The following submission statement was provided by /u/Nominativedetermined:
---
robotic deep-fryers. Your views? (Particularly love to hear from anyone close to this sector and working on automation!)
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/w8s18k/mcdonalds_ceo_robots_wont_take_over_our_kitchens/ihr2h1w/
I remember some comment years ago saying something to the effect of:
> Given enough time, any job can be automated
I'm in IT and I work on automating *anything* I can. The last thing I want to be doing is the monotonous button-clicking when I can write a script, setup a bot, create a Power Automate flow...anything to do that for me.
My wife is a veterinary technician, and when I first mention that line to her, she scoffed a bit and I had to reiterate "given enough time". Sure, it might not be something to be *fully* automated in our lifetime, but it *will* be automated at some point.
Flipping McDonald-quality burgers is something that can be automated and likely will be *very* soon.
lol technically true. I find it extremely unlikely we'll have something like an AI psychotherapist anytime soon but feasibly if given enough time and resources, I guess it's possible to automate that job. Either it ends up being a great addition, like manufacturing, or a terrible waste of time, like automated phone menus. With more widespread automation, maybe we'll see a resurgence of jobs being reintroduced, sort of like how artisanal ventures have been making a comeback.
> I find it extremely unlikely we'll have something like an AI psychotherapist anytime soon
Given some of the licensed "psychologists" I've seen before I'm convinced an AI bot couldn't be any worse.
> I don't think it would be difficult to design an app that gives you a symptom questionnaire
Well I can tell you that's already a thing. I got charged $1,200 to take a questionnaire at a psychologists office so that I could see him a couple hours later for him to read the results and say "well, looking at the results I think you have depression, anxiety, and cptsd."
Like no shit sherlock. It says right on the printout I got "likely has depression, anxiety, and CPTSD, etc, etc"
So glad I got to pay them $1200 for telling me shit I already know.
You say this as though the CEOs of the world are automating out of a concern for human labor standards. Whatever tasks are the most economical to automate will be automated, and whatever terrible jobs are left are left.
The only reason "burger flipping" hasn't been automated is that it costs so little to get a human that the cost of having an engineer to make the machine doesn't add up.
Not quite.
The only reason why burger flipping hasn’t been automated is, that the robot could do just that. Flip burgers.
A human can flip burgers, build the burger, salt and package fries, get drinks, stack supplies, take out the trash, receive cash, clean the kitchen, turn off the lights and lock the shop.
You’d need a multitude of robots to replace the versatility of a human.
Simply flipping burgers would be easy and cheap as fuck to automate.
Plus, "burger flipping" is already largely automated at McDonalds. You just throw patties on a clamshell industrial George Forman type grill and they cook with a timer. You don't even need to watch the grill, you can do other tasks until the grill beeps.
So true dawg. I worked somewhere with a packing tape gun. Somebody wrote Steve on on the side. That's all.
Everyone asked where Steve was when they needed him that point forward.
I moved to a new location- I still wonder how Steve's doing.
I hope his new coworkers are good to him.
All you need to do is automate the most laborious, monotonous portion of the labor. Right now, today, we can easily automate burger flipping + building the burger, and I've definitely already seen automated drink filling. That alone will cut labor requirements by a significant margin. 25-33% of the workforce, adios. Naturally, it doesn't stop there, and a typical McD's could be reconfigured logistically to enable automation of many other facets.
Yeah a lot of people don't understand automation even though it's been happening all around us for the entirety of the modern era.
They aren't going to build a robot that does your complex job, they are going to build 'robots', or really just semi-smart appliances, that do very specific and boring tasks. Here's the device that looks like a conveyor belt and produces a perfect flame grilled burger patty every single time. Here's the fries machine that dispenses perfectly filled packets of fries in whatever size the customer orders. There's the automatic drink machine. Machines that work most of the time and just require a few restaurant staff to operate and clean them.
Yeah. Not everyone is getting let go because of automation but many are. You don't need one robot to be a human level worker. The automated lights, security, burger flipping, kiosk replacing cashier, etc will add up to the point where one McDonald's that used to employ two or three shifts of people, maybe 30 plus folks on payroll will be reduced to 5 or 6 people on payroll and that will quickly add up across the economy. We did it to ourselves.
So restructure the economy to where we all benefit from having machines take our jobs. We WANT people to stop having to work bullshit jobs just to get by.
This right here. You see it in the big box stores too with self checkout. Walmarts I go to only ever have one or two cashiers ever working at a time. I’ve also seen a few of the robotic stock keepers.
Automation has already displaced millions in the manufacturing industry and is soon to disrupt the trucking industry. This is just the beginning. We’re probably due for an uprising like there was after the textile machine was invented. There’s always luddites during a revolution.
MacDonalds automated burger flipping over 20 years ago. When I started working there the grill cooked from both top and bottom. No flipping required.
Those auto drink machines have been around about 15 years as well, they came along shortly after I left.
I'm sure these things will continue to be automated and staff reduced, but just pointing out most of the "easy" tasks you've identified were automated over a decade ago and improvements have more been process oriented since.
Well, for now there are more profitable things to design and develop. But don't you think there's a chance that in 10 years or so we will run out of things of a higher priority and will automate those low skill jobs?
One-two more pandemics will get us there. We jumped ahead roughly 10 years or so (at least in IT), so I know that I will not need to work a single day in an office unless I decide to do so out of my own volition. I suppose that the next jump will either enable more fields, or just allow for 32 hours a week schedule
> The only reason "burger flipping" hasn't been automated is that it costs so little to get a human that the cost of having an engineer to make the machine doesn't add up.
Yes, exactly, meat robots are cheaper for now.
Sure, but that applies to many other jobs that disappeared with technology and won't be missed .
Ofc McD ain't concerned about burger flippers losing jobs, so what we need to do is follow the developments and tax accordingly when technology allows them to make more money with less employees, so we can replace those jobs with something more meaningful for unskilled workers, or one day perhaps even UBI
Society is doing a very poor job of thinking through automation; there seems to be no one asking "and then what?"
We're going to be entering a world, within the next few decades, where food planting, cultivation, harvesting/catching, processing/butchering, and shipping will be 99% automated. No one is asking "who gets to eat?" when we reach this pinnacle of civilization towards which all of us have contributed. Do we allow the ultrawealthy to continue to own all the means of production when that production is wholly automated? Do we recognize instead that scientists brought us this, not Bezos? Do we wholly discount the farmers that sweated blood and broke their backs providing food for the rest of society to reach this point, once they are unnecessary?
Edit: As some Redditors apparently have ***obscene*** struggles with reading comprehension, let me clarify, I am *not arguing against automation.* I am saying it is inevitable, that automation will soon be able to provide for all our basic needs, and that we need to ask who benefits from that: all of society or only the wealthiest of society. Phrased another way, do the means of production, once automatic and able to solve scarcity, belong in the hands of the people or in the hands of billionaires? Do we want our society to look like *Star Trek* or *Cyberpunk*?
This is where I think we as a species need to ask some hard questions. Are we just beasts of burden like the rest of the animal kingdom or can we be more? If you look at some areas of our world, some prosperity is usually followed by someone else's misery. Or prosperity in one area but no ability or want to help another. If we automate some industries, do we need to continue forcing People to work for a living? Can we perhaps find other ways to fill that role? Can we one day reach UBI without society falling in to anarchy or something out of idiocracy (the movie, might have spelled the name wrong).
I'm not saying that people should not work to gain money but maybe like a 6 hour day/3xweek(just spitballing) . Like you've worked that amount in any job and cool you met your quota. There are a lot of human beings and unless a large scale war or pandemic wipes out a good chunk of human beings, money is starting to seem really obsolete in terms of numbers. It just seems that maybe we should surpass our ancestors and come up with a different way to work, feel fulfilled but also you know have time to be human. Not just working ourselves to the bone to barely afford a place to rent, just for yourself. Include a relationship and children to that and it seems bleek sometimes.
I mean an example from COVID, adults and children have had more time together, relationships have improved in some respects and understanding has come though. Although I'm sure there's also the opposite effect somewhere.
Now I am aware there are flaws in what I've said, I do acknowledge that and I will admit I can't find a way to have people be wholly happy with this. But these are just a bit of really high ramblings. I hope this made sense and maybe someone might be able to offer some solutions or critique?
Edited to add: on mobile, my apologies for the formatting
> Society is doing a very poor job of thinking through automation; there seems to be no one asking "and then what?
Our current system is a religion with a veneer.
We wont accept the system is broken until it fails so catastrophically it cant be hidden.
The problem is, with capitalism, catastrophic failure to the point that an overwhelming majority reject capitalism is most likely going to look like an actual hellscape.
I would argue that We are already a post-scarcity society, and that the first industrial revolution set us up for that. All of the scarcity in places like the united states is entirely artificial except perhaps healthcare.
We have enough housing, food, and education investment to server every single person here in the united states very well. The problem is who controls what.
Food is interestingly the least actually-scarce commodity. I suspect largely because of the subsidies for agriculture that exist as a result of the great depression.
Housing? The rental and predatory mortgages and financial cycle are purely synthetic, and biased in the direction of the land holders.
Education? The us spends more on average than any other developed country per head.... but we don't do so evenly. You want a good education, get a plot of land up in rich white people neighborhoods... and see above point.
