I have always wondered why nobody has seriously attempted to mass market hamburger making robots. They are very simple things to put together and there have been examples of machines made to do...
I have always wondered why nobody has seriously attempted to mass market hamburger making robots. They are very simple things to put together and there have been examples of machines made to do this task since probably the 50s or so.
And yet every time I have seen anyone actually market these as a place that serves food, it’s always as a gimmick. 9 times out of 10 it will be an extremely expensive robotic arm that has been fitted with an expensive toolchanger that will make a single burger at a time, extremely slowly, and if you are lucky it might be able to put lettuce and tomato on your burger as well, but you might have figured that kind of movement is very difficult to achieve on this kind of machine.
I wonder how much of it is the need to overcome the stigma of vending machine food quality historically being convenient garbage in the US. Often they are flat out bad. When they could be good,...
I wonder how much of it is the need to overcome the stigma of vending machine food quality historically being convenient garbage in the US. Often they are flat out bad. When they could be good, their turnover may be low enough to impact the quality of the output at order time, and even simply the thought of such a possibility is off-putting. Lowering the price in an attempt to make it an attractive fast food alternative just fuels the low-quality perception. Without a gimmick like an entertaining robot arm, it's hard to convince someone to even give a vending machine burger a try when there's any number of McDonalds, BurgerKing, Wendy's and more nearby in almost any location.
If we're talking general automation of fast food burger cooking and assembly like at a McDonalds, my understanding is that it's still not as cheap and flexible as human staff.
Maybe McDonald’s is a good example of the problems in foodservice automation. In the US almost every location has a kiosk so you can order without talking to a person but they are almost...
Maybe McDonald’s is a good example of the problems in foodservice automation. In the US almost every location has a kiosk so you can order without talking to a person but they are almost universally unused because their workflow doesn’t fully support ordering through them. Not only do customers have to deal with their terrible slow UI, they get worse quality service; they may get the food delivered to their table, but they will give you an empty drink cup even though they forced you to go through their drink list and select what you wanted already.
The vending machine concept solves most of these problems IMHO. I think it has an audience who will want to eat that food. It gives you your expectation ahead of time and then meets it. The major problem is that a single hamburger generally isn’t going to be enough food for many Americans and they are going to want to have a drink with it, but that can be solved with more vending machines.
I'm only in McDonald's once or twice a year, but my latest experience was entirely counter to yours. Everyone used the self-order kiosks. There was a single vestigial cash register, and in the...
I'm only in McDonald's once or twice a year, but my latest experience was entirely counter to yours. Everyone used the self-order kiosks. There was a single vestigial cash register, and in the time I was inside it sat totally unused.
That’s not been my anecdotal experience. The kiosks get way more traffic at my local mickie d than the counter - it is mainly, well, older clientele that go the one counter still manned. I prefer...
That’s not been my anecdotal experience. The kiosks get way more traffic at my local mickie d than the counter - it is mainly, well, older clientele that go the one counter still manned.
I prefer the kiosk as well. Is the touchscreen good? No. Is the interface good? No. But it beats the ambiguity of human speech. I’ve had so many orders misheard, or awkward “no, that’s not what I said” corrections. It’s not like you’re at a nice, quiet sit down restaurant with a server assigned - fast food is a loud, and fast environment.
It’s especially nice for mix and matching different items, so you don’t have to give a long list of discrete items in a noisy environment to another person.
Suffer through the touch screen and at least you know what counts as a kitchen will have the order with what you put on it. There’s also no pressure to order, as there is if you’re standing in silence in front of a counter with decision paralysis.
From a more general view, it’s not like you’re getting your taxes done. There’s not a lot of nuance in fast food orders - there’s a menu, pick some things from a menu. It feels like something where another human is not the best UI.
Here's a short story about my experience with McDonald's attempts to improve the customer experience inside the dining room in their US restaurants. I went there regularly because I hated food...
Here's a short story about my experience with McDonald's attempts to improve the customer experience inside the dining room in their US restaurants. I went there regularly because I hated food prep and there wasn't any better options for mid-work lunch in the area so I would go and get a chicken salad.
"Table service", or at least having them bring your food to your table, was rolled out first before the kiosks were even a thing, and one thing was clear; none of the franchises were OK with that change. Today they just call your number.
