Minimum Wage and the Rise of the Machines

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Jonah Goldberg has an article about the replacement of waiters and wattresses with tablets for ordering food at Applebees and other chain restaurants.

In 2011, Annie Lowrey wrote about the burgeoning tablet-as-waiter business. She focused on a startup firm called E La Carte, which makes a table tablet called Presto. “Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter. Moreover, no manager needs to train it, replace it if it quits, or offer it sick days. And it doesn’t forget to take off the cheese, walk off for 20 minutes, or accidentally offend with small talk, either.”

Nextbigfuture has written extensively about robots and automation and job replacement. Recently we had some articles about a mini-robotic gourmet hamburger machine that can make 360 gourmet hamburgers every hour.

Some basic calculations were shown for what automation and robots at a MacDonalds would look like

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