6 ms·

Fast food is already automated

26 points by jseliger 3y ago

aebtebeten 3y ago
cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808071 I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.
Jsebast24 3y ago
Automation is expensive to acquire, operate and maintain. It is better to hire employees...unless employees become much more expensive.
- atoav 2y ago
  Full automation certainly is. But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7. Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities. In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving. We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Instead of a McDonald's order taking about 20s at some cashier it is now multiple minutes at a kiosk. The work is offloaded to the customer. It is quite sad since the initial kiosk app was like as fast as the cashier since it didn't try to uppsell you 15 times. I guess it is a power problem. The employer does not have enough power over the staff to enforce BS procedures that makes them and the customers waste time while programmers happely complies since they are not the 'victims'.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      That time would probably have been spent queuing before.
      - kbar13 2y ago
        there are queues at the kiosk now too. because people take much longer perusing the interactive menu then they would when there’s the pressure of a cashier in front of them
      - rightbyte 2y ago
        Maybe. But is hard to compare since the cashier also picked together your meal. The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.
        HPsquared 2y ago
        Maybe an opportunity for LLM-powered AI agent with voice recognition on the automated kiosks. Can even ask it how its day has been.
        woleium 2y ago
        Your AI will interact with the stores api eventually, solving the problem
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Accelerando was a cautionary tale.
        add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
        Why use a slower, lossy, error-prone input method rather than tap a screen a few times to make precise choices? This has been solved for over a decade.
    - redox99 2y ago
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    The complexity is that to save money, you have to automate enough that you can reduce the staffing level. Go from say, 5 people to 4. When I worked at a radiology firm, they thought having patients fill out forms on an iPad would cost them money. They did it anyways to seem more modern.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      That isn't as hard as it sonds becaus demand is veariable all day. if they need the same staf, during the lunch rush but can get rid of someone in the less busy mid afternoon that is more saved than one less for the lunch rush. Lunch rush is the cheapest labor because there are a lot of customers and teamwork means you specialize to work faster. Midday you lose time walking between stations.
    - tyingq 2y ago
      > patients fill out forms on an iPad My favorite part of this is that most of these setups still ask for the same pieces of information over and over again. Sometimes even on the same page. Or stuff like "todays date". Really?
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7. Even then, the economics of such terminal isn't clear: for start you need multiple times more such machines than cashiers since everything is much slower on it (for self cash out machines in supermarket the ratio is up to 1 to 6 !) and the kiosks are also insanely expensive (6 figures). And as a result at the end of the day it has not gained that much traction over the past ten years (if you compare it to the deployment of things that were massive successes like credit card, you'll see that the success is much more limited here)
- drewcoo 2y ago
  CapEx v OpEx https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-difference-between-capital-expenditures-capex-and-operational-expenditures-opex.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-differ...
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  The main reason why it's expensive is that it's almost always outsourced, which drive the cost up a lot. For instance IIRC a self cash-out machine costs around $50k, for something that should cost less than $3k to manufacture with a trivial software stack. And many things are like that.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    Are you saying the _cost_ of manufacturing is 17x (50/3) what it should be, or are you saying that the selling price is 17x the manufacture cost and the market isn't operating to reduce the price? Are you referring to a McDo ordering machine, or a generic [supermarket] self-checkout machine?
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      Here I'm referring to a supermarket self check-out machine. And what I'm saying is that the cost for supermarket is 17x higher than it would be should they internalize the manufacturing and software development process. Outsourcing incurs a lot of additional costs in addition to the actual production costs in addition to the manufacturer's margin. As long as big companies don't understand that technology is a key component of their business, whatever it is, they won't be able to leverage it to even a fraction of its potential (not holding my breath though…).
Freak_NL 2y ago
The title of the article is 'Your Fast Food Is Already Automated', not 'Fast food is already automated?'.
- ginko 2y ago
  At least fix it to "Is Fast Food Already Automated?" so it doesn't sound like a sarcastic quip.
- dang 2y ago
  Ok, we've depunctuated it now
neonate 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240421095115/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/kernel-robot-fast-food-automation/678107/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240421095115/https://www.theat...

