Many moons ago I first read the excellent Stainless Steel Rat series. Harry Harrison rocks. I highly recommend the books as young reader escapist “literature”; particularly for any SciFi leaning kid with a libertarian bent. Reading his books as a young curmudgeon it felt like Harrison was reading my mind!
(Warning: mild risk of spoilers from books 30 years old.) In The Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, the hero and his mentor hole up in a futuristic fast food restaurant (essentially a metaphorical space McDonalds). The whole operation is robotic. The only sign of life is routine maintenance and a steady flow of customers showing up to chow down on Porcuswine burgers. Yum!
I thought this was a nifty idea. After all, fast food is the very epitome of an assembly line and the food is judged exclusively on uniformity and cost. (We all know that being somewhat inedible is tolerable in fast food but variation isn’t. I doubt any of us can recall a particular exceptionally high quality Big Mac or Whopper but we’ve eaten dozens of forgettable ones.)
Later I got a job as a fast food flunky and confirmed my suspicions. Not only could a monkey do my job but a monkey might do better than I, an actual human, who kept getting pissed at the scratchy uniform and the skeevy boss (who was the owner’s son).
A photo from the Curmudgeon’s resume. Also, “here’s your burger dumbass.”
I have no regrets. Perhaps all young people should do a thankless job where they’re a nameless widget serving a corporate overlord. Couple that with a paycheck that has had the first third siphoned in taxes and you’ve now had a shared experience. It’s things like this that once tied us together as a nation. Lacking that learning experience is risky. It makes one prone to becoming a snowflake in a safe space a half decade later; pondering thousands of dollars in student loan debt and plumbing the logic that led to a degree in unemployability.
But I digress. Robot-like food delivery is not a new idea. Here’s a photo from New York City in 1942 (link):
An automat. Virtually no human interaction. Isn’t it beautiful?
Despite the futuristic 1940’s, by the 1970’s a fast food robot was science fiction satire. (Nor did I get the goddamn flying car they promised!) Progress slowed and hovered around an assembly line type fast food kitchen but with humans at the grill. (Though the grill at my job was actually a conveyor belt so there’s that.) By the 1980’s we (meaning monkeys like me) stopped filling the paper cup. We merely shoved it across the counter at a customer who poured his own cola.
Here’s a cup. Pour your own damn soda.
I counted change like the Neanderthal I was. But eventually automatic change counters showed up because it’s easier to make a machine count than train a monkey.
Here’s your nickels. I’m too busy to count ’em. Get them out of the dish yourself. In fact, just quit bothering me.
By now automatic ordering devices are commonplace; though not yet found everywhere.
Is this really so shocking?
I notice that my old tasks (such as divvying up fries into the baskets) are increasingly done by a machine. (Also the kitchen at a McDonald is so filled with beeps and clicks that it sounds surprisingly like the deck of the Enterprise.)
As for the entirely human free hamburger experience? Not yet but soon. The ever rising cost (and red tape hassle) of labor cannot be denied. The Japanese famously vending machine deliver damn near everything. Stateside, hamburger robot prototypes already exist. They make the news from time to time. This link is goes to a hamburger robot situation being tested in Kansas where labor is cheap San Fransico. Here’s another “human interaction free” “restaurant of the future” that just happens to be in San Francisco and in no way corresponds to labor prices. It looks like an automat from the 1940’s.
Sooner or later the labor cost will push them into production. When it happens I’ll pretend to be Slippery Jim Degriz and type “Porcuswine Special” into the kiosk.
A.C.
P.S. In the interest of full disclosure I have had a job where I was laid off because the minimum wage increased and I have mixed positive and negative feelings about that. I have also taken a job where I replaced a robot because I was cheaper than the robot. Change/automation is not the same as “disaster”… sometimes it’s just change.
P.S.2. In honor of my old job I present Beavis and Butthead. Wouldn’t you prefer a robot to those two? Also, any young folks getting grief from a Gen X person about how culture was better in the past can use this to remind them that stupidity predates Facebook.
