More propaganda to make people hate increasing minimum wage.
Even if minimum wage never increased, they’d still try and put these robots in. These two things are unrelated!
I can confirm this. I’ve got family in the restaurant industry and we’ve been keeping an eye on advances in restaurant related robotry for ages. We knew this was coming looong ago. Like, a decade ago. It just wasn’t quite there yet.
McDonald’s invested in robotics every year they didn’t increase minimum wage. Clearly they must not know shit about maintaining businesses. Automatic soda machines, burger cookers, bun warmers…
30+ years ago McDonald’s put in the automated fry hopper machines. This has nothing to do with minimum wage.
I’m also in favor of automating fast food, the fewer people handling my food the better. Let them hire maintenance workers instead of cooks.
You say that as if machines don’t get dirty and still require a good amount of hygiene/cleaning to keep up
Don’t get me wrong though because I am also in favor of automation only because I believe it will make some parts of work more bearable, minus the job displacement problem caused by our current economic model…
Taco Bell tried to do this in the 90s.
This article is light on the details of the failures, but basically the little bits of lettuce, tomato and cheese would slip out of the various holders and get smashed into the moving pieces and jam everything up while starting to rot. It was broken more often than not, and even when it wasn’t it was a pain in the ass to keep sanitary. Far more trouble than it was ever worth.
Building these machines and operating them won’t be the hard part. Keeping them working will be more expensive than paying people to make food for a halfway decent wage. The necessary logistics system just to supply replacement parts for the machines will probably break the bank, and never mind all the technicians they’ll need to make repairs.
Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s, probably more than the mobile.phone has. This sort of device has been common in food factories for quite a while now and is inevitably moving into first high-volume then after refinement canteen kitchens before slowly making its way into the home.
It’s a great thing if it does, the food industry is hugely wasteful especially when trying to lower overheads which also lowers quality and healthiness of diets. Multistage processing allows near to raw ingredients to be sourced locally and used as needed thus avoiding the need for chemical preservatives, pre-proceasing and all the transport logistics, added risk, and etc. Cheap food places could go back to the days of getting fresh produce delivered rather than bags of presliced and shaped meal components from a factory - that’d be huge amounts of plastic and oil use removed from our global consumption.
Of course this installed device is probably just fairly basic pick and place using preshaped meal components but it’s a step in the evolution of small-scale industrial kitchens which will eventually benefit us all.
Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s
This is true, and we have smaller, lighter and more accurate motors, and fancy tools like machine vision with object identification, and substantially better electronics.
I don’t think it matters. Nothing has changed in food ingredients - they’re squishy, slippery, soft and irregular. If you put just a little too much pressure on a cooked grain of rice it will turn into a two-inch-long smear of starch that other things will stick to, and then you’ve got a little pile of gunk inside your machine. The more complex these machines are the more impossible it will be to keep them clean on the inside.
I remember when this burger making robot was getting a lot of attention (apparently they were “the definition of disruption”). Their restaurant location in Daly City (Creator Burger) closed during the pandemic but then reopened with a simpler version:
Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will now apply to the burger themselves.
Give you one guess why.
The company is now dead, their domain is abandoned and the restaurant location is permanently closed, although apparently they managed to sell one to a Sam’s Club in Arkansas last year. Wonder how that’s going for them now.
I quit going after their CFO was bitching about quiet quitting keeping him up at night.
QDoba is better anyways, they’re just not in nearly as many locations (around me anyways).
Pancheros is my favorite. They press tortillas fresh when you order and I love it.
QDoba is better anyways, they’re just not in nearly as many locations
Only seen them in shopping mall food courts.
How many decades before the purchase, installation and testing costs of these robots are recouped vs. that $20/hour wage?
Because I’m thinking it may not be all that cost-effective to just say “fuck you” to a minimum wage.
Is there any chipotle that exists where a better-tasting taco truck isn’t within walking distance?
We have bodegas and trucks, for a very reasonable price, although the trucks cost less, I suppose because of less overhead. If anyone’s never had homemade tortillas, I recommend them. In the bodegas, they usually have a machine, similar to the wringer on the antique wringer washers so they’re thin and more uniform, but hand made masa tortillas are divine, especially topped with avocado and queso fresco.
It’s less a function of not having decent Mexican food and more a function of both food trucks and the concept of “walking distance” not really being things in most of the metro area.
