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Why Restaurant Automation Is on the Menu
Wall St Journal ^ | March 24, 2016 | Andy Puzder

Posted on 03/25/2016 11:17:04 AM PDT by TroutStalker

Consumer preferences, reduced technology costs and government policies that increase labor costs are driving a trend toward automation in the restaurant business. If you make something more convenient and less expensive, it tends to catch on.

As recently as the 1960s, gas-station employees would rush to fill your car’s tank, wash the windows, check the oil and put air in the tires. Telephone operators made your long-distance calls and bank tellers cashed your checks. Those jobs now are either gone or greatly diminished.

Today, we reduce jobs whenever we shop on Amazon instead of our local retail outlet, use an Uber app rather than calling a cab dispatcher, order a pizza online, use an airport kiosk to print boarding passes, or scan groceries. Each of these changes in behavior has increased convenience and reduced labor costs—and competitive businesses pass the savings to their customers.

In the restaurant business, the increasing impact of technology doesn’t mean that a robot will soon roll up to your table and say, “Hi, I’m Trudi4783. I’ll be your automated server today.” But technology can replace certain functions. Touch screens are already transforming the way food is ordered in many restaurants.

(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 15dollars; automation; carlsjr; minimumwage; robots
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To: Buckeye McFrog
The pressures on the government to redistribute wealth and income will become irresistible.

It can work one of three ways:

  1. Marxism becomes a mandatory outcome of a jobless population surrounded by producing machines, or,

  2. The elites decide the masses are an unnecessary burden on mother Earth, and work to eliminate them (either by culling/killing, or by preventing reproduction using a disease or other universal vector), or,

  3. The AI becomes intelligent enough to not want or need humans around.

21 posted on 03/25/2016 11:34:58 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Islam is rabies. Anyone infected needs to be put down like a dog.)
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22 posted on 03/25/2016 11:35:16 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Here's to the day the forensics people scrape what's left of Putin off the ceiling of his limo.)
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To: Pearls Before Swine

Yes I remember...best orange soda around...and carrot cake


23 posted on 03/25/2016 11:35:28 AM PDT by Doogle (( USAF.68-73..8th TFW Ubon Thailawnd..never store a threat you should have eliminated))
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To: Lazamataz

The fourth possible outcome is that machines just produce such a bounty of stuff so cheaply, people completely stop worrying about what we’ve come to know as an economy.


24 posted on 03/25/2016 11:36:38 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Buckeye McFrog

A fifth outcome is that the sexbot they give me has me so busy hitting it that I don’t care about anything any more.


25 posted on 03/25/2016 11:37:41 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Islam is rabies. Anyone infected needs to be put down like a dog.)
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To: Lazamataz

Competition for post of the day has officially closed...


26 posted on 03/25/2016 11:39:35 AM PDT by oldschoolwargamer
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To: TroutStalker

Direct result of minimum wage, obamacare and union organizing. Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union campaigning ‘for the good of farm workers’, made it ‘economical’ to use tomato picking machines.


27 posted on 03/25/2016 11:40:04 AM PDT by Kent C
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To: TroutStalker

Good news for my shop. I just finished up my second PLC packaging machine. It shouldn’t be so hard to adapt that to burger making.


28 posted on 03/25/2016 11:41:38 AM PDT by Organic Panic
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To: TroutStalker

I for one would welcome paying a little more at the gas station for someone to check my oil, wash my front windows, check the air in my tires and pump my gas. Would suspect if stations would begin again to offer the option of full service enough people would take advantage of it to make it profitable.

Served as a great employment opportunity for high school kids when my son was in school. Of course back them parents made sure that their kids who drove knew how to maintain a car. Today’s kids probably not so much.


29 posted on 03/25/2016 11:41:41 AM PDT by Grams A (The Sun will rise in the East in the morning and God is still on his throne.)
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To: TroutStalker

Policies that encourage low skilled people not to work has this effect. They stop working and take handouts. Those with good jobs continue to receive normal wage increases.

So the party that continues to go on and on about the “growing divide” are the ones guilty of creating it in the first place, driving more voters to their corner. It is by design.


30 posted on 03/25/2016 11:43:22 AM PDT by fuzzylogic (welfare state = sharing consequences of poor moral choices among everybody)
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To: central_va
Actually. . .
31 posted on 03/25/2016 11:53:30 AM PDT by Salgak (Peace Through Superior Firepower. . . .)
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To: sickoflibs
Doesn't automation ‘steal jobs’?

Automation is the ultimate Chinaman.

32 posted on 03/25/2016 11:53:31 AM PDT by Agnes Heep (Trump 2016: Statism that WORKS for US!!!)
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To: Lazamataz
What happens when there are NO JOBS AT ALL.

You can spend every waking minute hitting ugly women.

33 posted on 03/25/2016 11:55:15 AM PDT by Agnes Heep (Trump 2016: Statism that WORKS for US!!!)
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To: TheGipperWasRight

Break-even point for fast food (a la McDonalds) kitchen full automation is somewhere around $10 - in other words, the point at which the bots and maintenance thereof cost the same as a human worker does per year.

The Dems want (and in some places have gotten) a $14-15 or higher minimum wage.

Do the math.

Additionally, a bot will never spit in your shake, wank on your burger, deliberately spread disease all over your fries or give you a cold. And they’re far more consistent about cooking your food.


34 posted on 03/25/2016 11:57:57 AM PDT by Spktyr (Overwhelmingly superior firepower and the willingness to use it is the only proven peace solution.)
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To: Pearls Before Swine
Does anybody remember the "Automat" cafeterias in Manhattan in the 50’s?

I do. Here's a book you may enjoy. Click the pic.


35 posted on 03/25/2016 11:58:02 AM PDT by upchuck (MAGA!!)
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To: EagleUSA; All

You are assuming it is not a gay robot.


36 posted on 03/25/2016 11:58:25 AM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; Not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: Agnes Heep

So there IS a bright side to this.


37 posted on 03/25/2016 11:58:36 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Islam is rabies. Anyone infected needs to be put down like a dog.)
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To: TheGipperWasRight

Or not enough of the right color machine.


38 posted on 03/25/2016 11:58:59 AM PDT by Secret Agent Man (Gone Galt; Not averse to Going Bronson.)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

There are already several of that kind of automated system going into production now, in the era of the $15 minimum wage.


39 posted on 03/25/2016 11:59:17 AM PDT by Spktyr (Overwhelmingly superior firepower and the willingness to use it is the only proven peace solution.)
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To: Graybeard58
In the mid 60s, it cost me a $10 roll of quarters to call my g/f and talk for 30 minutes, at a time when I was only making about $100 per month (Military).

I remember reading back in the 1980s, before the rise of ubiquitous cell phones, that if the phone technology of that time (1980s) was the technology of the 1940s, that it would take every female in the country to be telephone operators simply to keep the phone conversations connected.

Oh, and where we were stationed in Japan in the 60s, it took $3 a minute, 24 hours advance notice, and at least three operators (Japanese, LD, and Pennsylvanian), to have a conversation with our Philly-suburb family, and that was when base gas was 15 cents a gallon.

40 posted on 03/25/2016 12:00:26 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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