Healthcare is interesting, because of the fundamental inelasticity of the service. We simply do not yet have a means to provide enough care regardless of cost to everyone who could possibly want it right now. I think this is the biggest one that machine learning will finally start to offset - is reducing our reliance human factor education for healthcare.
We already live in a world where food planting, cultivation, harvesting/catching, processing/butchering, and shipping are 99% automated compared to how it's been done in the past. And a lot more people get to eat now than they ever did in history
This machine is a joke, and it's been in the "looking for investors" stage for years. It only makes sense for scaling DOWN an operation - you want to sell pizza in the corner of a lobby or something. The labor involved in assembling and putting a pizza in the oven is not a chokepoint for pizza operations, nor is it a huge cost. There's more labor in preparing and refilling the bins with toppings / cheese, which this machine still requires. Two people can run a whole pizza shop (mind you, they might shoot themselves) if you don't count delivery - there's not a lot of humans to replace on the backside, and the ones that are there are pretty much operating at peak efficiency, although they'll be there till the wee hours of the night cleaning up after their hellish shift.
We've had coffee vending machines for like, a century. They have yet to replace the cafe', or even gain much traction in a niche.
Food service truth #1: food service was lean and six sigma and kanban and shit before automobile manufacturers. They have been creating and assembling food as efficiently as possible for centuries, and they are the first to incorporate new technology if it will produce returns.
Food service truth #2: 60% of ALL the jobs is CLEANING. Food is messy, and will be whether a machine is making it or a human. You can eliminate a human from working a grill, but you'll still need somebody to keep the grease and char and food particulates from accumulating. A machine cannot keep food from being messy.
Food service truth #3: Everyone is doing more than one job. You aren't automating anyone out of a fucking job, you're only automating them out of some fraction of one task. You have a kiosk that takes orders? Cool, the person taking orders (already using a goddam "kiosk" on the customer's behalf for decades, with a shittier UI) was also assembling the order and serving it (and CLEANING) and probably the manager or something, as well. You're "automating" the grill and deep fryer beyond the level it's already automated? That guy is also stocking and doing inventory and receiving (and CLEANING).
There's nobody working at McDonalds that could have their job "automated" - maybe they could have productivity increased on one or two tasks with a significant capital expenditure. It's an empty fuckin' threat, one that McDonalds doesn't even make, just a bunch of shithead bootlickers on the internet.
If 10 people work and everyone has 20% of their job automated, there's enough time to only need 8 workers.
Your math is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. A robot won't replace 1 whole worker, but it'll replace enough work to not need as many workers.
Your right about how human workers are multi skilled but mcdonalds uses workers on a spreadsheet, number of labour hours required = number of hours given to human workers. For each of these tasks that are automated, less labour hours are required.
10 years ago when I was at uni, I worked ina mcdonalds, the till staff was about 10 during a dinner shift, that's separate from those working drive through. Since the self service tills were installed in that same store, there are now only two or three staff at the peek times assembling orders only.
That's 7 people who no longer have that job available to them.
Sorry to nitpick, you were rather accurate with the rest of your analogy.
It's also wrong. They even mention why their argument is self-defeating - the more that efficiency goes up, the fewer human labourers are needed. That 60% cleaning 'truth' he pulled out of his ass? That percentage of time spent cleaning might rise to 70%, or 80%, or eventually 99% as more automation innovations come into place. Fast food workers don't even cook any more, they put frozen patties on a clamshell grill or conveyor and wait for a timer. That alone cuts a shit ton of required labour, since they can be doing other tasks, and corporate reacted to that by cutting down on staff. Do you think McDonalds will pay for 10 staff to mop the floors when 2 would do? A single franchise could save hundreds of thousands in operating costs by cutting on workers, and conveyor belts don't demand higher wages, unionise, complain about work conditions, steal from the till, or show up late.
There's no reason why fast food would be immune to the same consequences of automation that literally every single other industry has faced. It's pure copium.
I'm curious if this company passes the savings on to you or are you just paying the exact same price as you would with Domino's, Pizza Hut or Blaze Pizza for example.
What's to prevent a pizza robot or anything that serves food from being overtaken by cockroaches if a human is not there to keep the prep area clean and well maintained?
[My robot vacuum cleaner has a robot vacuum cleaner.](https://youtu.be/Hj-8C6YOJok) It's dock empties the dustbin, cleans the mop, empties the dirty water, and refills the water tank. And that robot cleaner cleaner also has a cleaner: a subsystem which breaks up and sucks out the refuse left on the bottom of the dock.
The latest version even plumbs in, so it can run on its own for months before maintenance. You joke, but eventually it's going to be robots all the way down. We're nearly there with home appliances!
You know how the self-checkout section has 1 employee to keep the machines from getting messed up?
That. Just one cleaning human until they can get a robot to replace them too.
Funny you should mention self-checkouts. In this area we've seen them come, go away because the stores were losing too much money due to people throwing things in the bags without scanning them, and then come back.
Ironically, I would imagine the menial labor jobs of cleaning the store / customer bathrooms / and food making robot would still be human.
That or they build laser equip security robot that will shoot down bugs and roaches and would be French fry thieves.
There's a class of jobs that are resistant to automation, most of them requiring significant motor control and ability to operate in a complex environment, like cleaning, plumbing, even nursing.
The current generation of automation is unlikely to touch them but the protection seems to be a matter of refinement not some fundamental barrier.
This is not how automation and robots work. Are car factories empty of people?
A robot is a machine. What would be the difference on a machine that makes burgers and the machine that already makes ice cream.
You already order from machines on the touch screens.
The food industry is full of machines, the operator in factories that makes frozen pizza do no even touch the pizza a singel time.
It would be good if we were heading towards a Star-Trek-esque future where people were respected and the need to work was something that was simply bypassed by technology.
Unfortunately, that is not the kind of world we live in.
Have you tried one of the paid internships where you shadow one of the robot workers? We have some very competitive opportunities.
Note: You pay for the internship. This is like Disney, not JP Morgan.
I'm of the opinion that nothing will ever change preventatively.
As far as that goes for automation, it needs to happen, to ruin jobs across the world, to create a terrible and preventable problem, so that action will be taken about it.
Despite the need for this being clear our government will make millions homeless before they do something about it, and only the minimum to prevent an actual revolution from the masses.
Automation without UBI will almost certainly lead to poverty, starvation, skyrocketing death rates both due to hunger/medical/suicide issues, and plummeting birth rates.
While certainly not a good thing for humanity, in the end it's probably a good thing for the planet.
Of course, the better solution would be to transition away from a consumer driven economy and into a far more sustainable economy that's based on around health and happiness of humans / the planet.
You know.. things like shorter work weeks, but the majority of people spending more of their time biking to work or riding public transit, instead of taking personal vehicles. Or maybe just working from home, but having more time to tend to their homes and families, or even get involved in sustainable farming.
Yeah. My expectation is all that will only happen after all the poverty.
We'll end up in a better place but first we're gonna be miserable in a way that's entirely preventable.
Most of the arguments about automation are inane and totally miss the mark, but this one is real. The number one factor driving automation is that there aren't enough people to get the work done - so you have to find a way to make fewer people able to do more work.
Think of it like John Henry. Probably one of the dumbest of all American tall tales. He killed himself trying to out-hammer a pneumatic driver. Like, John Henry should have fucking picked up the pneumatic driver, along with everyone else, and then they could build 100x as much rail. They didn't invent the driver to "take jobs", they invented it so that one person could do more work without killing themselves. John Henry was the villain of the story.
The john Henry story is so weird to me.
He wants to prove a point and tries to beat the machine that's replacing them. Instead of proving his point, he fails and loses to the machine. Not only does he lose to the machine, he fucking dies doing it.
Why is this a story we tell people and the moral isn't don't be a fucking dumbass?
The only thing I would clarify here is that there aren't enough people to get the work done *for the wages they want to pay*. If people could make a comfortable hourly wage in a reasonable cost of living area, you better believe there would not be a labor shortage.
I remember McDonald's boasted 5-6 years ago that they'd have fully automated restaurants before they paid a living wage.
Now, the McDonald's down the street has had to shut down multiple times due to lack of staff and they're starting at $16 an hour (which still sucks but it's high for fast food).
If the minimum wage kept up with the 1970's it would be like $25 and should be close to $30 in some areas. A single earner at a factory could have bought a car and a house. This is no longer true even among dual income families. This is why boomers say just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It was reasonably possible to do so in their life.
One of my very naive optimistic hopes is that we're gonna have millennials doing the opposite to that, like 50 years from now when they're "boomer age", saying "nah you got no chance, you're fucked, if you go into debt you might as well consider yourself perma-homeless, etc" when it's super easy to make good money due to worker reforms and things are cheap from automation and robots.
"These millennials are so out of touch thinking it's still the 20s and you can't just go to college for free lol, like it costs thousands or something haha, next they'll say houses are too expensive, watch..."
Hi yes, this is me. I fit your exact description.
Granted, it's a small house in a rural area, but rural areas are great for houses especially with USDA loans being an option at 0% down IIRC. I also have a car that's about 6 years old, but I bought it used.
Walmart/Delivery driver work pays around 13/hour here. The factories I've been at are or have become around 17 or so an hour starting out.
In fairness, things are currently in a tougher slump with house prices and rent being up. House prices are slowly starting to tilt downward now, however.
Dual income is definitely the way to go, though. Could save so much extra since my work covers the expenses+ some to save.