And then the kiosks came and it basically forced them to do the one thing that nobody wanted to do. And so they did a shitty job. They would always give you an empty cup, and that was usually after reminding them that you ordered a drink to begin with since they would usually give you nothing. This obviously wasn't how it was supposed to be, so every time this happened, I would do their stupid survey and complain about it. You see, if the franchise didn't care, McDonalds corporate offices would.
You'd think with that kind of pressure, they would start properly filling their drink orders. But no. Instead, they comissioned someone to build a cart with cup dispensers on it and had a staff member loiter alongside the kiosks, stop the customers from sitting down, demanding their receipt, and handing them cups for any drinks they ordered. Instead of doing things the right way, they decided to do it in a way that cost them significantly both for the cart they had to build and for the labor to man it.
I stopped complaining, mainly because explaining the whole situation seemed rather ridiculous and filling in the surveys were mind-numbing. And two weeks later, they stopped bringing the cup cart out and reverted to their old ways.
On the one hand, looks like a great burger, and the robotic novelty is certainly attractive. On the other, this scares me quite a bit. How many jobs things like this can eventually eliminate? And...
On the one hand, looks like a great burger, and the robotic novelty is certainly attractive. On the other, this scares me quite a bit. How many jobs things like this can eventually eliminate? And any eventually savings in cost are unlikely to ever reach the consumer.
Probably many, but from a 10k mile high view, I don't think it really makes sense to keep employ people for menial labor purely for the sake of being an opportunity to give them money. As to...
Probably many, but from a 10k mile high view, I don't think it really makes sense to keep employ people for menial labor purely for the sake of being an opportunity to give them money.
As to whether "savings reach the consumer", especially for things like a hamburger, I don't think that's the correct framing (but I do think prices would go down). Companies, in the end, don't optimize for selling things at the highest price - they optimize for making the most money. There certainly are circumstances where you will make more money by selling lower if your cost of supply goes down, and a competitive, elastic, substitute good like fast food hamburgers is one of them.
As an extreme example, take a replaceable, consumer electronics device like an SSD. As supply eases up on SSD manufacturing, has prices gone down over the years? ...hell yeah they have, and it's certainly not because Samsung's doing you a solid.
Yeah. We just have to make sure our societies can survive the changes that are coming down the pipe there. We're on the cusp of making millions of professional drivers unemployed, and food service...
I don't think it really makes sense to keep employ people for menial labor purely for the sake of being an opportunity to give them money.
Yeah. We just have to make sure our societies can survive the changes that are coming down the pipe there. We're on the cusp of making millions of professional drivers unemployed, and food service workers could face a similar fate. In the long run, my perspective is that the leftover jobs will be higher and higher skill and the required skills will change faster. Meanwhile we require less and less labor to actually sustain our society. So either we stick to the growth we have currently, forcing everyone to acquire new skills quite often (something most people are plain incapable of), employ them in bullshit positions, or we accept that in the future not everyone, not even the majority, has to work. Of course we need to keep people busy (and feeling productive) even then, and we need to make sure they are taken care of materially. That's not something that's going to happen overnight. Our entire society is centered around deriving value from your work, not just materially. I am valued (in terms of status) by society, and in consequence derive my own estimate of my value, in proportion to my work. Shifting our perception of status away from that will be an enormous undertaking.
They are, though. The main thing is that they are commodity items. Brand loyalty to the generic fast food restaurants is not non-existent, but for the most part, if a McDonalds burger cost $10 and...
They are, though. The main thing is that they are commodity items. Brand loyalty to the generic fast food restaurants is not non-existent, but for the most part, if a McDonalds burger cost $10 and a Wendy's burger cost $5, people thinking about shopping at McDonalds just want a burger. This makes it's a fairly elastic good. Elastic goods, in general, make more money at higher volume.
In comparison to, say, fancy luxury watches, where someone who wants a Rolex wants a Rolex and if a Rolex cost 10% more next month, well, they want a Rolex.
Also, once McD normalizes robot-prepared burgers, anyone else can develop/buy such a robot and could sell (nearly) the same burgers cheaper. That way, they undercut the competition, getting more...
Also, once McD normalizes robot-prepared burgers, anyone else can develop/buy such a robot and could sell (nearly) the same burgers cheaper. That way, they undercut the competition, getting more sales. Boom, price war.
