Keep doubling-down on the minimum wage and doubling the homeless population, commiefornia
“And it’s only $6,” says Creator founder, Alex Vardakostas, 34, who started flipping patties at his parent’s Southern California burger joint A’s Burgers at age 9 and figured he could find a better way to make this American classic. “For the price of a Big Mac, you’re getting organic ingredients and a perfect hamburger, every time.”
Creator is a novelty to be sure, but it also is a harbinger of a robotic invasion that brings with it big questions about the future of food, employment and social interactions.
“In any cities where the cost of living is going up, this is an issue,” says Borden. “That’s causing food business owners to get creative to hire people, whether that’s by looking at hiring the homeless or former convicts, or by offering workers gym memberships.”
Or by bringing in robots.
It’s a shift is happening across the U.S. and the world. In Boston, customers at Spyceget served up health food bowls by an automated machine. In Brooklyn, BigEve Sushihas robots doing the rolling. Brussels-based Alberts is peddling its Smoothie Stationsacross that country. And the scientists at British-based Moley are working on a robot that will take over all chores in your home kitchen.
San Francisco has fast become an epicenter of this automated trend. Beyond the burger robot at Creator, there’s the dancing coffee shop robot at Café X, Sally the salad making robot at an undisclosed tech company cafeteria, and the fresh baguettes pumped out by the Le Bread Xpress robot at a local mall. Then add in the fresh smoothie robot at Blendid on the campus of the University of San Francisco, and Zume pizza in Silicon Valley, where employees share duties with robots.
They say that robots do monotonous, repetitive-stress jobs exceedingly well, which leaves humans to serve in more high-touch roles such as advising customers on menu selection. Robots happily work 24/7, allowing for access to more high-quality foods in environments where traditional food services close, such as hospitals and universities. And at popular restaurants robots quickly pay for themselves, allowing owners to put more money into ingredients while keeping prices down.
“By eliminating the barista pushing buttons on a coffee machine, we can provide a very high-quality drink quickly at a lower price,” says Henry Hu, who came up with the idea for Café X five years ago while in college and now has three locations with another one coming to San Francisco’s airport.
“More than half of our customers are repeat, and our sales have doubled every year,” says Hu, who, in a familiar debate for robot food purveyors, is still deciding whether to own and operate his growing stable of robots or license the technology. “I think the future will be a mix of robot foods and places where you have personal experiences.”
Food writer Eve Turow Paul, whose forthcoming book “Hungry” tackles the future of food, says the potential upside of robots in the culinary world is “the democratizing of good food.”
These include “huge displacements of food workers over the next 10 years, or less,” says Paul. “No one will be flipping burgers anymore.”
Those most impacted will be workers on the low end of the pay scale, small salaries that ultimately will be made expensive when compared to robot overhead.
According to a recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute, of the 73 million U.S. jobs that will be lost to automation by 2030, those most susceptible are physical ones in predictable environments. Those include workers who operate machinery, prepare fast food, collect and process data.
About half of workers who make minimum wage, which is typical in food services, are under age 25, according to a 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on low-income workers.
