Why aren't there machines instead of workers at fast food places?

A machine could make a meal easily. It could? I find that hard to believe.

So more people don’t get added to the high number of people unemployed!

More of them should replace human hands? Plus they would be far more costly to buy, maintain and replace!

As soon as machines can replace any employee they probably will.
Have you ever worked in fast food? the amount of different tasks that are expected out of even an entry level employee is vast. And Switching between these tasks is not clearly defined – those decisions are made on the fly (“toilet’s overflowed”, “we need more frys from the freezer”). Yuu would need a fleet of special task machines, when 2–3 minimum wage employees could do all those jobs so much better.

Too expensive.

Because, they can’t spit in your food.

All jokes aside, it’s entirely possible to set them up assembly line wise but there are too many variables to account for and the money would just be too much to have machines advanced enough to actually make, say, a hamburger, the way as people do. As long as people are cheaper, and do the job, machines will remain at jobs too dangerous, repetitive, or at jobs that require extreme precision.

I guess on the other had, there’s this

It will be expensive, sometime tasteless, can’t handle all this without a person. Please don’t suggest & ask such question. I don’t like such kind of ideas because it will be increases unemployment.

@JamesHarrison: There are almost no questions that should not be asked on Fluther.

@JamesHarrison You can even ask “What questions should not be asked on fluther?”, with the follwoing caveats:
1) please put it in the Meta Section
2) it may create a causality implosion on the website (but probably not)

Because the current slaves are cheaper still. But I am certain as soon as automation becomes a cheaper alternative, they will switch to it over night.

The World’s Largest Play place McDonald’s in Orlando has a French fry robot. No lie.

Well, they did ten years ago, last time I was there.

I thought it was pretty badass, as I was the fry person for one week of my three week employment with that horrid company.

”A machine could do this… why am I not selling drugs?”

I took a driving trip last weekend and stopped at two different McDonald’s, something I haven’t done for years. The people there acted like machines.

It’s cheaper to have people working like machines but getting $7 per hour and no benefits, rather than machines that might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy, install and maintain.

To screw things up, it takes a person.

To really screw things up and run your business to death, it takes a robot.

Machines are expensive and really are not capable of the kinds of judgement that people find easy.
People, especially in these days of anti-union, race-to-the bottom commerce, are cheap – much cheaper than they should be. Most companies that pay close to minimum wage could pay twice as much as still be plenty profitable.

In the first place, the machines don’t yet exist that can do all of the tasks required. When that machine is developed – which is surely just a matter of time and focused innovation – then its limitations will be, as noted above, task switching and the ability to handle complex and unexpected variations in the task.

The first machines that might be workable will require a long phase-in period with a lot of oversight by both programmers and line workers to continue to work out the bugs, enhance the Artificial Intelligence (insert joke here) and the neural network that will be required to link several of these machines together, and to a (likely) human manager. There may even be an element of self-serve involved (such as with fuel stations that have self-serve gas pumps, ATMs that require you to do some of the cashier tasks that used to be done at a bank window, etc.). In fact, most soft drinks at most fast food joints that I’ve seen are already self-serve. Pay for the cup and fill up as you like, and the losses in extra product that this incurs are still cheaper than having an employee run the dispensing.

It’s not likely that you’ll walk into a McDonald’s someday and “all of a sudden” all of the people will be gone from behind the counter, but it’s a gradual and nearly inexorable process. I don’t see it as anything to be upset about, either. I like and appreciate human ingenuity, even when it’s slow and imperfect, but I already know that I’m in a tiny minority here.

Machines are expensive to purchase and maintain.

Wage slaves are cheap and easily replaced when you finally break them down.

The closest I have seen to such a machine is the automat.

Because the development and use of them was not determined to be cost effective.
Recent strikes by fast food workers demanding double wages makes it more likely that they will show up.

Because it’s not 2025 yet.

After this question was posted, I heard about cases where robots are already being used in fast food restaurants.