2 . Iron Cooks
Robots have arrived in American restaurants and hotels for the same reasons they first arrived on factory floors. 1 Labor, meanwhile, is getting expensive, as some cities and states pass laws raising the minimum wage.
“We think we’ve hit the point where labor-wage rates are now making automation of those tasks make a lot more sense,” Bob Wright, the chief operations officer of the fast-food chain Wendy’s, said in a conference call with investors last February, referring to jobs that feature “repetitive production tasks.” Wendy’s and McDonald’s are in the process of installing self-service kiosks in locations across the country, allowing customers to order without ever talking to an employee.
2 The international chain CaliBurger, for example, will soon install Flippy, a robot that can make 150 burgers an hour. John Miller, the CEO of Cali Group, which owns the chain, says employees don’t like working in the kitchen. Once the robots are sweating there, human employees will be free to interact with customers in more-targeted ways, bringing them extra napkins and asking them how they’re enjoying their burgers.
How many employees, though, do you need working in the café? 3 Will companies like CaliBurger see sufficient value in employing human greeters and soup-and-sandwich deliverers to keep those positions around long-term?
The experience of Eatsa may be instructive. The start-up restaurant, based in San Francisco, allows customers to order its quinoa bowls and salads on their smartphone or an in-store tablet and then pick up their order from a white wall of cubbies — an Automat for the app age. Initially, two greeters were stationed alongside the cubbies to welcome and direct customers. 4 So the company now employs a single greeter in its restaurants.
| A．The early success of the kiosks suggests that, at least when ordering fast food, customers prize speed over high-touch customer service. |
| B．Business owners insist that robots will take over work that is dirty, dangerous, or just dull, enabling humans to focus on other tasks. |
| C．The better hope for workers might be that automation helps the food-service industry continue to develop. |
| D．But over time, customers relied less frequently on the greeters. |
| E．The cost of machines has fallen significantly in recent years, dropping 40 percent since 2005. |
| F．This has typically been the story of automation: Technology eliminates old jobs, but it also creates new ones. |
