Posted on 09/13/2017 10:30:50 AM PDT by C19fan
As fast food employees across the U.S. continue to protest for higher wages, a California chain restaurant has decided to hire a new staff member that works for free. The competition for the companys low-wage workers: a burger-flipping robot named Flippy.
CaliBurger has announced they will be installing the high-tech replacement in 50 of their locations around the world. Flippy, the robotic kitchen assistant, was created by a California startup company called Miso Robotics and is expected to roll out in 2018.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacramento.cbslocal.com ...
More and more you just order from your cell phone from home and drive to pick it up.
“The left will cry foul and demand that robots be outlawed in restaurants, because they take away jobs from the poor.
Then they will organize boycotts of this and any restaurant that uses them........................”
Just tell them that Flippy swings both ways, they’ll love it.
I know an engineer who was on a project about ten years ago. He was sworn to secrecy by his employer, but he let me know privately that the project was to develop an automated cook station for Wendy’s.
It never did go into production. He said they kept running into technical problems they couldn’t solve. That and Wendy’s started to feel the political heat after Obama became POTUS.
By now I guess the basic tech problems have been solved.
If so, we know what it's called.
It's a decent salary, you'll not get rich at it, but if you're worth anything, you'll not stay at it for long, either.
This could be a Futurama episode.
I was making $30,000/yr in 1984.
Good point!
Then Flippy makes the burger, you scan an app on your cell phone to pay for it, and you only need maybe one $15.00 an hour employee to assemble the various items into an order. Even that function could be automated if the idea pans out.
They don't even need a manager. All management functions dealing with record keeping are automated, there is no need for direct supervision of human employees. Hmmm... sounds like the future is here now.
I’ll take a burger-flipping robot over a burger-flipping Lawyer , ....... any day of the week and twice on Sunday!
Sheetz already uses touchscreens to take your orders. It wouldn't be much to add a CC swipe to them.
Touchscreen ties direct to the "Automated Cook Station". Your food gets processed - the same way, to the same standards and same temperature, correctly, every single time - dropped in a bag and passed to you. Other than when machines are restocked, no human hands touch it.
Pay a 2-3 techs to maintain the robots 24/7, a handful more people to keep the machines stocked and to mop up occasionally, and a few people to manage the whole thing. Cuts labor for several stores by what - 75%? More? Especially at a mandated $15/hr.
This is where we're headed, and progressive idiots are pushing us there.
There’s a cop and Trump bit.
As an entry level tech? Good for you. 30,000 in ‘84 was a heck of a nice salary. At least where I was.
The last burger I ordered at McD’s looked like it was thrown together during an Antifa riot. Fastfood-bots can’t come soon enough.
Seems like if the cooking station was larger the robot could flip a dozen at a time if there were some rectangular contraption like a large muffin pan that could be rotated.
But I didn’t stay at Holiday Inn last night so what do I know.
Then there’s the noon breakdown that shuts the whole operation down until the repair guy can get there.
WCCO (the TV station with this report at the link) is, however, the major TV/radio outlet in Twin Cities, Minnesota
so it is happening in more places than just Californication
We will order with our semi smart phones and pickup our paid orders at a counter or through a drive through.
No spit on food, left out sides or tops and no snarling in Hispanic when you place your order in English.
Why flip at all? Doesn’t Burger King put their patties on a chain-link conveyor belt that runs them thru a flame that cooks both sides at once and drops them in a tray below where they started?
3mm to flip burgers. Lets say you have 10 kitchen employees at one of these places. Then its replacing at a cost of 300,000 per employee. Lets use the $15 per hour. Thats 20000 hours of labor. Thats 2500 8 hour days. It will take that robot 6.849 years to replace 10 $15 per hr employees working 8 hrs a day, every day of the year.
So CAN the bot replace 10 humans at once? I don’t really see how. even if the store is open 24 hrs a day.
It will be another luddite revolt.
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