I think(!) the way economists think about this is that in a given market, the thing that's constant(ish) is the profit margin. If you can slap 5% profits on your prices, you do that. 6%, competition will have your ass. If you manage to cut costs 10%, you'll of course look to exploit that, but in the long run, market forces will pressure you back down to a 5% profit margin. There could of course be a change in market structure that long-term enable lower or higher margins, which you already went into: The market structure (luxury, commodity, status of brands, but probably also capital investments etc) will determine what kind of profit margin you can expect.
Yeah, unless there was something unique about the Mashed article that I didn't notice, it appeared to just be some scant information and a quote from the Today article. So I changed the link and...
Yeah, unless there was something unique about the Mashed article that I didn't notice, it appeared to just be some scant information and a quote from the Today article. So I changed the link and title to that article, which is much more detailed. Hope you don't mind, @moocow1452.
I have always wondered why nobody has seriously attempted to mass market hamburger making robots. They are very simple things to put together and there have been examples of machines made to do this task since probably the 50s or so.
And yet every time I have seen anyone actually market these as a place that serves food, it’s always as a gimmick. 9 times out of 10 it will be an extremely expensive robotic arm that has been fitted with an expensive toolchanger that will make a single burger at a time, extremely slowly, and if you are lucky it might be able to put lettuce and tomato on your burger as well, but you might have figured that kind of movement is very difficult to achieve on this kind of machine.
I wonder how much of it is the need to overcome the stigma of vending machine food quality historically being convenient garbage in the US. Often they are flat out bad. When they could be good, their turnover may be low enough to impact the quality of the output at order time, and even simply the thought of such a possibility is off-putting. Lowering the price in an attempt to make it an attractive fast food alternative just fuels the low-quality perception. Without a gimmick like an entertaining robot arm, it's hard to convince someone to even give a vending machine burger a try when there's any number of McDonalds, BurgerKing, Wendy's and more nearby in almost any location.
If we're talking general automation of fast food burger cooking and assembly like at a McDonalds, my understanding is that it's still not as cheap and flexible as human staff.
Maybe McDonald’s is a good example of the problems in foodservice automation. In the US almost every location has a kiosk so you can order without talking to a person but they are almost universally unused because their workflow doesn’t fully support ordering through them. Not only do customers have to deal with their terrible slow UI, they get worse quality service; they may get the food delivered to their table, but they will give you an empty drink cup even though they forced you to go through their drink list and select what you wanted already.
The vending machine concept solves most of these problems IMHO. I think it has an audience who will want to eat that food. It gives you your expectation ahead of time and then meets it. The major problem is that a single hamburger generally isn’t going to be enough food for many Americans and they are going to want to have a drink with it, but that can be solved with more vending machines.
I'm only in McDonald's once or twice a year, but my latest experience was entirely counter to yours. Everyone used the self-order kiosks. There was a single vestigial cash register, and in the time I was inside it sat totally unused.
That’s not been my anecdotal experience. The kiosks get way more traffic at my local mickie d than the counter - it is mainly, well, older clientele that go the one counter still manned.
I prefer the kiosk as well. Is the touchscreen good? No. Is the interface good? No. But it beats the ambiguity of human speech. I’ve had so many orders misheard, or awkward “no, that’s not what I said” corrections. It’s not like you’re at a nice, quiet sit down restaurant with a server assigned - fast food is a loud, and fast environment.
It’s especially nice for mix and matching different items, so you don’t have to give a long list of discrete items in a noisy environment to another person.
Suffer through the touch screen and at least you know what counts as a kitchen will have the order with what you put on it. There’s also no pressure to order, as there is if you’re standing in silence in front of a counter with decision paralysis.
From a more general view, it’s not like you’re getting your taxes done. There’s not a lot of nuance in fast food orders - there’s a menu, pick some things from a menu. It feels like something where another human is not the best UI.
Here's a short story about my experience with McDonald's attempts to improve the customer experience inside the dining room in their US restaurants. I went there regularly because I hated food prep and there wasn't any better options for mid-work lunch in the area so I would go and get a chicken salad.
"Table service", or at least having them bring your food to your table, was rolled out first before the kiosks were even a thing, and one thing was clear; none of the franchises were OK with that change. Today they just call your number.