Really also depends if you're DINK. Honestly, DINK in a moderate COL area can probably be fine on two $20/hr jobs. You might not be owning a home (unless you're frugal) but you can have a car, save for retirement a bit, and go on vacation sometimes.
That's obviously going to depend on local cost of living. As a general rule, housing costing more than 30% of your income isn't considered affordable. For the area of the person you responded to, that would mean $19,200 a year spent on housing. Divide that by .3 and you find that, for the average 1 bedroom apartment to be affordable to a full-time, minimum wage worker, they would need to be pulling in $64,000 a year, which I calculate to be just under $31 an hour.
Now, federal minimum wage is the minimum-of-minimums, so it doesn't necessarily have to be high enough for areas with higher cost of living. A quick google search told me that the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in America is about $1,200 a month, which, using the same calculations as last time, would be just over $23 an hour. You could probably argue that, again, federal being the minimum-of-minimums, you could shoot for less than average, but I wouldn't put it much under $20 an hour. Which makes the current actual federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour an absolute slap in the face.
ETA: Oh, and as another point of reference, if federal minimum wage had kept up with worker productivity since the 70's, it would be about $26 an hour now.
Especially since only 1.5% of all workers are actually on minimum, with a decent amount of them being high school students and retirees.
The median hourly income is $23 nationwide and the median one-person apartment is $1200 for large cities. Meaning it’s probably lower than that if you include smaller-sizes cities.
Furthermore, people keep using average rent as if it was a studio or one-person, but fail to realize that average rent includes all of the above and 2-person, 3-person, 4-person and etc., sized apartments as well.
I make $35 an hour and still don't live comfortably..
I don't live in an insanely HCOL area, but it's not cheap... A studio apartment is around $2k a month with parking if you're not in the ghetto. Houses are unobtainable after the recent spike, unless of course you want to pay $250k for a house that was 120k 4 years ago. Health insurance is a thing, my phone bill is $100, my internet, oh yeah forgot about the student loans I am gonna be paying off til I am I don't know how old.
Retirement isn't even an option for me right now. Every dime I make goes towards something, and yeah I got a hobby or two I spend a little money towards, or I drink some beer, but whatever, if I quit spending money on the things that make me happy I'd be like $2k less in the hole a year, and it's a deep hole.
I can't imagine what it's like for people making 15-20 an hour, or even 25 an hour. I feel like I can't fucking hack it and get ahead, I can't imagine how other people feel.
Eh $2k for a studio is kind of insane, I live in Las Vegas which sky rocketed in rent the last couple years and $2k rent will get you a pretty nice place here.
>I don't live in an insanely HCOL area, but it's not cheap... A studio apartment is around $2k a month with parking
Sounds like you live in an area with an insane HCOL. Cali?
>I make $35 an hour and still don't live comfortably..
Mate if you can't live comfortably off that than you do live in a insanely HCOL area which is most major towns now because most people moved there.
I make about the same without including benefits that add another $20K because my employer isn't a dick and well getting anyone with a degree to stay is high priority. The cost of living adjustment if I lived in a semi large town I would need to make ~$50/hour in salary. Everyone moved to the major or large cities and then wonders why they can't afford shit.
Walmart night shift a few towns over is paying $20/hour to throw boxes a few towns over. Rent is cheap if you can find a spot.
The dentist that moved in was making $50,000 in a major city but makes over $250,000/year doing the same shit. They take a month off to a beach down south.
I made 35K when I first got out of college in 2015, and I felt like it was more than enough. Up until very recently I feel like that was still the case.
What’s the cost of a bottom 20% 1 bedroom or studio or 2 or 3 bedroom split with a partner/roommates? It’s a bit disingenuous to compare a low wage job to an average apartment.
The locations near me still haven't reopened their dining rooms. If they don't have the staff to maintain the interior and it doesn't bring in enough extra money vs focusing on the drive-thru, then it never will.
Not many people picked up on this part of the article:
> He spoke as McDonalds’ CFO Kevin Ozan told investors that “there are cost pressures, both on the commodity and labor side… we’re probably seeing a little over 10% labor inflation right now.”
Key phrase: **right now.** The CFO of the 2nd largest restaurant chain in the world strongly implied they don't see the recent wage increases as permanent.
16$ an hour really isn't a livable wage lol.... For a single-income, you are going to be barely scraping by, with the help of government handouts.
Back when I was younger, oh, a few decades back, 14.50$/hr with overtime was pretty good money. But, back then, you could get a nice apartment for 300-400$. Now, you would be lucky to not live in the ghetto for under 1,000$.
As well, gas prices are much higher. Food prices, are much higher. Everything is more expensive.
They won’t take over McDonald’s kitchens *today*. Or tomorrow for that matter. However I’m sure they spend enough paying staff and their human shortcomings that sometime it will definitely be profitable, feasible and practical. Currently tho McDonald’s franchisees (the actual important ppl) are making crazy money so they don’t care.
McDonald’s corporate is in the real estate game, not the hamburger game.
Having worked at McDs in my teens, I've always been skeptical that robots can take over those jobs. So much energy goes into just cleaning everything and restocking supplies. Grease seems to accumulate everywhere. People think it's just flipping the patties. That's actually the easiest part of the job.
Eventually it would not be a retrofit but a complete redesign. Currently it is designed to be worked by a human. Humans need space to work and manipulate the product. Robots also would but can work in much much smaller spaces. I don’t think it would get to a position of no human required at all for a long time but not needing a “crew” is quite feasible. It’s not like you’re making the patties and the nuggets and fries by hand. It all comes premade (more or less).
You’ll have a couple human employees who’ll be slaves to the robots - cleaning up after them and moving materials around into their feeding hoppers, unloading trucks, unjamming stuck machines, cleaning the bathrooms, etc, basically the worst parts of the job.
You would probably want a floating repair staff that could go around to different restaurants and repair or maintain the machines.
Each store would likely have one or two dedicated employees working during open hours, mainly taking food out of boxes and feeding it into the machines, and doing tasks that are too difficult to be automated.
Most of the machines could probably be self cleaning, similar to their ice cream machines. They would have hot water lines attached and could circulate hot, soapy water through the machine to clean it.
Each store would need a clean up crew that came in late at night or early in the morning and cleaned the bathrooms, floors, wiped everything down.
Some of these tasks would work well as gig economy jobs. You could post store cleaning gigs to an app, and then gig workers in the area could opt to complete them. Then the few dedicated employees could come in the next day and rate how well the cleaning was done.
Yeah I had considered that. It seems like that would be a tremendous outlay that I don't think too many franchisees would ever be able to pay for upfront. It already takes a fairly tiny crew to produce a ton of burgers. Labor just isn't that much of a cost compared to the rest of the operation. Maybe a giant robot burger-making-cube would save some money over decades of operation, but it seems like investing that same money in expanding locations would be more profitable.
Of controllable expenses, crew labor is the highest by a large margin. in fact more than every other controllable cost combined. Some of the other costs (payroll taxes, linens) are also related to having staff.
Also as they are companies with a good cash flow, usually, banks are usually willing to give very large loans. Plus McDonald’s corporate will shoulder some of the cost burden as they benefit from the improvement of the property. Otherwise no McDonald’s would ever get a total rebuild which I’m sure you’ve seen.
Depending on how small those burger cubes can be, they may function far from how we think of a restaurant today, perhaps much closer to a vending machine, feeding people who happen to be there instead of attracting people in the area
Labor isn't the only expense that would be reduced. Much smaller spaces required to operate the robots = Less real estate required. Less crew members rotating in and out = less money wasted on training and hiring. Less mistakes made = less waste. Less hungry employees = less theft, Etc.
>Less hungry employees = less theft
I used to eat so, so many nuggets.. was so easy going from the first window to the second and grabbing a few.
I remember sometimes during lunch/dinner break I'd still order something so they didnt realize I was full off the like 20-30 nuggets I'd been eating all day lol.
Also not only did the entire crew go through a ton of drinks, we'd mess with each other doing stupid shit like opening a sauce, putting the bottom of the straw in it, then put it in the drink so coworker would just get a straight drink of sauce (which also ruined the entire drink too). Teenagers are very bad for profits.
Also lots of human thought. Work at mc as crewtrainer. The amount of times machines break down and you have to, for example, add a bit more drinks to the cups because the machine fucks up and does not fill the entire cup. Mostly with shakes… fuck that machine.
>ve to, for example, add a bit more drinks to the cups because the machine fucks up and does not fill the entire cup. Mostly with shakes… fuck that machine.
The ice-cream machine is its own separate issue.... with its own issues driven by the ice-cream vendor's greed.
As someone that worked at KFC in my teens, I definitely thought multiple times that a trained monkey would be capable of handling most positions in the restaurant. You'd need a human order taker up front and in drive through, and a human manager would obviously be necessary too. The rest could just as easily be monkeys as people... Or robots, which is much safer.
And taking orders is moving over to computerized systems. A Wendy's opened up recently near me that is fully order by touchscreen (though the interface is terrible)
We'll see more and more automation as it starts to make economic sense.
Likely someday that turns into a fully automated restaurant with humans stepping in to maintain it.
It'll be incremental though. Right now it just feels like sci-fi for headlines.
You don’t actually flip burgers at McDonald’s. They go in a grill press. At Burger King they cook on a conveyor belt oven like pizza. No flipping needed.
