Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput.
All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.
Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.
At least 10 years earlier. Probably more but that's outside my memory range.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in...
There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out.
It is just going a bit slow right now.
Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)
Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present...
So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/
Looks like it's a work in progress.
It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.
Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.