More propaganda to make people hate increasing minimum wage.
Even if minimum wage never increased, they’d still try and put these robots in. These two things are unrelated!
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Robotry isn’t a word, but I think if it were it would be a way to refer to people who hated robots. Kind of like ribbitry is for people who hate frogs.
Edit: oed and mw must have a cage match to decide this one.
McDonald’s invested in robotics every year they didn’t increase minimum wage. Clearly they must not know shit about maintaining businesses. Automatic soda machines, burger cookers, bun warmers…
30+ years ago McDonald’s put in the automated fry hopper machines. This has nothing to do with minimum wage.
I’m also in favor of automating fast food, the fewer people handling my food the better. Let them hire maintenance workers instead of cooks.
You say that as if machines don’t get dirty and still require a good amount of hygiene/cleaning to keep up
Don’t get me wrong though because I am also in favor of automation only because I believe it will make some parts of work more bearable, minus the job displacement problem caused by our current economic model…
Taco Bell tried to do this in the 90s.
This article is light on the details of the failures, but basically the little bits of lettuce, tomato and cheese would slip out of the various holders and get smashed into the moving pieces and jam everything up while starting to rot. It was broken more often than not, and even when it wasn’t it was a pain in the ass to keep sanitary. Far more trouble than it was ever worth.
Building these machines and operating them won’t be the hard part. Keeping them working will be more expensive than paying people to make food for a halfway decent wage. The necessary logistics system just to supply replacement parts for the machines will probably break the bank, and never mind all the technicians they’ll need to make repairs.
Something something McDonalds milkshake machines.
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Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s, probably more than the mobile.phone has. This sort of device has been common in food factories for quite a while now and is inevitably moving into first high-volume then after refinement canteen kitchens before slowly making its way into the home.
It’s a great thing if it does, the food industry is hugely wasteful especially when trying to lower overheads which also lowers quality and healthiness of diets. Multistage processing allows near to raw ingredients to be sourced locally and used as needed thus avoiding the need for chemical preservatives, pre-proceasing and all the transport logistics, added risk, and etc. Cheap food places could go back to the days of getting fresh produce delivered rather than bags of presliced and shaped meal components from a factory - that’d be huge amounts of plastic and oil use removed from our global consumption.
Of course this installed device is probably just fairly basic pick and place using preshaped meal components but it’s a step in the evolution of small-scale industrial kitchens which will eventually benefit us all.
Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s
This is true, and we have smaller, lighter and more accurate motors, and fancy tools like machine vision with object identification, and substantially better electronics.
I don’t think it matters. Nothing has changed in food ingredients - they’re squishy, slippery, soft and irregular. If you put just a little too much pressure on a cooked grain of rice it will turn into a two-inch-long smear of starch that other things will stick to, and then you’ve got a little pile of gunk inside your machine. The more complex these machines are the more impossible it will be to keep them clean on the inside.
I remember when this burger making robot was getting a lot of attention (apparently they were “the definition of disruption”). Their restaurant location in Daly City (Creator Burger) closed during the pandemic but then reopened with a simpler version:
Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will now apply to the burger themselves.
Give you one guess why.
The company is now dead, their domain is abandoned and the restaurant location is permanently closed, although apparently they managed to sell one to a Sam’s Club in Arkansas last year. Wonder how that’s going for them now.
It might be a great thing if it wasn’t displacing so many workers.
Unless and until some sort of UBI system exists, I cannot applaud businesses increasingly putting people out of work, especially while continually increasing their profits.
I quit going after their CFO was bitching about quiet quitting keeping him up at night.
QDoba is better anyways, they’re just not in nearly as many locations (around me anyways).
Pancheros is my favorite. They press tortillas fresh when you order and I love it.
Nice! I’ll keep an eye out for one!
I wish I liked QDoba, Chipotle is still better to me even after all their changes which I am not crazy about either. Luckily we have a local chain that beats the pants off them both called Illegal Pete’s
QDoba is better anyways, they’re just not in nearly as many locations
Only seen them in shopping mall food courts.
interesting! I’ve never seen one in a mall in my area, just stand alone (same with Chipotle actually)
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I saw a Quiznos yesterday. I too thought it had gone out of business
How many decades before the purchase, installation and testing costs of these robots are recouped vs. that $20/hour wage?
Because I’m thinking it may not be all that cost-effective to just say “fuck you” to a minimum wage.
I honestly think it’s more the principle of the matter… they’d rather invest in robots to do this than consider paying those they view beneath them anything remotely resembling a living wage.
Is there any chipotle that exists where a better-tasting taco truck isn’t within walking distance?
I was promised taco trucks on every street corner if Biden won. Of all the Trump lies, this one is by far the most disappointing.
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We have bodegas and trucks, for a very reasonable price, although the trucks cost less, I suppose because of less overhead. If anyone’s never had homemade tortillas, I recommend them. In the bodegas, they usually have a machine, similar to the wringer on the antique wringer washers so they’re thin and more uniform, but hand made masa tortillas are divine, especially topped with avocado and queso fresco.
Yes, Atlanta.
Damn vote better bro
It’s less a function of not having decent Mexican food and more a function of both food trucks and the concept of “walking distance” not really being things in most of the metro area.
I guess we could send in the national guard.
Near me there is a chipotle, a taco bell, and a nice taco truck that is open late, all within just a couple blocks of each other.
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Fully-automated outdoor vending machines for pizza from scratch already exist and aren’t new. It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to adapt that to roll something into a burrito instead of baking it.
Yeah, this whole list is kind of nuts. Burritos already get mass produced in factories. Those prepackaged ones at the grocery store? Some brands have people hand making them but quite a few are machine made and rolled. It’s not a very big stretch to put that kind of machinery into a restaurant, and 2 techs is about the same price as 4 $20/hr works by their estimate
Chipotle has fallen off a cliff. It was decent 10 years ago, now it’s trash. They treat their workers like shit.
Mmm mmm… Don’t you love the taste of supply chain optimization?
Push it more and more towards universal basic income, with Chipotle’s help.
Chipotle is dead to me. Suprema Market in Atascadero is easily the best burrito I can get my hands on.
Have you tried an al pastor burrito from Los Robles Cafe in Paso? Thanks for the rec of Suprema Market
No, but I will today
Companies should be outright banned from dodging ways to pay wages like this
No, they should be required to pay taxes equivelant to what they subtracted when they removed a tax-paying worker. All of those taxes should go towards UBI.
I think we really need some kind of automation tax, whether or not it’s specifically this take. But between robotics and AI, the only sustainable solution is taxing these kinds of things to fund UBI or some similar payments scheme for the displaced workers. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a few wealthy capitalists and mass unemployment. So it sure sounds to me like they need to choose between the tax option, and a significantly more dangerous option.
Chill. You can’t force businesses to hire people any more than you can force someone to work.
Don’t worry, the robots will be subscription by year’s end.
That’s okay, I already don’t eat there.