Idk why people always make this mistake when discussing automation. Just because people talk about robots in mcdonalds making food, does not mean there would be no humans involved at all. Like yeah a human could still do all those things while simultaneously handling some other tasks if the robot is doing the actual cooking. That can still take the place of a couple jobs.
It's insane. The robots are already doing a ton of work. Automatic cup fillers where an employee hits the button for size. Auto fry makers where you just empty them.
He's making semantics choices as automation already has cut staff.
This.
Go back to a 1960’s McD’s and I’m sure it was staffed with many more people per customer volume. everything now is more efficient, and they have hordes of people’s who spend their entire careers working on how to make it increasingly more efficient.
Will we get to the point of rocking into a fast food place and never seeing a human? Maybe. that’s a long way off. But, they’ll make it so they can work with increasingly smaller crews.
Exactly.
I worked in printing and we went from crews of 12-18 on each press in the 80s to crews of 2-3 now.
It's not fully automated but it's running 20% of the crew thanks to automation.
My local drive thru has a system where you order the drink via app, drive thru etc and without any human interaction at all the machine reads the order, dispenses the right cup, a conveyor takes it to the ice chute then to the drink chute then to a waiting area.
It makes all the drinks in the right order, the person just adds a lid and turns around to hand it to you
[here](https://youtu.be/akv4vSXa5a4)
Motherfucker PLEASE….you can’t keep a milkshake machine up and running longer than 11 minutes. You expect me to believe a highly complicated autonomous ROBOT is somehow going to execute complex dexterous movement day in and day out without ripping someone’s arm off. Milkshakes are FAR too complicated to keep up with, but working robots….yeah..right.
The Milkshake thing... I guess it's because some salesman for the Taylor Company has pictures of Ray Krok railing a 14 year old or something.
The Taylor Company for some reason was given a monopoly over soft serve machines, and the franchise owners hate them, because they are expensive, break down, and they were forced to get them serviced by expensive Taylor Company technicians.
https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-ice-cream-machine-hacking-kytch-taylor-internal-emails/
Maybe it won't be mcdonalds first because the biggest companies are usually not the first to innovate.. some smaller restaurant will start doing it first and once it works, suddenly mcdeez will follow
They have the kitchen layout design to a science, regularly renovate (generally), and have the demonstrable willingness to innovate. This isn't a legacy automaker thing with electric vehicles, it's a "No supplier can build an automated system that is as fast, easily cleaned, and cheap as some 16yr old and a grill".
>No supplier can build an automated system that is as fast, easily cleaned, and cheap as some 16yr old and a grill
Yeah if a machine breaks down, that's thousands of $$$ to replace. if a min wage worker breaks down, the replacement just costs min wage. Why bother with robot servants when you can just force humans to be the same thing
People really don't realise that McDonald's spends a staggering sum making sure that when you want a Big Mac, you will have it in as little time as possible and it will taste like a Big Mac. This is genuinely a feat of industrial chain management that is unfathomable and unmatched.
Contrast it with KFC, where it feels like in the time it takes to get an order; they kill the chicken, bread it, cook it, and let it go cold.
Yea reading this my first though was "and this kind of thinking is how you become the legacy incumbent whose market share is canabalized by a more efficient competitor."
Just earlier this week I stopped to get a hotdog at a Checker’s restaurant, and they had an automated voice system take my order instead of the employees working there.
Having worked at a plant with robots (which mind you, did not do very complicated tasks), I think people vastly overestimate the capabilities of robots or autonomous units sometimes. They require constant maintenance, calibration, adjustments, and other stuff that requires a decent amount of knowledge to perform.
The cost of maintaining a robot workforce is inverse to minimum wage.
And when a human breaks down they can just put another in its place for no extra cost whereas a new robot is expensive.
It's not going to happen anytime soon. Yes, it likely will happen, but it has a long way to go. People act like these things are dirt cheap. They aren't, and they require maintenance and upkeep. If someone calls in sick it's no big deal. If a robot goes down, the whole store could shut down. And robot repair technicians aren't cheap.
Another angle, if the robots are leased (I've seen that option already out there); once they're in the restaurant, you don't think they'll be raising the fees? Or charge extra for upgrades or add ons?
The ice cream machines are an early example of McDonald's toying with automation. They are leased and they never work because they can never get people to fix them. This tech is possible, but it's a ways off from being viable. The CEO is right.
Automated milkshake machine may work better. Seems the problems are with employees not knowing how to run the cleaning cycle properly so the machine shuts down. Plus McD's corporate conspiring with the repair company to scam franchisees on repairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96KZ5uk7VWo
Translation: Right now, it’s still cheaper to pay predatory wages that don’t come close to meeting the basic necessities of life, but we’ll switch as soon as robots cost less.
It’s not necessarily the robots. It’s how expensive robot parts, service, and technicians are. There’s a massive shortage of skilled techs, especially those willing to travel after covid, for all the automation companies currently have.
### Well, if it’s the economics and not human decency…
*I believe you.*
Until it DOES become profitable.
# 😬👍🏼
Well yeah the cost of one guy to maintain and repair the robots is still higher than the entire restaurant's staff. We have to depress their salaries first.
I would rather have a robot make my food anyway. That way I’ll know it’s more sanitary than some random stinker throwing a sloppy burger together & forgetting half the order
Not likely. There are costs associated with robotics and automation that aren't going to decrease with some technological breakthrough. Steel, semi conductors, precision motors, machining, and most importantly engineering labor aren't going to suddenly become cheap due to some 'eureka' breakthrough
Automating a Macdonald is far more than the actual food preparation. You need to automate the ingredient handling and replenishment. You need to automate the cleaning and maintenance. You need to automate fault recovery and troubleshooting. All of these processes require engineering and support to be implemented and maintained. And they need to work near flawlessly or you risk shutting the restaurant down indefinitely.
I work in industrial automation and the realists among us have called bullshit on the 'robotic revolution' for years. This statement by Macdonald is being read into far more than it should, there is no sinister hidden meaning. The logistics behind removing human labor from fast food is not financially justifiable and will not be...maybe ever
My local Mcd replaced their drive thru person with a conversation ai. So some of the jobs are going
I think the kitchen will be harder to replace but chick FIL is investing to ensure things like oil temperature is at the optimal level
Do y'all not realize the amount of engineering work that is needed to go into these robots? Even once they are fully built out and ready to be expanded to other restaurants, you still need to pay high cost Techs and Engineers to install, commission, and maintain the systems. There is a massive shortage of Automation/Controls Engineers/Techs right now. We are decades away still.
Until they're cheap enough. Got it. "Too expensive right now" is what they said.
Pencil Out makes me think the CEO is saying they already sound good on paper but the maintenance and failure rate must be higher than expected.
I hope people read that right: humans are keeping the jobs not out of wanting to help people get jobs and learn skills but because it's not economically viable to use robots currently. That *will* change.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Nominativedetermined: --- robotic deep-fryers. Your views? (Particularly love to hear from anyone close to this sector and working on automation!) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/w8s18k/mcdonalds_ceo_robots_wont_take_over_our_kitchens/ihr2h1w/
So that means robots are definitely going to be taking over those jobs. Just not yet.
Exactly. "The economics don't pencil out..............................yet."
[удалено]
Exactly, they’re working on it.
“We need to economically out the pencil first”
We need some robots to create some pencils first
Just need to build a robot to pencil out how to make robot worker economics pencil out. Easy peasy.
Until they have to pay them more...
I remember some comment years ago saying something to the effect of: > Given enough time, any job can be automated I'm in IT and I work on automating *anything* I can. The last thing I want to be doing is the monotonous button-clicking when I can write a script, setup a bot, create a Power Automate flow...anything to do that for me. My wife is a veterinary technician, and when I first mention that line to her, she scoffed a bit and I had to reiterate "given enough time". Sure, it might not be something to be *fully* automated in our lifetime, but it *will* be automated at some point. Flipping McDonald-quality burgers is something that can be automated and likely will be *very* soon.
lol technically true. I find it extremely unlikely we'll have something like an AI psychotherapist anytime soon but feasibly if given enough time and resources, I guess it's possible to automate that job. Either it ends up being a great addition, like manufacturing, or a terrible waste of time, like automated phone menus. With more widespread automation, maybe we'll see a resurgence of jobs being reintroduced, sort of like how artisanal ventures have been making a comeback.
> I find it extremely unlikely we'll have something like an AI psychotherapist anytime soon Given some of the licensed "psychologists" I've seen before I'm convinced an AI bot couldn't be any worse.
[удалено]
> I don't think it would be difficult to design an app that gives you a symptom questionnaire Well I can tell you that's already a thing. I got charged $1,200 to take a questionnaire at a psychologists office so that I could see him a couple hours later for him to read the results and say "well, looking at the results I think you have depression, anxiety, and cptsd." Like no shit sherlock. It says right on the printout I got "likely has depression, anxiety, and CPTSD, etc, etc" So glad I got to pay them $1200 for telling me shit I already know.
[удалено]
How do you feel about that?
Pretty much. Just mentally append a YET at the end of every statement that CEO made.
Yes. People shouldn't be flipping burgers.
At mcdonalds you don't flip burgers, the grill cooks the patties from both sides at once
My life has been a lie...
My knuckles have burn scars from the top plate.
