White Castle wants to install robot cooks in 100 new locations(misorobotics.com) |
White Castle wants to install robot cooks in 100 new locations(misorobotics.com) |
I... doubt it? It seems like it would allow the redeployment of team members to "no longer working at White Castle".
I once ordered a Big Mac and the employee forgot to put in the meat. Someone did that. They put it in the bag and handed it to me. When I returned it, no one apologized, some other employee shrugs and went back and got another one.
The service will be much better with robots. And the remaining employees can be paid more, thus be smarter and happier.
But they won't. And they could already be paid more (see McD in Norway and McD in the US, drastically different minimum wage but basically the same prices), but aren't.
> The service will be much better with robots.
Doubt it.
What jobs are there, especially for somebody who may quite bluntly not be the sharpest tool in the box? The labor market is not prepared to absorb these workers.
One is to replace the people, ideally reducing cost assuming the bot, and it's programming, maintenance, etc... are less than the labor cost was.
The other is to augment the people, maybe replace a few, but for the most part the people get repurposed to tasks they can do much better than the automation can.
In the first case, it's all about optimization, and the cost is generally a more rigid organization, but a very lean, efficient one. This leads to much lower costs, assuming the scale and savings make sense.
In the second case, it's all about quality and or expanding the scope of business. The potential for rigidity is still there, depending on how the robots and people work. In general, resources are there for the people to work smarter, and or on other tasks, products, improvements, and the like.
500 years ago, some guy invented the printing press. With it, one person could produce more books in a month than 100 scribes. Which soon found themselves redeployed to not working anymore.
Cooking is an enormous working-class employer and it is getting automated — will it lower demand for work? Most people still cook their own food, so there‘s a lot more cooking service that could be sold, but at this point, the economies of scale point at fewer people manning the frier, and just one person monitoring several robots.
I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. Made-to-order food, always the same, packaged without anyone ever touching it, for a good price. Would be hard to beat.
My speculation: a robotic arm makes for a great press release. Actuator + track feels like a factory.
Those arms are also usually in cages or somewhat enclosed for safety reasons, are employees just expected to walk around it?
In terms of location costs, 2 machines with maintenance might be around $10k per month per location. Definitely a cost savings move for White Castle - I reckon 24 hour coverage with staff would be more than that.
I guess there's no avoiding this - with inflation the way it is, and the inability of certain businesses to raise prices (fast food burgers at $15 a pop?), and real estate going crazy, we are certainly moving to a Star Wars type future where "droids" of some sort will be in most aspects of our lives. All this money printing has a cost.
Bit sad that our kids won't have the experience of working in fast-food as their "summer job", nor will they have humans serving them from behind the counter. Cold and clinical...
Subway was the first one I quit and that was back in the early `80s. McDs was around the turn on the century. Burger King & Jack in the Box, ect were somewhere in between those. I've had a few Arby's sandwiches since then, they're not great but were still edible last time I ate there, and that's been a couple years now.
Good food will make you feel good. Those fast food joints don't do that. You notice this more when you're working physically hard. They just don't provide any real fuel to get you through that, and that's why I quit eating at those places.
That being said I hope we will see some kind of UBI in return for all the money that will be saved once robots take over these menial jobs.
But in speaking with the few corporate offices that would bother to even respond to us, we'd be brushed us aside as nothing more than a novelty, as they considered any introduction of automation anywhere in the food-assembly process to be a hit to their brand promise of "freshness" and "quality."
Now with the Great Resignation giving employees a bit of an upper hand, I'm pretty sure the corporates are changing their tune in displacing the $15+/hr/unit meat suits ASAP. They're just waiting for the regional/tier-3 QSRs like White Castle to go all-in before making the plunge themselves.
For the last ~100 years now we've optimized our ability to create jobs that are mindless because this makes hiring easier. The side effect of this is a workforce full of people who never get to work creatively and go home feeling drained, worthless, and depressed
I'm optimistic about all automation because it relieves some of the pressure of mindless work off of humans and frees them up to be creative. Now if only we had a social system in place to redirect some of the profits from automation toward supporting fellow citizens who want to do legitimate hard work on a brand new idea...
Completely agreed that maintaining low quality is a path to irrelevance for most of these places, regardless of automation.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/camilo-buscaron-93739827_seat...
On the other hand there will be a very large portion of society who will become obsolete with absolutely nothing useful for society to do.
A large portion of society that doesn't want to work on hot, dusty, dirty worksites might become obsolete with nothing useful for them to do. But there are absolutely jobs that are accessible to no-skill workers with only 1-2 years investment in schooling.
Almost everyone has something to contribute. The problem is that society structured in a way where most forms of productivity are undervalued. A great example of this is art. Nobody in their right mind could imagine a world without art yet there's the stereotype of a starving artist. Burger flipper robots aren't going to make or break the world.
The tradeoff is that it can't pick up other tasks when things are slow.
There's been plenty of innovations that have failed because while the initial price tag looks like a saving, the long term maintenance has changed the calculation.
I'll be interested to see if places like White Castle are still using them after a year or two.
I'd call that $50/hour right there.
There's a significant quality difference, even with mass-produced burger patties, cheese and sauce.
Bread and meat don't respond well to the same treatments, and as anyone who's had a service-station pre-prepared sandwich knows - bread absorbs moisture and goes soggy/damp if prepared more than an hour or two before use. With fillings that need to be re-heated it gets worse. There are various ways that they try to fix this, generally by putting more fats/oils on.
IMO I would rather have them prepared separately and combined at purchase time, even if it is the same ingredients that would be on a pre-prepared burger.
Sounds like a simple experiment to make :) fry up a burger, assemble it, freeze it, and try to thaw it a few days later and see how you like it.