26 points by jseliger 3y ago

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808071 I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.

Jsebast24 3y ago

Automation is expensive to acquire, operate and maintain. It is better to hire employees...unless employees become much more expensive.

atoav 2y ago
Full automation certainly is. But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7. Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities. In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving. We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Instead of a McDonald's order taking about 20s at some cashier it is now multiple minutes at a kiosk. The work is offloaded to the customer. It is quite sad since the initial kiosk app was like as fast as the cashier since it didn't try to uppsell you 15 times. I guess it is a power problem. The employer does not have enough power over the staff to enforce BS procedures that makes them and the customers waste time while programmers happely complies since they are not the 'victims'.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That time would probably have been spent queuing before.
    - kbar13 2y ago
      there are queues at the kiosk now too. because people take much longer perusing the interactive menu then they would when there’s the pressure of a cashier in front of them
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      Maybe. But is hard to compare since the cashier also picked together your meal. The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        Maybe an opportunity for LLM-powered AI agent with voice recognition on the automated kiosks. Can even ask it how its day has been.
        woleium 2y ago
        Your AI will interact with the stores api eventually, solving the problem
        toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Accelerando was a cautionary tale.
        add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
        Why use a slower, lossy, error-prone input method rather than tap a screen a few times to make precise choices? This has been solved for over a decade.
  - redox99 2y ago
- nitwit005 2y ago
  The complexity is that to save money, you have to automate enough that you can reduce the staffing level. Go from say, 5 people to 4. When I worked at a radiology firm, they thought having patients fill out forms on an iPad would cost them money. They did it anyways to seem more modern.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    That isn't as hard as it sonds becaus demand is veariable all day. if they need the same staf, during the lunch rush but can get rid of someone in the less busy mid afternoon that is more saved than one less for the lunch rush. Lunch rush is the cheapest labor because there are a lot of customers and teamwork means you specialize to work faster. Midday you lose time walking between stations.
  - tyingq 2y ago
    > patients fill out forms on an iPad My favorite part of this is that most of these setups still ask for the same pieces of information over and over again. Sometimes even on the same page. Or stuff like "todays date". Really?
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7. Even then, the economics of such terminal isn't clear: for start you need multiple times more such machines than cashiers since everything is much slower on it (for self cash out machines in supermarket the ratio is up to 1 to 6 !) and the kiosks are also insanely expensive (6 figures). And as a result at the end of the day it has not gained that much traction over the past ten years (if you compare it to the deployment of things that were massive successes like credit card, you'll see that the success is much more limited here)
drewcoo 2y ago
CapEx v OpEx https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-difference-between-capital-expenditures-capex-and-operational-expenditures-opex.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-differ...
littlestymaar 2y ago
The main reason why it's expensive is that it's almost always outsourced, which drive the cost up a lot. For instance IIRC a self cash-out machine costs around $50k, for something that should cost less than $3k to manufacture with a trivial software stack. And many things are like that.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  Are you saying the _cost_ of manufacturing is 17x (50/3) what it should be, or are you saying that the selling price is 17x the manufacture cost and the market isn't operating to reduce the price? Are you referring to a McDo ordering machine, or a generic [supermarket] self-checkout machine?
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Here I'm referring to a supermarket self check-out machine. And what I'm saying is that the cost for supermarket is 17x higher than it would be should they internalize the manufacturing and software development process. Outsourcing incurs a lot of additional costs in addition to the actual production costs in addition to the manufacturer's margin. As long as big companies don't understand that technology is a key component of their business, whatever it is, they won't be able to leverage it to even a fraction of its potential (not holding my breath though…).

Freak_NL 2y ago

The title of the article is 'Your Fast Food Is Already Automated', not 'Fast food is already automated?'.

ginko 2y ago
At least fix it to "Is Fast Food Already Automated?" so it doesn't sound like a sarcastic quip.
dang 2y ago
Ok, we've depunctuated it now

neonate 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240421095115/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/kernel-robot-fast-food-automation/678107/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240421095115/https://www.theat...