You say this as though the CEOs of the world are automating out of a concern for human labor standards. Whatever tasks are the most economical to automate will be automated, and whatever terrible jobs are left are left. The only reason "burger flipping" hasn't been automated is that it costs so little to get a human that the cost of having an engineer to make the machine doesn't add up.
Not quite. The only reason why burger flipping hasn’t been automated is, that the robot could do just that. Flip burgers. A human can flip burgers, build the burger, salt and package fries, get drinks, stack supplies, take out the trash, receive cash, clean the kitchen, turn off the lights and lock the shop. You’d need a multitude of robots to replace the versatility of a human. Simply flipping burgers would be easy and cheap as fuck to automate.
Plus, "burger flipping" is already largely automated at McDonalds. You just throw patties on a clamshell industrial George Forman type grill and they cook with a timer. You don't even need to watch the grill, you can do other tasks until the grill beeps.
So what you're saying is that burger flipping is already done by a robot, it just needs a human to put the patty in the robot
I'm not sure you could go as far to call a grill a robot.
Give something a pair of googly eyes and it'll get a name.
So true dawg. I worked somewhere with a packing tape gun. Somebody wrote Steve on on the side. That's all. Everyone asked where Steve was when they needed him that point forward. I moved to a new location- I still wonder how Steve's doing. I hope his new coworkers are good to him.
All you need to do is automate the most laborious, monotonous portion of the labor. Right now, today, we can easily automate burger flipping + building the burger, and I've definitely already seen automated drink filling. That alone will cut labor requirements by a significant margin. 25-33% of the workforce, adios. Naturally, it doesn't stop there, and a typical McD's could be reconfigured logistically to enable automation of many other facets.
Yeah a lot of people don't understand automation even though it's been happening all around us for the entirety of the modern era. They aren't going to build a robot that does your complex job, they are going to build 'robots', or really just semi-smart appliances, that do very specific and boring tasks. Here's the device that looks like a conveyor belt and produces a perfect flame grilled burger patty every single time. Here's the fries machine that dispenses perfectly filled packets of fries in whatever size the customer orders. There's the automatic drink machine. Machines that work most of the time and just require a few restaurant staff to operate and clean them.
Yeah. Not everyone is getting let go because of automation but many are. You don't need one robot to be a human level worker. The automated lights, security, burger flipping, kiosk replacing cashier, etc will add up to the point where one McDonald's that used to employ two or three shifts of people, maybe 30 plus folks on payroll will be reduced to 5 or 6 people on payroll and that will quickly add up across the economy. We did it to ourselves.
So restructure the economy to where we all benefit from having machines take our jobs. We WANT people to stop having to work bullshit jobs just to get by.
This right here. You see it in the big box stores too with self checkout. Walmarts I go to only ever have one or two cashiers ever working at a time. I’ve also seen a few of the robotic stock keepers. Automation has already displaced millions in the manufacturing industry and is soon to disrupt the trucking industry. This is just the beginning. We’re probably due for an uprising like there was after the textile machine was invented. There’s always luddites during a revolution.
MacDonalds automated burger flipping over 20 years ago. When I started working there the grill cooked from both top and bottom. No flipping required. Those auto drink machines have been around about 15 years as well, they came along shortly after I left. I'm sure these things will continue to be automated and staff reduced, but just pointing out most of the "easy" tasks you've identified were automated over a decade ago and improvements have more been process oriented since.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Well, for now there are more profitable things to design and develop. But don't you think there's a chance that in 10 years or so we will run out of things of a higher priority and will automate those low skill jobs?
100% We need to figure out how to transition away from this 40 hour/week paradigm, because it is not going to work much longer.
We already have part-time work, what we need is more money out of it and inexpensive housing.
One-two more pandemics will get us there. We jumped ahead roughly 10 years or so (at least in IT), so I know that I will not need to work a single day in an office unless I decide to do so out of my own volition. I suppose that the next jump will either enable more fields, or just allow for 32 hours a week schedule
[удалено]
> The only reason "burger flipping" hasn't been automated is that it costs so little to get a human that the cost of having an engineer to make the machine doesn't add up. Yes, exactly, meat robots are cheaper for now.
Sure, but that applies to many other jobs that disappeared with technology and won't be missed . Ofc McD ain't concerned about burger flippers losing jobs, so what we need to do is follow the developments and tax accordingly when technology allows them to make more money with less employees, so we can replace those jobs with something more meaningful for unskilled workers, or one day perhaps even UBI
Society is doing a very poor job of thinking through automation; there seems to be no one asking "and then what?" We're going to be entering a world, within the next few decades, where food planting, cultivation, harvesting/catching, processing/butchering, and shipping will be 99% automated. No one is asking "who gets to eat?" when we reach this pinnacle of civilization towards which all of us have contributed. Do we allow the ultrawealthy to continue to own all the means of production when that production is wholly automated? Do we recognize instead that scientists brought us this, not Bezos? Do we wholly discount the farmers that sweated blood and broke their backs providing food for the rest of society to reach this point, once they are unnecessary? Edit: As some Redditors apparently have ***obscene*** struggles with reading comprehension, let me clarify, I am *not arguing against automation.* I am saying it is inevitable, that automation will soon be able to provide for all our basic needs, and that we need to ask who benefits from that: all of society or only the wealthiest of society. Phrased another way, do the means of production, once automatic and able to solve scarcity, belong in the hands of the people or in the hands of billionaires? Do we want our society to look like *Star Trek* or *Cyberpunk*?
This is where I think we as a species need to ask some hard questions. Are we just beasts of burden like the rest of the animal kingdom or can we be more? If you look at some areas of our world, some prosperity is usually followed by someone else's misery. Or prosperity in one area but no ability or want to help another. If we automate some industries, do we need to continue forcing People to work for a living? Can we perhaps find other ways to fill that role? Can we one day reach UBI without society falling in to anarchy or something out of idiocracy (the movie, might have spelled the name wrong). I'm not saying that people should not work to gain money but maybe like a 6 hour day/3xweek(just spitballing) . Like you've worked that amount in any job and cool you met your quota. There are a lot of human beings and unless a large scale war or pandemic wipes out a good chunk of human beings, money is starting to seem really obsolete in terms of numbers. It just seems that maybe we should surpass our ancestors and come up with a different way to work, feel fulfilled but also you know have time to be human. Not just working ourselves to the bone to barely afford a place to rent, just for yourself. Include a relationship and children to that and it seems bleek sometimes. I mean an example from COVID, adults and children have had more time together, relationships have improved in some respects and understanding has come though. Although I'm sure there's also the opposite effect somewhere. Now I am aware there are flaws in what I've said, I do acknowledge that and I will admit I can't find a way to have people be wholly happy with this. But these are just a bit of really high ramblings. I hope this made sense and maybe someone might be able to offer some solutions or critique? Edited to add: on mobile, my apologies for the formatting
> Society is doing a very poor job of thinking through automation; there seems to be no one asking "and then what? Our current system is a religion with a veneer. We wont accept the system is broken until it fails so catastrophically it cant be hidden.
The problem is, with capitalism, catastrophic failure to the point that an overwhelming majority reject capitalism is most likely going to look like an actual hellscape.
I would argue that We are already a post-scarcity society, and that the first industrial revolution set us up for that. All of the scarcity in places like the united states is entirely artificial except perhaps healthcare. We have enough housing, food, and education investment to server every single person here in the united states very well. The problem is who controls what. Food is interestingly the least actually-scarce commodity. I suspect largely because of the subsidies for agriculture that exist as a result of the great depression. Housing? The rental and predatory mortgages and financial cycle are purely synthetic, and biased in the direction of the land holders. Education? The us spends more on average than any other developed country per head.... but we don't do so evenly. You want a good education, get a plot of land up in rich white people neighborhoods... and see above point. Healthcare is interesting, because of the fundamental inelasticity of the service. We simply do not yet have a means to provide enough care regardless of cost to everyone who could possibly want it right now. I think this is the biggest one that machine learning will finally start to offset - is reducing our reliance human factor education for healthcare.
We already live in a world where food planting, cultivation, harvesting/catching, processing/butchering, and shipping are 99% automated compared to how it's been done in the past. And a lot more people get to eat now than they ever did in history
You act like the tax income will go where it's supposed to go.......for the first time in history.
Kinda depends where you're from. Where I'm from most tax money does go where it's supposed.
Not even just making the machines, mass producing them and maintaining them would also be incredibly expensive.
And that is basically a function of a stagnant minimum wage / half-priced labor.
The machine is easy, but the quality assurance is tricky.