You say:
“(Also the kitchen at a McDonald is so filled with beeps and clicks that it sounds surprisingly like the deck of the Enterprise.)”
I say can you imagine the business they’d do if they put T’pol in every franchise as the manager???
I knew you could!
}:-]
Back in my college days many of my friends worked at the local McDonalds. That place was as busy as a bee hive. At least five or six people handled my order before I got to it. Today? Two. Maybe three. A couple of guys / girls in the back do all of the cooking and I never see them, and much of THAT is automatic. A machine bags the finished order and tosses it in the general direction of the drive thru window. A machine does the drinks and likewise delivers them to whoever hands me my food. A good friend manages a McDonalds – he says the day is coming when it will indeed be him and a dog running the place.
Ever walk beans as a kid? Throw square hay bales? Your labor costs went up and Monsanto invented a herbicide that was cheaper and New Holland invented a round baler that let a farmer in a tractor pick up 24 bales at a time in air-conditioned comfort. Did your parents or grandparents shuck corn or thresh wheat or pick cotton? The combine harvester became cost-effective at the turn of the century and the self-propelled version put a crapload of horses out of work in the 1950’s. Ever milk cows? Dude, that was automated back in the ’40’s and nobody milks cows by hand unless he has a pretty unnatural fondness of being slapped in the face with a wet tail.
Between the 1940’s and the year 2000 the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture went from 25% to 2%. Think of all those lost jobs! Oh, wait, we also have people engaged in building things that didn’t exist in 1940 like integrated circuits, batteries and a wide array of pollution sensors for the Prius, photocopiers, ATM’s, and I myself happen to have a job in the credit card industry and just think of all the technicians and scientists involved in bringing about the internet and telecom and plastics and magnetic stripe readers etc.. just so you can swipe a card instead of writing a check.
Make labor too expensive and somebody will make a machine to do it. For less.
– Max
I remember all teenage males being forced to deal with small square bales in the fall. I was delighted when big round bales showed up on farms.
How we milk cows here in New Zealand :
http://eatonrapidsjoe.blogspot.in/2017/02/new-zealand-milking-parlors.html
Much less labour, labour utilised more efficiently and happier cows. Plus the beef cattle are all grass fed so taste better!
However, the Curmudgeon was right about automated hamburger joints. This article:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/02/27/wendys-plans-kiosks-cut-labor-costs/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
says that Wendy’s self ordering kiosks cost $15,000 and at $15/hr minimum wage, that equates to 1000 hours of a humans labour or, at 40 hours a week, it will pay for itself in 25 weeks for ONE minimum wage worker. If you have more than one worker taking orders, then it will pay for itself a lot quicker.
Hey! I have an idea! Let’s go for $20 an hour minimum wage …
“Expensive”, though, depends on the size of the operation, and its market.
Hay bales, corn, picking cotton, and milking cows? My Dad did all that–in late 1950s Texas. Nobody around there big enough to own their own expensive machinery, and they had all these kids around…
I slung a lot of square bales myself, in the late 70s/early 80s, in rural Tennessee.
None of this negates your point; in fact, I agree. There will, however, always be small operators doing it by hand (for which I am thankful). The nearest town has several fast-food places. There is, though, a little concrete-block building, the Dixie Maid Cafe: it has maybe 6 tables inside, but only 3 or 4 parking spaces. You usually can’t find an open space; they never hurt for business, because the food is so damned good. A lot of it is burgers, but they’re real burgers, and a cheeseburger, fries, & a glass of tea isn’t more expensive than a McWenDeesKing combo. I’m just grateful that most folks don’t know that, and aren’t willing to walk 100 or 200 feet from the nearest parking space to get it.
I knew a guy ~35 years ago who got to be a McDonalds shift manager because he was the only one who could do the ratio calculation needed for the soft drink machine. I think the modern ones do it all thmselves.