The new hamburger joint just opened by McDonald’s in Fort Worth, Texas looks, at least from the outside, like any other. But it differs in one fundamental way: there are no humans facing customers. The only people work there are a small team of cooks hidden away in the kitchen.
After parking their cars, customers enter and place their order on one of the large touch screens they will have been familiar with for some time; they then pick up their order at the counter, where it arrives on a conveyor belt. For the moment, the service is only takeaway, and there are no chairs or tables. Drive-through order and collection is also available, as is pre-ordering by using the app and indicating your approximate time of arrival, and driving through the Order Ahead lane, where customers are limited to a single stop. You stop the car, roll down the window, extend your arm a bit, and off you go. Next.
It’s the first, and so far only, restaurant the company has tested using this technology, which some believe will spread rapidly, revolutionizing the fast-food restaurant landscape. Critics point to more jobs lost to automation, as well as raising issues such as what happens if the order is incorrect, if something is missing or if customers want a few more ketchup sachets or extra napkins.
As ever, the steady replacement of people with machines is about saving money; in this case, the $7.25 an hour minimum wage of Texas, or up to $15 in others. This is now the post-pandemic scenario, where people increasingly want food delivered or to pick it up without setting foot in the restaurant, couple with higher inflation, fewer people willing to do low-pay menial tasks, upward pressures on wages….
First it was ordering on screen, then via a smartphone app smartphone; now, the counter staff have been removed from the equation, and the next step, obviously, will be to fully automate the kitchen, which is already a highly efficient assembly line, leaving humans to do the cleaning and maintenance out of sight. The autonomous restaurant, with just one person coming by every few hours to deliver supplies.
It all sounds very dystopian, but who said that serving food is exclusive to humans? What value does a person add to the task? If you want attention, to sit quietly in a pleasant place, to be greeted or have what you’re eating explained to you, don’t go to a McDonald’s; there will still be others doing things the old way, for now. But I suspect that for many people looking for a burger, a screen and a conveyor belt will be more than enough.
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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.
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Photo credit: iStock
