Even before labor shortages and supply chain issues began plaguing the economy, the food service industry was bringing in robots. From flipping burgers to making pizzas, automation has been taking over a variety of food preparation tasks. A San Francisco restaurant has now taken it to the next level, opening what it claims is the world's first fully autonomous restaurant this past weekend (though the "world's first" title is likely not accurate; Pazzi Pizzeria in Paris, for one, has been serving up robot-made pies for just over a year).
The restaurant is located in an outdoor food court in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood, alongside similar businesses. The similar businesses are namely food trucks, which is probably a more accurate label for Mezli than "restaurant," except for the important detail that it's not a truck. It is a lot like a shipping container in shape and size, though.
[...] To be fair, Mezli can only be called "fully automated" because the food served there is prepared by humans in a commercial kitchen then transferred to the robo-restaurant; machines aren't cooking food so much as selecting and mixing it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 03 2022, @09:54AM
Full self driving pizza parlor serves seeing eye dog instead of pizza.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2022, @02:18PM (8 children)
Let me get this straight... eliminating the cost of human labor only decreases the price of the sold goods by a handful of bucks, but increasing the wage of that human labor a handful of percents to a livable wage would result in a 15-or-whichever-other-exageration-of-the-day USD increase of the price of your burger so definitely cannot be done?
Something tells me them MBA's cannot math properly and are fetishi(s)ts for human suffering.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2022, @02:47PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2022, @02:56PM
But in the long run, once paid off, the "cost" of the robot goes to 0 + operating cost. What the GP was probably trying to point out is that this "we can shave a couple of bucks off the cost of your meal" highlights how much/little of the cost of your meal is actually driven by labor cost, and that it is less than presented by those opposing livable wages.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by owl on Saturday September 03 2022, @06:10PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2022, @10:28PM (1 child)
This "greed" thing seems interesting. Is there a place I can learn about it?
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Sunday September 04 2022, @12:37PM
I'll be running a training course next month. The price is very reasonable.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Saturday September 03 2022, @08:00PM
In all fairness, the robots also have access to a huge database of AI-chosen Winston Churchill-level customer-targeted insults, and don't have a sense of either corporate loyalty or job retention. So there's that benefit to going to the automated restaurant.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday September 03 2022, @10:31PM
That's exactly why robots are cheaper, they don't demand wage increases.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2022, @01:07AM
Funny how someone can ask questions like this and just not get it. In this story we have someone going to substantial effort to displace human labor (and perhaps some real estate costs as well) with automation. The particular argument you mention may be bogus, but we have half a century of evidence that labor costs are a big deal throughout the business world. Sure, talk is cheap, but here, they're building a bunch of novel, expensive infrastructure just to save on labor costs. That illustrates the seriousness of the problem.
The key thing to understand is that it's a hand of dollars difference between profit and loss. So even though labor costs may seem small, it's much bigger compared to that profit (or more generally positive benefit) that businesses pursue in order to stay in business.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Saturday September 03 2022, @04:42PM
https://www.6sqft.com/horn-and-hardart-automats-redefining-lunchtime-dining-on-a-dime/ [6sqft.com]
Similar to moon rockets.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.