re: #415 William Barnett-Lewis

Which is more expensive? A grill station where a cook, or handful of cooks working full time can turn out hundreds of meals, or a technological terror that still requires human intervention to provide all the ingredients, handle issues, etc., and which could break down rendering the store inoperable. It’s far more difficult for a grill station to break down - there’d need to be a gas outage for gas-fired grills, or the power to go out on electric griddles.

Say you’re talking about $10,000 for the grill station. Plus the worker costs (which you’d still need for the workers to feed ingredients into the machine). As compared with the “burger flipper machine” that will likely cost a couple hundred thousand dollars (or a whole lot more).

Kiosks might conceivably replace the cashier, but you’d still need people to provide the meal to the customer, so you’re not eliminating all these jobs no matter what they claim.

And you’d need even higher paying jobs to service the equipment when it inevitably breaks down.

So, your break-even costs, once figuring in the depreciation of the equipment plus wages, and you’d still be ahead if you hired human workers at the $15 wage rate compared to the machine. This is why chains haven’t shifted away from the human factor - it doesn’t make fiscal sense, and the franchisees don’t want to take on that additional up-front cost either.

Where a burger (or other product) machine dispenser might make sense is in a low-volume setting or in a kiosk setting like in an airport - as a gimmick.

Japan is a hotbed for these kiosks, but they haven’t replaced restaurants and the human workers, so there’s that as well.