Your question about the economics wasn't silly... I was just pointing out that corporations like McDonalds are very unlikely to start spending money on robotics research or rethinking their entire business. It just isn't in their corporate DNA. Whether the economics make sense or not... McDonalds/BurgerKing/TacoBell etc. isn't the one to figure it out.

To support your point:

Burger King, to take an example, probably doesn't give a crap about the restaurant sales at all.

Most of their profit is from franchise fees, not restaurant sales.

Company restaurant revenues in 2011 were 1638.7 million, and company restaurant expenses in 2011 were 1447.4 million. All told, profit from restaurant sales was 191 million.

Franchise fee revenue in 2011 was 697 million, franchise and property expenses 97.1 million. All told, profit from franchise fee revenue was 599.9 million.

Basically, I can't imagine they care if they are franchising restaurants with people, restaurants with robots, or heck, franchising robot boxes themselves.

They only care that someone is paying them to call it burger king, and giving them a cut of sales

I find this comment a bit short sighted. First of all, it's obvious that the burger king org DOES care about restaurant sales, otherwise they would not be advertising constantly. Even if you ignore the contradiction between their actions and your suggestion about their priorities, applying a little logic to the situation will make it clear. If sales aren't good, how many people are going to be making new Burger King franchises? If sales aren't good, will franchises remain in business to pay them fees?

Yes, they do care about restaurant sales, but, IMHO, only to keep franchisees happy.

I still think they'd be just as happy franchising robots. I could be wrong.

At the risk of sounding nit-picky, you did make a judgment: "I have the feeling that, if this sort of idea was as value as the article implies, McDonalds ... would have put serious money into developing this sort of thing and it would already be everywhere."

It was this judgment that I felt super-serial was responding to.