"The improved workflow allows for the redeployment of team members to focus on creating memorable moments for customers."
I... doubt it? It seems like it would allow the redeployment of team members to "no longer working at White Castle".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on that experience I think a robot burger maker will be less likely to forget to add the burger to the burger.
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.
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.
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.
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.