This robot-powered burger joint could put fast food workers out of a job

“Momentum Machines” is starting work on a robotic burger joint… in San Francisco, of all places. The already have the robots. they’re now working on the actual storefront.

Best lines in the whole thing:

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy in 2012. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Heh.

The higher you raise the minimum wage, the more economic sense it’ll make to simply replace minwage workers with robots. Back in 2013 I estimated that a $15/hour worker might cost a company $40K a year; the article here says that the robot can replace two to three workers for $90K/year. But the thing to note is if the machine can replace three employees *at* *a* *time,* it’s actually replacing six to nine employees, since it can work 24 hours a day… 3 8-hour shifts. Thus saving the employer perhaps $270,000/year in employment costs. If the machine costs half a million, then it’ll pay for itself in two years, and start raking in the cash by year three.

From the burger-eating customers point of view, this will only be an improvement. The burgers will be made to order, with more probability of actually getting it right (I no longer bother to ask for no pickles, for example, as they’d inevitably wind up on the burger anyway). The burgers are less likely to be made sloppily due to the worker being in some emotional distress or sleepy or lazy or drunk, or made with Added Bonus Bodily Fluid Secret Sauce because the worker is mad.

Since the flagship burger joint is to be in San Francisco, I expect to see a lot of protests. Union thugs, illegal alien advocates, brainless hippy burnouts, social justice warriors… all are likely to be tweaked by the idea of a robot that replaces a minwage worker, and San Fran seems loaded to the gills with causeheads like these. But even if they cause enough trouble to cause the San Fran site to fail, the causeheads themselves are in a losing war. The robots are coming. Hell, they’re *here,* and the drive to jack up the minimum wage for minimally useful jobs is only speeding the process.

I’ve yammered about this before