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.
