True. Then maybe it becomes how you define the market. After a while people will crave something beyond burgers and sushi. The wants of mankind are infinite.

The thought/hope is that if individual chef's are freed from having to managing teams of people to handle backend restaurant activities like dish washing, food forecasting, etc. they can start bringing quality differentiated products (Sengalese food, Peruvian food, etc.) to market or existing products to new geographical markets (sushi to rural Midwest).

Sort of how personal computers and now cloud computing enable tech entrepreneurs compete against yesterday's incumbents.

Do you believe that Burger King, McDonalds, and Wendy's are all within 5bpp of productivity of each other? Because none of them have taken over all of the market, not by a wide margin.

I seriously doubt their productivity numbers are anywhere near that tight a spread and yet we've seen no clear monopoly emerge.

I think automation will change the game though. Because the variance that comes from the human factor will be gone. If one chain is a tiny bit better, then every single restaurant will be a tiny bit better. The 0.05% advantage will not drown in the random noise of good and bad employees. And policy updates can happen immediately, the lag from having to retrain will not be there.

One source of variance that will remain is location. The local branch of Very-Slightly-Better-Chain may be poorly situated, which could put them at a disadvantage.

I'm skeptical. This "tiny bit better" might not be noticeable by customers, so it could easily be swamped by better marketing or by having a more convenient location (which will never be consistent).