Fast-food worker replacement machine

by luu • 13 years ago

16 19 13 years ago

I have been following this for a little while and their site hasn't changed much since 2012 - if at all. I am really curious to see what they are doing now.

Many of the founders' angel.co profiles don't show any other employment but beyond that I haven't seen much else from these folks, on twitter or otherwise.

Anyone know?

taybin3• 13 years ago

Great, let's eliminate the last remaining service sector jobs! What could go wrong?

deelowe• 13 years ago

Better to plug our ears, cover our eyes, and pretend that the technology doesn't exist, right? Automation is going to displace workers (and it should). This is certain and it's something we need to prepare for. The transition may be painful, but the end game is that humans are no longer required to work to survive. This is a "Good Thing."

w0utert• 13 years ago

People are not just required to work because there's so much work to do, but because they need income, so they can consume, take on debt, service it, etc. No work means no income means no consumption means no economic growth means we won't be able to service our national debt or take on new loans.

I'd go as far as saying a non-trivial proportion of service sector jobs is only necessary to keep deprecated business models going, not because they are indispensable or add actual value to the economy.

The cynical conclusion to draw is that the common man will always be a working debt slave. A history of over 200 years of automation seems to support this conclusion, as people only have to work more and more to make ends meet.

taybin3• 13 years ago

I didn't say to pretend it's not there, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Employment is a serious issue and handwaving about painful, but worthwhile transitions to some utopia we aren't going to see in our lifetime doesn't seem realistic to me.

We're not going to reach that utopia if there's an anti-capitalist revolution first.

nawitus• 13 years ago

And what could go right?

csbrooks• 13 years ago

...frees up all of the hamburger line cooks...

Frees them up for what? Unemployment?

Einstalbert• 13 years ago

One special McDonalds ticket to machine-repair college, let's replace the workers with technicians and then make THOSE jobs minimum wage.

That'll be the future. People groaning at minimum wage jobs for repairing current-day minimum wage jobs.

joezydeco3• 13 years ago

Having actually worked on McD's kitchen tech, the corporation is extremely specific about their technology design including the amount of repair calls allowed per machine per year.

I can guarantee this machine would never make that metric. And I'd really like to see what this machine looks like after making 40 burgers, much less 400 or 4000. 40,000? Forget it.

Cooking and handling animal protein is a very messy job. Letting semi-skilled workers load raw beef into a hopper? That's a non-starter right there for a company like McDonald's.

nikoftime• 13 years ago

This is a very interesting pitch to the consumer: gourmet food/higher quality ingredients at fast food prices.

This is entirely different from the imagined pitch to investors: same food, cheaper production, higher profits.

It will be fascinating to see what they come up with and how they productize - it sounds like they think equipment sales is just an ancillary revenue source or something they "might do later" at present, but perhaps they'll change their minds if and when they have functioning burger bots.

ottoflux• 13 years ago

How does this fix the fast food problem? 1) Who will clean the machines well every night? 2) Really? Try to answer 1 honestly. 3) How will keep the tables clean, as well as the messes from terrible idiot customers who no longer believe they should clean up a mess they make (at least partially until getting help from employee)? 4) When I mean clean, I don't mean rubbing the table with microquat (or equivalent) and knocking the food and crumbs all over the seating surface. I mean cleaning it so that you would comfortably (and by you I mean more than 50 % of the people) lick the surface of the table. It takes hot soapy water, effort, and technique - all things that seem to be missing from restaurants (fast and many not-so-fast). 5) Terrible mopping, etc.

The big problem isn't keeping cheap sh*tty food cheap, it's keeping the restaurants clean enough you don't feel dirty when you leave. That is a social and managerial problem, and you don't fix it with magical meat grinder machine.

malandrew3• 13 years ago

Easy, take all the parts that need to be cleaned and convert it into disposable laminated paper product or plastic. The employee at the end of the night just removes the dirty ones and replaces it with clean ones. The tubes for example could be disposable.

The conveyer belt would have to have a wax paper or laminated sheet wrapped around the belt and affixed in place.

The only thing that would have to be cleaned is the cooking surface and grinding mechanism, which should be trivial.

You basically would need one employee to fill the device hoppers with fresh ingredients in the morning, babysit the device for the day adding more ingredients as necessary and then break the machine down at night and set it up again for the following day. I estimate 20 minutes labor in the morning and 40-60 at night. A huge savings for the ability to pump out 3600 decent burgers over a 10 hour work day.

adam-f• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if they can deliver on the custom grind promise. I know that supermarkets have to grind in a specific order: roughly cow, pig, chicken: lower required cooking temperature to higher.

Is every burger going to be well-done?

dzlobin• 13 years ago

Presumably a self-clean in between grinder changes is not entirely difficult though.

taybin3• 13 years ago

I'm skeptical that "gourmet" food can be made by a machine. Perhaps it is "artisanal" as well?

Fast-food worker replacement machine

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