Competition isn't just other restaurants. It includes prepared food from grocery stores (often prepared off-site) and cooking at home, which at least some people will switch to as prices go up. I...
Competition isn't just other restaurants. It includes prepared food from grocery stores (often prepared off-site) and cooking at home, which at least some people will switch to as prices go up.
I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing from a macro perspective. We will adjust to higher labor costs in lots of different ways and restaurants come and go. But individual businesses do need to think about their own competitive situation and can't necessarily assume all the alternatives will get more expensive too.
After I got into 3D printing with FDM, it's a short skip and hop away until you realize that most robotics are fairly simple and a lot of the things that used to be really hard have become a lot...
After I got into 3D printing with FDM, it's a short skip and hop away until you realize that most robotics are fairly simple and a lot of the things that used to be really hard have become a lot easier. How much easier? To the extent that I'm kind of amazed that it's cheaper to hire humans than to build robots. For one thing, there are already a huge number of food prep robots. Unless you go to a gourmet restaurant, your sushi was probably put together by a machine. The sliced onions on your burgers were likely sliced by a machine, and if you are eating anything remotely like bread it was almost certainly kneeded and possibly proofed, portioned, or shaped by a machine. When you're working on a fast food grill with strictly portioned patties, there's no skill required to cook them; just use the prescribed heat setting for the prescribed time. That's why there have been so many hamburger making machines in so many places in the past. Heck, there are tons of places where food is being served to your table by robot right now.
A bunch of the links in the article are worth checking out too: https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ http://www.hyundai-holdings.com/?p=115&idx=480 https://www.kiwibot.com/ https://www.nuro.ai/
Competition isn't just other restaurants. It includes prepared food from grocery stores (often prepared off-site) and cooking at home, which at least some people will switch to as prices go up.
I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing from a macro perspective. We will adjust to higher labor costs in lots of different ways and restaurants come and go. But individual businesses do need to think about their own competitive situation and can't necessarily assume all the alternatives will get more expensive too.
After I got into 3D printing with FDM, it's a short skip and hop away until you realize that most robotics are fairly simple and a lot of the things that used to be really hard have become a lot easier. How much easier? To the extent that I'm kind of amazed that it's cheaper to hire humans than to build robots. For one thing, there are already a huge number of food prep robots. Unless you go to a gourmet restaurant, your sushi was probably put together by a machine. The sliced onions on your burgers were likely sliced by a machine, and if you are eating anything remotely like bread it was almost certainly kneeded and possibly proofed, portioned, or shaped by a machine. When you're working on a fast food grill with strictly portioned patties, there's no skill required to cook them; just use the prescribed heat setting for the prescribed time. That's why there have been so many hamburger making machines in so many places in the past. Heck, there are tons of places where food is being served to your table by robot right now.
A bunch of the links in the article are worth checking out too:
https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/
http://www.hyundai-holdings.com/?p=115&idx=480
https://www.kiwibot.com/
https://www.nuro.ai/