Any effort would result in service improvement.
White Castle's burgers are weird and small, standardized and square, and cooked from frozen. Not exactly a general case for a burger-robot; sliders seem like they could easily be made in a vending machine. My bet is that somebody connected with White Castle is an investor, and this is a publicity stunt.
Commoditization of Compliments.
If it's cheaper to make food using automation, then some complimentary component of food service is going to capture some of the dollars saved. For example, we could see food trucks that make your food while en route and the truck pulls up and delivers it fresh.
Or, more simply, we could see commissaries/"ghost kitchens" capable of serving a larger variety of food with fewer people pop up in suburban strip malls. Maybe they could have a rotating menu. A small restaurant like that could pull down a few million in revenue each year even in less populated states, which is more than enough to pay good wages if the number of operators can be kept to <4 people.
Most of them now have several operators making a limited selection of food.
No more need for fast food restaurants because they just can transformed into a fleet of trucks.
History is full of clues of how this story is going to play out over the next few decades.
Long story short: there's a lot more going on with service industry than "just make it more factory automated to reduce labor costs" and any attempt at "disrupting" the industry that ignores that is going to do little better than be a more expensive vending machine.
They went out of style in the late 20th century (in the USA at least).
Alternately, the drive-thru version of an Automat. Drive up to a wall of boxes, each of which has a meal. Scan a QR code / punch a code in, the box with your meal pops open. Robots deliver meals in the background continuously. The boxes keep the meals warm, but JIT ordering would also work. This allows scaling operations up and down around peak hours without additional resources.
To increase efficiency, have a separate "ordering" line and a "pick-up" line. People who order on the app just go to the pick-up line.
https://www.fox19.com/2021/08/14/taco-bell-future-new-4-lane...
If you reduce the foot print enough you can fit a store that can serve the whole menu into a food truck (or sea can, or construction trailer) format and do it with acceptable results that opens up options.
Imagine renting a McDonalds for your sporting event, concert, oil drilling rig or forward operating base the same way you rent a big genset, rock crusher or any other equipment that gets mobilized on a semi truck.
I don't see it happening in the next decade without some yet unforeseen change that makes the tech cheaper, the engineering cheaper or the recurring cost of labor for running a manual restaurant more expensive.
As for automating food preparation, there's already factories that produce TV dinners and whatnot. There's nobody in those factories (doing food prep). It's not a matter of technology; i'ts a matter of format and deployment.
That way really nobody touches the food, not even the person eating it. In the new capitalist utopia, food touches you.
But then if I was rich enough I’d be Howard Hughes.
The french fry station looks like an ideal place to start, anyway, since it's usually a task that doesn't get a dedicated worker unless the place is extremely busy. In the quieter times it's something nobody has time to work or monitor while doing other things. And then, suddenly, everyone is waiting on the fries to finish.
From a more critical POV, it's kind of a kluge but at least a human can take over. There have been products for a long time [3] that are more self-contained and can do smaller batches of fries but need a hell of a lot more maintenance and cleaning.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB4vFRcCN-4
- Square patties already designed for uniform mass-cooking
- Square-ish bun (Easier to grab/guide I would assume)
- Open-face Box packaging rather than a wrapper or clamshell
It's a pretty streamlined design as-is, as evidenced by how quickly you can get a crave case from time to order.
If you structure everything around it from the start I could see it
Anyhow, they're not everyone's cup of tea, and if you're expecting a miniature version of a $12 premium burger no, this ain't that. They're bare bones, and not for someone who dislikes the combo of beef and onion. But within that they're pretty tasty and satisfying.
But, I'll give White Castle credit. They know what they are and what their market is and they seem to do good business.
Literal stoner food that’s open all night.
Fast food has been in need of a shakeup for some time, anyhow. The quality bar across restaurants as a whole has kept getting pushed upwards but there's hardly any difference between the fast food chains of 1980 and now, other than brand designs, a token "healthy" option, and recipe changes for cost.
I love places with ordering kiosks (or places that let me order using my phone). It's like going to the supermarket, I'd rather wait in line to order myself even if a real person was available to take my order right away.
But that auto fruit has mostly been picked already (at many places at least). McDonalds is even getting rid of its front line cashier staff now at many locations (with just one person to occasionally take cash from those who don't want to pay with a card).
I think fast food workers want any job to pay the bills. It’s hard to imagine that anyone enjoys frying fries.
I think it’s similar to how no one liked manually plowing fields so they moved on to other jobs when automation made them unnecessary.
Sorry, we have no burgers, come back later.
This just looks like some corporate process improvement project that is doomed to fail but looks good on someone's resume.
Google says fast food labor cost is about 25% of cost. I just don't know if that is really enough savings overall with the added expense and risk of a machine.
Every fast food place is understaffed right now (eg, Burger King has a help wanted sign over their drive through menu) so I think the robots will pick up the slack from all the missing humans.
100+ years ago, industries weren't solved yet. Customer interaction was improvised, food service involved actual cooking skills, products were still hand crafted. Today jobs that involve customer interaction are scripted. Food and commodity production use preprocessed, packaged ingredients, and the process is pipelined. Entry level jobs today have no wiggle room for creativity, and very minimal amount of training that is portable across jobs, because that's what maximizes profits.
Based on that experience I think a robot burger maker will be less likely to forget to add the burger to the burger.
A Big Mac with soda and fries is well over $20 in Norway.
Those high wages have to come from somewhere. Margins in the food service industry are incredibly tight.
From the video, it actually seems as though White Castle burgers are even more optimized for process automation as their preparation doesn't even require flipping (TIL).
If you want to see flipless automation, McDonald's has been doing it this way for a few decades now:
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