And then the kiosks came and it basically forced them to do the one thing that nobody wanted to do. And so they did a shitty job. They would always give you an empty cup, and that was usually after reminding them that you ordered a drink to begin with since they would usually give you nothing. This obviously wasn't how it was supposed to be, so every time this happened, I would do their stupid survey and complain about it. You see, if the franchise didn't care, McDonalds corporate offices would.
You'd think with that kind of pressure, they would start properly filling their drink orders. But no. Instead, they comissioned someone to build a cart with cup dispensers on it and had a staff member loiter alongside the kiosks, stop the customers from sitting down, demanding their receipt, and handing them cups for any drinks they ordered. Instead of doing things the right way, they decided to do it in a way that cost them significantly both for the cart they had to build and for the labor to man it.
I stopped complaining, mainly because explaining the whole situation seemed rather ridiculous and filling in the surveys were mind-numbing. And two weeks later, they stopped bringing the cup cart out and reverted to their old ways.
On the one hand, looks like a great burger, and the robotic novelty is certainly attractive. On the other, this scares me quite a bit. How many jobs things like this can eventually eliminate? And any eventually savings in cost are unlikely to ever reach the consumer.
CNET has a video.
Probably many, but from a 10k mile high view, I don't think it really makes sense to keep employ people for menial labor purely for the sake of being an opportunity to give them money.
As to whether "savings reach the consumer", especially for things like a hamburger, I don't think that's the correct framing (but I do think prices would go down). Companies, in the end, don't optimize for selling things at the highest price - they optimize for making the most money. There certainly are circumstances where you will make more money by selling lower if your cost of supply goes down, and a competitive, elastic, substitute good like fast food hamburgers is one of them.
As an extreme example, take a replaceable, consumer electronics device like an SSD. As supply eases up on SSD manufacturing, has prices gone down over the years? ...hell yeah they have, and it's certainly not because Samsung's doing you a solid.
Yeah. We just have to make sure our societies can survive the changes that are coming down the pipe there. We're on the cusp of making millions of professional drivers unemployed, and food service workers could face a similar fate. In the long run, my perspective is that the leftover jobs will be higher and higher skill and the required skills will change faster. Meanwhile we require less and less labor to actually sustain our society. So either we stick to the growth we have currently, forcing everyone to acquire new skills quite often (something most people are plain incapable of), employ them in bullshit positions, or we accept that in the future not everyone, not even the majority, has to work. Of course we need to keep people busy (and feeling productive) even then, and we need to make sure they are taken care of materially. That's not something that's going to happen overnight. Our entire society is centered around deriving value from your work, not just materially. I am valued (in terms of status) by society, and in consequence derive my own estimate of my value, in proportion to my work. Shifting our perception of status away from that will be an enormous undertaking.
This is nothing new. See Player Piano by Vonnegut. Engineers and managers baby. Also, go you blue team!
I'm not sure if burgers and SSDs make for an enlightening comparison.
They are, though. The main thing is that they are commodity items. Brand loyalty to the generic fast food restaurants is not non-existent, but for the most part, if a McDonalds burger cost $10 and a Wendy's burger cost $5, people thinking about shopping at McDonalds just want a burger. This makes it's a fairly elastic good. Elastic goods, in general, make more money at higher volume.
In comparison to, say, fancy luxury watches, where someone who wants a Rolex wants a Rolex and if a Rolex cost 10% more next month, well, they want a Rolex.
Also, once McD normalizes robot-prepared burgers, anyone else can develop/buy such a robot and could sell (nearly) the same burgers cheaper. That way, they undercut the competition, getting more sales. Boom, price war.
I think(!) the way economists think about this is that in a given market, the thing that's constant(ish) is the profit margin. If you can slap 5% profits on your prices, you do that. 6%, competition will have your ass. If you manage to cut costs 10%, you'll of course look to exploit that, but in the long run, market forces will pressure you back down to a 5% profit margin. There could of course be a change in market structure that long-term enable lower or higher margins, which you already went into: The market structure (luxury, commodity, status of brands, but probably also capital investments etc) will determine what kind of profit margin you can expect.
Not in a mall anyway.
Mashed is merely re-reporting on an article by today.com.
Yeah, unless there was something unique about the Mashed article that I didn't notice, it appeared to just be some scant information and a quote from the Today article. So I changed the link and title to that article, which is much more detailed. Hope you don't mind, @moocow1452.