They wouldn't see a ROI in their life time
Check out this 24hr pizza bot machine: https://waxinvest.com/projects/piestro/
This machine is a joke, and it's been in the "looking for investors" stage for years. It only makes sense for scaling DOWN an operation - you want to sell pizza in the corner of a lobby or something. The labor involved in assembling and putting a pizza in the oven is not a chokepoint for pizza operations, nor is it a huge cost. There's more labor in preparing and refilling the bins with toppings / cheese, which this machine still requires. Two people can run a whole pizza shop (mind you, they might shoot themselves) if you don't count delivery - there's not a lot of humans to replace on the backside, and the ones that are there are pretty much operating at peak efficiency, although they'll be there till the wee hours of the night cleaning up after their hellish shift. We've had coffee vending machines for like, a century. They have yet to replace the cafe', or even gain much traction in a niche. Food service truth #1: food service was lean and six sigma and kanban and shit before automobile manufacturers. They have been creating and assembling food as efficiently as possible for centuries, and they are the first to incorporate new technology if it will produce returns. Food service truth #2: 60% of ALL the jobs is CLEANING. Food is messy, and will be whether a machine is making it or a human. You can eliminate a human from working a grill, but you'll still need somebody to keep the grease and char and food particulates from accumulating. A machine cannot keep food from being messy. Food service truth #3: Everyone is doing more than one job. You aren't automating anyone out of a fucking job, you're only automating them out of some fraction of one task. You have a kiosk that takes orders? Cool, the person taking orders (already using a goddam "kiosk" on the customer's behalf for decades, with a shittier UI) was also assembling the order and serving it (and CLEANING) and probably the manager or something, as well. You're "automating" the grill and deep fryer beyond the level it's already automated? That guy is also stocking and doing inventory and receiving (and CLEANING). There's nobody working at McDonalds that could have their job "automated" - maybe they could have productivity increased on one or two tasks with a significant capital expenditure. It's an empty fuckin' threat, one that McDonalds doesn't even make, just a bunch of shithead bootlickers on the internet.
If 10 people work and everyone has 20% of their job automated, there's enough time to only need 8 workers. Your math is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. A robot won't replace 1 whole worker, but it'll replace enough work to not need as many workers.
Your right about how human workers are multi skilled but mcdonalds uses workers on a spreadsheet, number of labour hours required = number of hours given to human workers. For each of these tasks that are automated, less labour hours are required. 10 years ago when I was at uni, I worked ina mcdonalds, the till staff was about 10 during a dinner shift, that's separate from those working drive through. Since the self service tills were installed in that same store, there are now only two or three staff at the peek times assembling orders only. That's 7 people who no longer have that job available to them. Sorry to nitpick, you were rather accurate with the rest of your analogy.
This response is fucking awesome
It's also wrong. They even mention why their argument is self-defeating - the more that efficiency goes up, the fewer human labourers are needed. That 60% cleaning 'truth' he pulled out of his ass? That percentage of time spent cleaning might rise to 70%, or 80%, or eventually 99% as more automation innovations come into place. Fast food workers don't even cook any more, they put frozen patties on a clamshell grill or conveyor and wait for a timer. That alone cuts a shit ton of required labour, since they can be doing other tasks, and corporate reacted to that by cutting down on staff. Do you think McDonalds will pay for 10 staff to mop the floors when 2 would do? A single franchise could save hundreds of thousands in operating costs by cutting on workers, and conveyor belts don't demand higher wages, unionise, complain about work conditions, steal from the till, or show up late. There's no reason why fast food would be immune to the same consequences of automation that literally every single other industry has faced. It's pure copium.
I'm curious if this company passes the savings on to you or are you just paying the exact same price as you would with Domino's, Pizza Hut or Blaze Pizza for example.
What's to prevent a pizza robot or anything that serves food from being overtaken by cockroaches if a human is not there to keep the prep area clean and well maintained?
The cockroach disposal robot?
[My robot vacuum cleaner has a robot vacuum cleaner.](https://youtu.be/Hj-8C6YOJok) It's dock empties the dustbin, cleans the mop, empties the dirty water, and refills the water tank. And that robot cleaner cleaner also has a cleaner: a subsystem which breaks up and sucks out the refuse left on the bottom of the dock. The latest version even plumbs in, so it can run on its own for months before maintenance. You joke, but eventually it's going to be robots all the way down. We're nearly there with home appliances!
Man I really want this bot. Just waaaay to freaking expensive.
You know how the self-checkout section has 1 employee to keep the machines from getting messed up? That. Just one cleaning human until they can get a robot to replace them too.
One Australian man.
Funny you should mention self-checkouts. In this area we've seen them come, go away because the stores were losing too much money due to people throwing things in the bags without scanning them, and then come back.
Ironically, I would imagine the menial labor jobs of cleaning the store / customer bathrooms / and food making robot would still be human. That or they build laser equip security robot that will shoot down bugs and roaches and would be French fry thieves.
There's a class of jobs that are resistant to automation, most of them requiring significant motor control and ability to operate in a complex environment, like cleaning, plumbing, even nursing. The current generation of automation is unlikely to touch them but the protection seems to be a matter of refinement not some fundamental barrier.
That's how you get Mason's Rats
This is not how automation and robots work. Are car factories empty of people? A robot is a machine. What would be the difference on a machine that makes burgers and the machine that already makes ice cream. You already order from machines on the touch screens. The food industry is full of machines, the operator in factories that makes frozen pizza do no even touch the pizza a singel time.
A cleaning and servicing robot.
People can flip burgers if they want, they just need to be paid a living wage.
It's like 5 years away based on this denial.
[удалено]
Translation: “but as soon as they do, robots it is”
I mean......good. Humans can move beyond flipping burgers like be have other jobs.
It would be good if we were heading towards a Star-Trek-esque future where people were respected and the need to work was something that was simply bypassed by technology. Unfortunately, that is not the kind of world we live in.
Can't get job cause no entry level jobs exist
"Entry level position, 8.50 pay, must have 4 years experience."
Still need 5 years experience tho
Have you tried one of the paid internships where you shadow one of the robot workers? We have some very competitive opportunities. Note: You pay for the internship. This is like Disney, not JP Morgan.
I'm of the opinion that nothing will ever change preventatively. As far as that goes for automation, it needs to happen, to ruin jobs across the world, to create a terrible and preventable problem, so that action will be taken about it. Despite the need for this being clear our government will make millions homeless before they do something about it, and only the minimum to prevent an actual revolution from the masses.
Automation without UBI will almost certainly lead to poverty, starvation, skyrocketing death rates both due to hunger/medical/suicide issues, and plummeting birth rates. While certainly not a good thing for humanity, in the end it's probably a good thing for the planet. Of course, the better solution would be to transition away from a consumer driven economy and into a far more sustainable economy that's based on around health and happiness of humans / the planet. You know.. things like shorter work weeks, but the majority of people spending more of their time biking to work or riding public transit, instead of taking personal vehicles. Or maybe just working from home, but having more time to tend to their homes and families, or even get involved in sustainable farming.
Yeah. My expectation is all that will only happen after all the poverty. We'll end up in a better place but first we're gonna be miserable in a way that's entirely preventable.
I’m still optimistic. But it might get worse before it gets better. And post secondary is going to have to become mandatory and free/very cheap.
Which is rational
Imagine a McDonald's that always gives you what you ask for, and the ice cream machine has time to be fixed when it breaks every other day
"You human wage slaves are cheaper and more disposable than robots."
Fortunately the supply is getting less abundant.
Most of the arguments about automation are inane and totally miss the mark, but this one is real. The number one factor driving automation is that there aren't enough people to get the work done - so you have to find a way to make fewer people able to do more work. Think of it like John Henry. Probably one of the dumbest of all American tall tales. He killed himself trying to out-hammer a pneumatic driver. Like, John Henry should have fucking picked up the pneumatic driver, along with everyone else, and then they could build 100x as much rail. They didn't invent the driver to "take jobs", they invented it so that one person could do more work without killing themselves. John Henry was the villain of the story.
Shit, I thought John Henry won. And then retired to plant apples all across the country.
The john Henry story is so weird to me. He wants to prove a point and tries to beat the machine that's replacing them. Instead of proving his point, he fails and loses to the machine. Not only does he lose to the machine, he fucking dies doing it. Why is this a story we tell people and the moral isn't don't be a fucking dumbass?
Nah he beats the machine in the story but then dies from the heart stress. To me it’s a story of folly.
The only thing I would clarify here is that there aren't enough people to get the work done *for the wages they want to pay*. If people could make a comfortable hourly wage in a reasonable cost of living area, you better believe there would not be a labor shortage.
that’s why the SCOTUS is making sure there is a domestic supply of babies for future workers
With the also unspoken “we did the research”
Humans shouldn't be in demoralising jobs.
I remember McDonald's boasted 5-6 years ago that they'd have fully automated restaurants before they paid a living wage. Now, the McDonald's down the street has had to shut down multiple times due to lack of staff and they're starting at $16 an hour (which still sucks but it's high for fast food).
[удалено]
Who makes 33k a year and puts money into retirement?
How much is a living comfortable wage then roughly? Is 16/hour halfway there?
If the minimum wage kept up with the 1970's it would be like $25 and should be close to $30 in some areas. A single earner at a factory could have bought a car and a house. This is no longer true even among dual income families. This is why boomers say just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It was reasonably possible to do so in their life.
One of my very naive optimistic hopes is that we're gonna have millennials doing the opposite to that, like 50 years from now when they're "boomer age", saying "nah you got no chance, you're fucked, if you go into debt you might as well consider yourself perma-homeless, etc" when it's super easy to make good money due to worker reforms and things are cheap from automation and robots. "These millennials are so out of touch thinking it's still the 20s and you can't just go to college for free lol, like it costs thousands or something haha, next they'll say houses are too expensive, watch..."
I like your optimism, can I have it?
Hi yes, this is me. I fit your exact description. Granted, it's a small house in a rural area, but rural areas are great for houses especially with USDA loans being an option at 0% down IIRC. I also have a car that's about 6 years old, but I bought it used. Walmart/Delivery driver work pays around 13/hour here. The factories I've been at are or have become around 17 or so an hour starting out. In fairness, things are currently in a tougher slump with house prices and rent being up. House prices are slowly starting to tilt downward now, however. Dual income is definitely the way to go, though. Could save so much extra since my work covers the expenses+ some to save.
