Many students work part-time jobs at fast food franchises like McDonalds and others as a way to pay for school or rent. Also these kinds of jobs are an easy way to get money when you have not had luck.
In fact, being a certain age and continuing to work in one of these positions is a symbol of job failure, because these kinds of jobs are easy and poorly paid. However, technology, in its voracity in destroying the labor fabric, is also suppressing this kind of work .
Momentum Machines
McDonalds employs 1.8 million workers in 34,000 stores around the world . They are low-wage jobs, few extra-work benefits, and very high turnover.
However, the global economic crisis has affected our perception of these kinds of jobs: in 2011, McDonalds launched an initiative to hire 50,000 workers in a single day but received more than a million applications (statistically, it was harder to get a job at McDonadls than it was to get accepted to Harvard University).
Automation is adding to the economic crisis. In 2011, McDonalds announced that it would install touch screens for ordering in its 7,000 stores in Europe. But this is only the beginning.
Momentum Machines is a San Francisco company that is researching how to automate the entire process of making and serving a hamburger, which will not only offer cheaper hamburgers, but also of much higher quality .
The gourmet hamburger (robot)
A fast food restaurant spends an average of $ 135,000 a year on employee salaries, but Momentum Machines robots will not only be much cheaper, but they will make food much better, as Martin Ford explains in his book The rise of robots :
While a fast food worker puts a frozen burger on the grill, the Momentum Machine molds fresh ground meat, grills it to order, and even determines the doneness to preserve the meat’s juice. Capable of producing up to 360 burgers per hour, the machine also toasts bread, cuts and adds fresh ingredients like tomatoes, onions and pickles, and places it all on a conveyor belt to serve the pickle.
As if that were not enough, this entire production process will be healthier, although we do not know very well how all the unemployed in the restoration will do to pay for one of these hamburgers.