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So instead of paying some bozo minimum wage to flip burgers, you have to pay someone to fix the burger robot every time it screws up. Which it probably will, fr
by afafsd 12y ago
So instead of paying some bozo minimum wage to flip burgers, you have to pay someone to fix the burger robot every time it screws up. Which it probably will, frequently, because it's got a zillion moving parts and a bunch of loose messy ingredients which can get stuck in them.
Replacing people with robots works great if you're replacing large numbers at the same factory, because firing workers and hiring robot repairmen still saves you a lot of money. If you're only going to replace one or two workers per site, though, it sounds pointless.
- ams6110 12y agoRestaurant kitchens are also rather hostile to precision mechanisms. They are greasy, hot, and stuff gets thrown around without a lot of care.
- ceejayoz 12y agoWouldn't robots fix the "without a lot of care" aspect?
- asdfologist 12y agoThat's exactly what people said about self-checkout lanes.
- wmeredith 12y agoYou know what's empty every time I go to Home Depot and Costco? Self checkout lanes. The Costco by my house just took out half of them and added more staffed stations.
- harmegido 12y agoI don't think one data point is enough to say that self-checkout lanes are a failure and waste of money.
- MrFoof 12y agoThere are varying implementations. Stop and Shop supermarkets have Symbol guns running Windows CE, and an iOS/Android app. You scan as you shop. When you get to a register you scan the "End Order" barcode on the register, then scan your Stop & Shop card. That's it. Pay. They even recently revved their software to speed up the process and reduce processing delays. I can check out an entire cart in about 40 seconds, and everything is already bagged the way I want it.
- afafsd 12y agoIf they said that self-checkout lanes would fail frequently because they have a lot of moving parts then they must have misunderstood the concept. (Incidentally, I'm really tired of the "That's what people said about such-and-such" counterargument to any attempt to predict the future success or failure of a given technology. "Hey, I don't think there's a big market for home-based chemical vapour deposition systems" "Oh yeah, that's what they said about personal computers, hah!".) Anyway, self-checkout systems are instrinsically less prone to failure since they don't have all those things I mentioned like moving parts and messy substances to foul them up, and a single failure doesn't shut the entire supermarket down.