you’re known for low prices, the only effective way to innovate is to reduce costs. There may simply be nothing that McDonald’s could do to double the average revenue per customer.
Maybe. But there’s no economic principle that says that a burger and fries and a shake should have a constant cost in minimum-wage-dollars. The cost of food has plummeted in the last century.
One of the fundamental business strategy concepts is that there are basically only 2 fundamental strategies- differentiation or lowest-cost.
If you differentiate, the sky’s the limit. But if you’re lowest-cost, you pretty much HAVE to always be the lowest cost provider, or someone else will undercut you and steal your business. Over the long haul, prices stabilize some small increment above cost- just enough that the business can keep the lights on and make a small profit per unit. Anything else, and their prices are higher than they could be.
Not incidentally, this is why low-cost operations like Wal-Mart are so concerned with logistics and automation- these are ways to drop overall costs such that they can make more profit while still keeping costs low.
I’m not sure a case can be made that McDonald’s is the lowest-cost fast food provider; they don’t really fit that mold. I think their model is a differentiation one, with their speed, their focus on children, and their specific style of food being their differentiator and brand identity. They’re struggling now because the fast-casual burger places like 5 Guys, Smashburger, etc… are stealing a lot of what used to be fast food burger-eaters, and a lot of people who might have eaten fast food in the past are opting for healthier meals. So they’re coming out with all sorts of salads and fruit and what-not, and gourmet burgers to hopefully compete.
Personally, I think they’re missing their shot- most fast food places have stuff like salads and fruit, and most have spiffy burgers. But their non-salad, non-fried and non-burger offerings are sorely lacking. Most places have a single grilled chicken option, and that’s it. McDonald’s would be smart to offer more variety in that space- they’re known for innovation, so maybe a grilled fish sandwich, or chicken-burger or something along those lines could be devised.
But McDonald’s menu is getting too complicated, I think. They have multiple burgers, chicken sandwiches, at least one fish sandwich and so forth. Every time you add a prepared menu item, you complicate ordering, stocking and preparation. (The ready-made items like the salads and fruit parfaits are different.) In N Out Burger, on the other hand, has a stripped-down menu; just burgers, fries, sodas and shakes.
That’s a good point, but I think that being the lowest cost food provider is a big part of their strategy as well. I know that the cheapest calories per dollar within about a 2-mile radius of my office is a McDouble.
The chains like Five Guys and Chipotle that always get mentioned as the sorts of competition that McDonalds aspires to be like have significantly higher price points (though still pretty cheap).
Meanwhile one of our joint-ventures had some corruption issues a year or two ago wherein HR was accepting payments for securing positions on the factory floor.
Although labor costs definitely go into our planning, speed and space do, too. Space in China is ridiculously expensive, and when we want to build 300,000 units per year of a particular model (that’s 1.2 cars per minute) , we don’t have the available space to let factory workers build them. Four to six robots in a 100 meter squared space can keep up; humans moving 140 kg tools around simply don’t cut it.