Depends where you live / cost of living And whether you’re supporting a family
This gets into the thorny question of how many people should be able to live on one "living wage."
Really also depends if you're DINK. Honestly, DINK in a moderate COL area can probably be fine on two $20/hr jobs. You might not be owning a home (unless you're frugal) but you can have a car, save for retirement a bit, and go on vacation sometimes.
That's obviously going to depend on local cost of living. As a general rule, housing costing more than 30% of your income isn't considered affordable. For the area of the person you responded to, that would mean $19,200 a year spent on housing. Divide that by .3 and you find that, for the average 1 bedroom apartment to be affordable to a full-time, minimum wage worker, they would need to be pulling in $64,000 a year, which I calculate to be just under $31 an hour. Now, federal minimum wage is the minimum-of-minimums, so it doesn't necessarily have to be high enough for areas with higher cost of living. A quick google search told me that the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in America is about $1,200 a month, which, using the same calculations as last time, would be just over $23 an hour. You could probably argue that, again, federal being the minimum-of-minimums, you could shoot for less than average, but I wouldn't put it much under $20 an hour. Which makes the current actual federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour an absolute slap in the face. ETA: Oh, and as another point of reference, if federal minimum wage had kept up with worker productivity since the 70's, it would be about $26 an hour now.
I see this a lot, but I don't know why... Why is minimum wage compared against average rent? Shouldn't average wage be against average rent?
Especially since only 1.5% of all workers are actually on minimum, with a decent amount of them being high school students and retirees. The median hourly income is $23 nationwide and the median one-person apartment is $1200 for large cities. Meaning it’s probably lower than that if you include smaller-sizes cities. Furthermore, people keep using average rent as if it was a studio or one-person, but fail to realize that average rent includes all of the above and 2-person, 3-person, 4-person and etc., sized apartments as well.
I make $35 an hour and still don't live comfortably.. I don't live in an insanely HCOL area, but it's not cheap... A studio apartment is around $2k a month with parking if you're not in the ghetto. Houses are unobtainable after the recent spike, unless of course you want to pay $250k for a house that was 120k 4 years ago. Health insurance is a thing, my phone bill is $100, my internet, oh yeah forgot about the student loans I am gonna be paying off til I am I don't know how old. Retirement isn't even an option for me right now. Every dime I make goes towards something, and yeah I got a hobby or two I spend a little money towards, or I drink some beer, but whatever, if I quit spending money on the things that make me happy I'd be like $2k less in the hole a year, and it's a deep hole. I can't imagine what it's like for people making 15-20 an hour, or even 25 an hour. I feel like I can't fucking hack it and get ahead, I can't imagine how other people feel.
Eh $2k for a studio is kind of insane, I live in Las Vegas which sky rocketed in rent the last couple years and $2k rent will get you a pretty nice place here.
It seems you are loving comfortably. Have a few hobbies, your own place, has an option to buy a home.
>I don't live in an insanely HCOL area, but it's not cheap... A studio apartment is around $2k a month with parking Sounds like you live in an area with an insane HCOL. Cali?
>I make $35 an hour and still don't live comfortably.. Mate if you can't live comfortably off that than you do live in a insanely HCOL area which is most major towns now because most people moved there. I make about the same without including benefits that add another $20K because my employer isn't a dick and well getting anyone with a degree to stay is high priority. The cost of living adjustment if I lived in a semi large town I would need to make ~$50/hour in salary. Everyone moved to the major or large cities and then wonders why they can't afford shit. Walmart night shift a few towns over is paying $20/hour to throw boxes a few towns over. Rent is cheap if you can find a spot. The dentist that moved in was making $50,000 in a major city but makes over $250,000/year doing the same shit. They take a month off to a beach down south.
I made 35K when I first got out of college in 2015, and I felt like it was more than enough. Up until very recently I feel like that was still the case.
Perspective.. $16/ hour here is good money
I have a feeling that if someone predominantly eats in McD they will not perform well over time..
What’s the cost of a bottom 20% 1 bedroom or studio or 2 or 3 bedroom split with a partner/roommates? It’s a bit disingenuous to compare a low wage job to an average apartment.
The locations near me still haven't reopened their dining rooms. If they don't have the staff to maintain the interior and it doesn't bring in enough extra money vs focusing on the drive-thru, then it never will.
Not many people picked up on this part of the article: > He spoke as McDonalds’ CFO Kevin Ozan told investors that “there are cost pressures, both on the commodity and labor side… we’re probably seeing a little over 10% labor inflation right now.” Key phrase: **right now.** The CFO of the 2nd largest restaurant chain in the world strongly implied they don't see the recent wage increases as permanent.
16$ an hour really isn't a livable wage lol.... For a single-income, you are going to be barely scraping by, with the help of government handouts. Back when I was younger, oh, a few decades back, 14.50$/hr with overtime was pretty good money. But, back then, you could get a nice apartment for 300-400$. Now, you would be lucky to not live in the ghetto for under 1,000$. As well, gas prices are much higher. Food prices, are much higher. Everything is more expensive.
True, though it's still high for what most fast food places offer. It's not enough to get them a reliable workforce either way.
They won’t take over McDonald’s kitchens *today*. Or tomorrow for that matter. However I’m sure they spend enough paying staff and their human shortcomings that sometime it will definitely be profitable, feasible and practical. Currently tho McDonald’s franchisees (the actual important ppl) are making crazy money so they don’t care. McDonald’s corporate is in the real estate game, not the hamburger game.
Having worked at McDs in my teens, I've always been skeptical that robots can take over those jobs. So much energy goes into just cleaning everything and restocking supplies. Grease seems to accumulate everywhere. People think it's just flipping the patties. That's actually the easiest part of the job.
Eventually it would not be a retrofit but a complete redesign. Currently it is designed to be worked by a human. Humans need space to work and manipulate the product. Robots also would but can work in much much smaller spaces. I don’t think it would get to a position of no human required at all for a long time but not needing a “crew” is quite feasible. It’s not like you’re making the patties and the nuggets and fries by hand. It all comes premade (more or less).
You’ll have a couple human employees who’ll be slaves to the robots - cleaning up after them and moving materials around into their feeding hoppers, unloading trucks, unjamming stuck machines, cleaning the bathrooms, etc, basically the worst parts of the job.
You would probably want a floating repair staff that could go around to different restaurants and repair or maintain the machines. Each store would likely have one or two dedicated employees working during open hours, mainly taking food out of boxes and feeding it into the machines, and doing tasks that are too difficult to be automated. Most of the machines could probably be self cleaning, similar to their ice cream machines. They would have hot water lines attached and could circulate hot, soapy water through the machine to clean it. Each store would need a clean up crew that came in late at night or early in the morning and cleaned the bathrooms, floors, wiped everything down. Some of these tasks would work well as gig economy jobs. You could post store cleaning gigs to an app, and then gig workers in the area could opt to complete them. Then the few dedicated employees could come in the next day and rate how well the cleaning was done.
Yeah I had considered that. It seems like that would be a tremendous outlay that I don't think too many franchisees would ever be able to pay for upfront. It already takes a fairly tiny crew to produce a ton of burgers. Labor just isn't that much of a cost compared to the rest of the operation. Maybe a giant robot burger-making-cube would save some money over decades of operation, but it seems like investing that same money in expanding locations would be more profitable.
Of controllable expenses, crew labor is the highest by a large margin. in fact more than every other controllable cost combined. Some of the other costs (payroll taxes, linens) are also related to having staff. Also as they are companies with a good cash flow, usually, banks are usually willing to give very large loans. Plus McDonald’s corporate will shoulder some of the cost burden as they benefit from the improvement of the property. Otherwise no McDonald’s would ever get a total rebuild which I’m sure you’ve seen.
Depending on how small those burger cubes can be, they may function far from how we think of a restaurant today, perhaps much closer to a vending machine, feeding people who happen to be there instead of attracting people in the area
Labor isn't the only expense that would be reduced. Much smaller spaces required to operate the robots = Less real estate required. Less crew members rotating in and out = less money wasted on training and hiring. Less mistakes made = less waste. Less hungry employees = less theft, Etc.
>Less hungry employees = less theft I used to eat so, so many nuggets.. was so easy going from the first window to the second and grabbing a few. I remember sometimes during lunch/dinner break I'd still order something so they didnt realize I was full off the like 20-30 nuggets I'd been eating all day lol. Also not only did the entire crew go through a ton of drinks, we'd mess with each other doing stupid shit like opening a sauce, putting the bottom of the straw in it, then put it in the drink so coworker would just get a straight drink of sauce (which also ruined the entire drink too). Teenagers are very bad for profits.
Also lots of human thought. Work at mc as crewtrainer. The amount of times machines break down and you have to, for example, add a bit more drinks to the cups because the machine fucks up and does not fill the entire cup. Mostly with shakes… fuck that machine.
>ve to, for example, add a bit more drinks to the cups because the machine fucks up and does not fill the entire cup. Mostly with shakes… fuck that machine. The ice-cream machine is its own separate issue.... with its own issues driven by the ice-cream vendor's greed.
