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Comment by baxter001 | Hacker News Reader

The sauce part isn't new https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q0vk_fKDEo

Nor is the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW_Maj0g8cg

Nor are dry ingredient spreaders for anything from cheese to sliced meats regularly used at an industrial scale for frozen pizza and bruschetta already.

The fact that all the components exist but aren't in common use in delivery pizza isn't due to lack of innovation in the area, more likely it's cheaper with better throughput to have the labour of 4 pizza chefs rather than the expertise to keep an assemblage of these machines running in all the local pizza places.

For the industrial and frozen segment they make perfect sense, but on the "hot" pizza side they're probably more useful in collective bargaining than anything else.

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>The fact that all the components exist but aren't in common use in delivery pizza isn't due to lack of innovation in the area, more likely it's cheaper with better throughput to have the labour of 4 pizza chefs rather than the expertise to keep an assemblage of these machines running in all the local pizza places.

I think this is what it comes down to. I was picking up a pizza at Dominos the other day, and while the girl was ringing up my order, she was also taking calls for orders and manually entering them into the computer. The workload for one person seemed absurd. I started wondering "why on earth doesn't dominos just staff a call center in India and have the orders forwarded to the store's ticketing system?".

And then I realized It's because that would be a cost center, and the food industry is already on tiny margins (<2%) as it is. It is simply cheaper and easier to offload all of that work onto a $9/hr employee you're already paying that will be replaced every 3 months after burning out. Modern capitalism has become brutally efficient at the expense of humanity.

Yep, and that to me should be regulated. It shouldn’t be possible to make a job so needlessly stressful and probably cruel.

> I started wondering "why on earth doesn't dominos just staff a call center in India and have the orders forwarded to the store's ticketing system?".

Or, y'know, Twilio. Voice recognition on limited grammars (such as pizza toppings + addresses) is already crazy good. And the system can always repeat back what the customer said to confirm it parsed it correctly.

Or, go one step further: have no phone number, only a website. There's an cellular MVNO in Canada (https://www.publicmobile.ca/) that operates using this cost-cutting model, and they seem to be doing pretty well.

I have the nagging feeling that Telus is trying to kill the PublicMobile 'experiment' by transitioning their customers to Koodo before the bury the coffin.

Why are there ads all over the place for public mobile then?

It is weird that they were redirecting their customers to Koodo when they stopped offering a certain favorable plan.

Little Ceasars has started replacing humans with robots at least 5 years ago :)

https://youtu.be/c0BzHdQhG9U

I think you are correct, but in the nearish future I don’t think it’s unlikely that the costs come down to the point where cheaper to use these machines than to pay for the labor of 4ish chefs.

I think a big part of it comes down to handling maintance and repair for the machines. Maybe they’ll move to having one technician on call to service a large area. Or maybe they will try to make the devices simple enough that they can train normal employees to do maintaince and fix problems.

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