Robotic Restaurants

[RE]

Not really a new idea, reducing the labor costs to sell restaurant food goes back to the Automat, popular during and right after WWII as a place to buy a cheap sandwich or bowl of soup for lunch.  All the menu items were in little glass mailboxes on a wall and you dropped coins into a slot to open the door and get the sandwich.



We still had a few left in NYC when I was in HS, there was a Horn & Hardart on 14th St I ate at a couple of times.  After getting over the novelty of being able to get my sandwich immediately without waiting for it to be made in the kitchen, this food quickly lost its appeal.  Except at lunch hour when the boxes would empty quickly, the rest of the day the food sat there all day and wasn't too appetizing.

Fast Food replaced the automat in the 70s, where you could get hot, freshly prepared dogshit to eat at cheap prices.  EZ cooking methods with a grill or deep fryer meant you didn't need a decent short order cook anymore, you could train any HS kid in a shift how to flip burgers or drop battered chicken parts or french fries into boiling fat.  No waitresses, customers carried the food to the tables themselves.  Nice customers bussed their own tables, otherwise one of the cash iers would periodically go out and clear trays from the tables.  Typicall, an FF restaurant worked with a skeleton staff of 3 people, the manager, the cook and the cashier.  The mgr could do either of the 2 jobs and bus tables as necessary.  During busy hours, more staff, end of shift, just the mgr finishing up.



With the cost of labor rapidly rising with inflation and a shortage of the demographic of HS age students seeking their first job, prices at the FF joints are close to full service restaurants at the cheap end, like Chinese and Mexican.  Enter the IT entrpreneurs to bring us the modern fusion of FF & Automat, the Robotic restaurant.



I'm mainly surprised it has taken this long for such a restaurant to open for biz, observing FF restaurants in action you can see how repetitive an simple all the tasks are, along with the Assembly Line system of making a sandwich that looks just like Henry Ford's auto assembly line, just with food instead of mufflers and motor parts.  So some grad students designed one that they load up in the morning with the food, the customer presses buttons on what they want and the robot assembles it, heats it up, serves it and takes payment from your debit card.  No on site staff necessary!

So, will this latest  variant of automation to reduce costs and increase profits to the capitalist owner of the food robot take off and be successful?  Maybe, but I think this one might have gone a bridge too far, and misses too much of why people eat at restaurants, even crappy FF ones.

First, calling it a restaurant at all is a misnomer.  It's really just a "Cooked Food Preparer & Dispenser".  All the food has to come out on disposable plates and bowls, bagged so the consumer can easily carry it from the kiosk to tables, if there are any.  That would mainly be in Malls, already losing foot traffic.  Otherwise, it's just for the breakfast and lunch crowd getting meals to take out during the workday to eat in the park or in the car or a workplace lunch room.  So it misses the main social function of restaurants where you gather with friends to chat while you eat.  Of course today, many Gen Z never actually do that anymore, they have a Zoom meeting on their phones while they eat and don't bother actually getting together even if they sit only two cubicles away from their friends at Google HQ. lol,  Then after lunch, they don't go to a motel for a quickie either, they just do sexting and exchange selfies of their genitals. lol.

Presentation is another aspect missing here, along with the pampered feeling of being served food by other lower class people.  At least at lunch, if you have a job paying $25/hr you can afford to be served by a Mexican immigrant making $15/hr and feel rich and superior for an hour.  The plate is real unbreakable Corningware composite ceramic, not cheap petrochemical plastic, and you get real cheap nickel plated silverware to eat with instead of plastic forks and knives.

At least these early dispensers really only will work for bowl foods, deep fried stuff like fries or chicken and subs, you're not going to get any meals that have say au gratin potatoes, asparagus hollandaise and braissed pork chop laid out nicely on the plate.  Pizzas also probably can be automated pretty well and most pasta dishes, so italian food will probably be next for automation.

Now, all these foods which are a staple of the FF industry are suitable for the robotic kiosk, and probably will provide similar or maybe even better quality at a cheaper price, which would lead to such places going outta biz with homo sap staff.  But unless they substatially incease revenue and profits in that industry, they won't take over, just maybe slow down their disappearance.  This because you can pick up just about anything in thr frozen food section of a food superstore that when you microwave it is just as good as what such a robot would prepare on site.  That's the price product they are actually competing against, not fast food.  People are abandoning restaurants in favor of bringing food from home purchased in bulk during weekly shopping, because that'sthe cheapest alternative.  The frozen meals aren't as good or cheap as foods you can make yourelf from scratch if you have time and inclination to do it, but still will be cheaper and as good as these robotic meals are.

Bottom line, I don't think robotic restaurants will really succeed, I think they'll just be part of the diminishing social behavior of eating out as collapse progresses. A few high end restaurants will survive ctering to the rich and well paid managerial class that can afford $100 meals a couple of times a month, but otherwise people will just consume cheap food like potato chips that comes in bags and beef jerky sticks, sandwiches made at home or microwaveable soups and bowl foods.

Personally, I have been thoroughly disappointed with every restaurant I have gone to in the last decade, with the exception recently of Moose's Tooth, a Pizza/Micro Brewery in Anchorage that makes fabulous thin crust Pizza, and had a terrific Hungarian Mushroom Soup.  Highly recommended if you visit Anchorage.

Moose's Tooth Menu





https://www.nationalreview.com/news/here-come-the-fast-food-robots/

RE