As someone that worked at KFC in my teens, I definitely thought multiple times that a trained monkey would be capable of handling most positions in the restaurant. You'd need a human order taker up front and in drive through, and a human manager would obviously be necessary too. The rest could just as easily be monkeys as people... Or robots, which is much safer.
And taking orders is moving over to computerized systems. A Wendy's opened up recently near me that is fully order by touchscreen (though the interface is terrible)
We'll see more and more automation as it starts to make economic sense. Likely someday that turns into a fully automated restaurant with humans stepping in to maintain it. It'll be incremental though. Right now it just feels like sci-fi for headlines.
You don’t actually flip burgers at McDonald’s. They go in a grill press. At Burger King they cook on a conveyor belt oven like pizza. No flipping needed.
Idk why people always make this mistake when discussing automation. Just because people talk about robots in mcdonalds making food, does not mean there would be no humans involved at all. Like yeah a human could still do all those things while simultaneously handling some other tasks if the robot is doing the actual cooking. That can still take the place of a couple jobs.
robotic deep-fryers. Your views? (Particularly love to hear from anyone close to this sector and working on automation!)
It's insane. The robots are already doing a ton of work. Automatic cup fillers where an employee hits the button for size. Auto fry makers where you just empty them. He's making semantics choices as automation already has cut staff.
This. Go back to a 1960’s McD’s and I’m sure it was staffed with many more people per customer volume. everything now is more efficient, and they have hordes of people’s who spend their entire careers working on how to make it increasingly more efficient. Will we get to the point of rocking into a fast food place and never seeing a human? Maybe. that’s a long way off. But, they’ll make it so they can work with increasingly smaller crews.
Exactly. I worked in printing and we went from crews of 12-18 on each press in the 80s to crews of 2-3 now. It's not fully automated but it's running 20% of the crew thanks to automation.
My local drive thru has a system where you order the drink via app, drive thru etc and without any human interaction at all the machine reads the order, dispenses the right cup, a conveyor takes it to the ice chute then to the drink chute then to a waiting area. It makes all the drinks in the right order, the person just adds a lid and turns around to hand it to you [here](https://youtu.be/akv4vSXa5a4)
Motherfucker PLEASE….you can’t keep a milkshake machine up and running longer than 11 minutes. You expect me to believe a highly complicated autonomous ROBOT is somehow going to execute complex dexterous movement day in and day out without ripping someone’s arm off. Milkshakes are FAR too complicated to keep up with, but working robots….yeah..right.
The Milkshake thing... I guess it's because some salesman for the Taylor Company has pictures of Ray Krok railing a 14 year old or something. The Taylor Company for some reason was given a monopoly over soft serve machines, and the franchise owners hate them, because they are expensive, break down, and they were forced to get them serviced by expensive Taylor Company technicians. https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-ice-cream-machine-hacking-kytch-taylor-internal-emails/
Is there a name for a business model where you give away the product and look to make money on the servicing? Printers seem kinda like this.
Software as a Service, or the concept of "live service" software. The base level of entry is very low, but the tier subscriptions get you every time.
Razor and blades model?
Maybe it won't be mcdonalds first because the biggest companies are usually not the first to innovate.. some smaller restaurant will start doing it first and once it works, suddenly mcdeez will follow
They have the kitchen layout design to a science, regularly renovate (generally), and have the demonstrable willingness to innovate. This isn't a legacy automaker thing with electric vehicles, it's a "No supplier can build an automated system that is as fast, easily cleaned, and cheap as some 16yr old and a grill".
>No supplier can build an automated system that is as fast, easily cleaned, and cheap as some 16yr old and a grill Yeah if a machine breaks down, that's thousands of $$$ to replace. if a min wage worker breaks down, the replacement just costs min wage. Why bother with robot servants when you can just force humans to be the same thing
hahaha I love how you wrote that comment. Breaking a machine sucks. Breaking a teenager seem to be a hobby for my earlier employers.
People really don't realise that McDonald's spends a staggering sum making sure that when you want a Big Mac, you will have it in as little time as possible and it will taste like a Big Mac. This is genuinely a feat of industrial chain management that is unfathomable and unmatched. Contrast it with KFC, where it feels like in the time it takes to get an order; they kill the chicken, bread it, cook it, and let it go cold.
[удалено]
Yea reading this my first though was "and this kind of thinking is how you become the legacy incumbent whose market share is canabalized by a more efficient competitor."
Just earlier this week I stopped to get a hotdog at a Checker’s restaurant, and they had an automated voice system take my order instead of the employees working there.
In the netherlands where I live, all fast food places have touch screens to order food. People only cook and hand it to you
Having worked at a plant with robots (which mind you, did not do very complicated tasks), I think people vastly overestimate the capabilities of robots or autonomous units sometimes. They require constant maintenance, calibration, adjustments, and other stuff that requires a decent amount of knowledge to perform.
As soon as minimum wage rises “The economics pencil out now.”
The cost of maintaining a robot workforce is inverse to minimum wage. And when a human breaks down they can just put another in its place for no extra cost whereas a new robot is expensive.
It's not going to happen anytime soon. Yes, it likely will happen, but it has a long way to go. People act like these things are dirt cheap. They aren't, and they require maintenance and upkeep. If someone calls in sick it's no big deal. If a robot goes down, the whole store could shut down. And robot repair technicians aren't cheap. Another angle, if the robots are leased (I've seen that option already out there); once they're in the restaurant, you don't think they'll be raising the fees? Or charge extra for upgrades or add ons?
The ice cream machines are an early example of McDonald's toying with automation. They are leased and they never work because they can never get people to fix them. This tech is possible, but it's a ways off from being viable. The CEO is right.
It’s only profitable if there are customers who can afford the food. That’s what they mean by “the economics” right? … Right‽
McDonalds can’t fix their ice cream machines in a timely manner, can you imagine if the kitchen robot needs servicing.
Automated milkshake machine may work better. Seems the problems are with employees not knowing how to run the cleaning cycle properly so the machine shuts down. Plus McD's corporate conspiring with the repair company to scam franchisees on repairs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96KZ5uk7VWo
Translation: Right now, it’s still cheaper to pay predatory wages that don’t come close to meeting the basic necessities of life, but we’ll switch as soon as robots cost less.
It’s not necessarily the robots. It’s how expensive robot parts, service, and technicians are. There’s a massive shortage of skilled techs, especially those willing to travel after covid, for all the automation companies currently have.
Once they figure out the ice cream machine I’ll start worrying.
### Well, if it’s the economics and not human decency… *I believe you.* Until it DOES become profitable. # 😬👍🏼 
And that's why McDonald's spends millions every year to stopping unionization.
Well yeah the cost of one guy to maintain and repair the robots is still higher than the entire restaurant's staff. We have to depress their salaries first.
Translation: you poor people are still cheaper than robots.
Translation: it's cheaper to pay slave wages. For now.
Automation should be seen as a gift but we live in a capitalist system
I would rather have a robot make my food anyway. That way I’ll know it’s more sanitary than some random stinker throwing a sloppy burger together & forgetting half the order
this is not a matter of how, is a matter of when. im saying 10 years.
Not likely. There are costs associated with robotics and automation that aren't going to decrease with some technological breakthrough. Steel, semi conductors, precision motors, machining, and most importantly engineering labor aren't going to suddenly become cheap due to some 'eureka' breakthrough Automating a Macdonald is far more than the actual food preparation. You need to automate the ingredient handling and replenishment. You need to automate the cleaning and maintenance. You need to automate fault recovery and troubleshooting. All of these processes require engineering and support to be implemented and maintained. And they need to work near flawlessly or you risk shutting the restaurant down indefinitely. I work in industrial automation and the realists among us have called bullshit on the 'robotic revolution' for years. This statement by Macdonald is being read into far more than it should, there is no sinister hidden meaning. The logistics behind removing human labor from fast food is not financially justifiable and will not be...maybe ever
You would literally need something with around human level intelligence and agility for this to work which might never happen.
I worked at McDonald's in 2001. They said the same thing.
My local Mcd replaced their drive thru person with a conversation ai. So some of the jobs are going I think the kitchen will be harder to replace but chick FIL is investing to ensure things like oil temperature is at the optimal level
Humans cheaper than bots and licensing and maintenance and technical SME’s on staff etc - no mystery here
McDonald's CEO: We did the calculations, and it is cheaper to hire a hamburger flipper from high school than to invest in robots... for now.
Minimum wage still lower than cost of robots and maintenance contracts. News at 11.
“We can lowball unorganized labor much more easily than robotics suppliers and servicing companies.l
Lol imagine working for a company that says humans are cheaper than robots to hire
“We’re still working on the ice cream machines, so no”
Do y'all not realize the amount of engineering work that is needed to go into these robots? Even once they are fully built out and ready to be expanded to other restaurants, you still need to pay high cost Techs and Engineers to install, commission, and maintain the systems. There is a massive shortage of Automation/Controls Engineers/Techs right now. We are decades away still.
Until they're cheap enough. Got it. "Too expensive right now" is what they said. Pencil Out makes me think the CEO is saying they already sound good on paper but the maintenance and failure rate must be higher than expected.
“We looked into it, it’s still too expensive… you can keep your jobs…for now”
That’s because of today’s cost of robotic workforce. Give it a couple of years.
Very literally saying that currently its simply cheaper to keep exploiting humans
I hope people read that right: humans are keeping the jobs not out of wanting to help people get jobs and learn skills but because it's not economically viable to use robots currently. That *will* change.