this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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Let's see Your fucking AI flip burgers.
Seems relatively easy? You don't even need a full ass robot, just a robot arm with sensors. No one gives a shit about fast food quality anyway.
Heck, this happened before the AI boom
But that arm and its maintenance costs more than a minimum wage
And it can't rapidly switch tasks and make adjustments on the fly. Or stock it's one grill or.....
True, but its not far off. I ran the math on minimum wage, the machine costs $2000 a month for maintance, whereas full time at minimum wage is 1200 a month. If the employee makes more than $12/h the machine would cost less for maintance. That is ignoring the upfront cost of $20,000-$30,000, but the nature of fast food with its low employee retention and high burnout rate means the upfront costs would likely be worthwhile for companies like mcdonalds. Not having to go through the hiring process would save a fair bit of money id imagine, though i have no clue how much.
Its also worth noting that these machines are way more expensive than they need to be, because they are kept artificially high because the payoff for buying one is so large. Companies REALLY want automation, and theyre willing to pay top dollar to get it because it means they dont need slaves anymore. Same with the maintance, there is about a zero percent chance it legitimately costs the maintance company anywhere in the astronomical ballpark of $2000 a month to maintain the machines.
We can also factor in the machine can work 24/7, even if its just 1 customer at 330am. In any case, McDs near me starts at $14 or 15.
Test stores will pop up in a year or 2 I imagine.
This is shortsighted of them. Fast food service is not that simple. There’s a lot to manage. The understanding of workers as “burger flippers” is a gross misconception of human nature.
"flipping burgers" is a colloquialism for fast food work. It involves a lot more than rotating patties on a grill.
McDonald's doesn't even flip burgers. They use a two sided grill with a timer.
Wendy's does it like that, and Burger King has a little conveyor belt and the patty gets blasted with fire as it goes through.
That sounds like a more reasonable automation than a robot arm.
i am eager to see the new laser cooked burgers. whenever they invent them
Lasers in a McDonald's: the new frontier in OSHA violations
Which is kinda funny since I think that's kinda how Hamburg steaks were often cooked historically. The grill was used for hamburgers once it became more common since the actual oven grill thing was too expensive or complex.
its also a euphamism, and insult for people who had a degree who hasnt found a job in thier field too.
Is that robot about to flip a burger cheese-side down?
Do you even need a robot arm for that? Just have the gridle be on both sides of the burgers (and have like a locking mechanism or something. Kinda like a waffle machine) and then just attach a motor to it that periodically rotates it. Then a timer for when it's done
But how do you put the cheese on top a minute before it's done?
There already are robots for flipping burgers. If you prepare the burgers for them and place them on GBE grill and then assemble the burger.
2029-30 How many burger flipping robots do you want...
2031 How come no one is buying burgers from my fully automated burger joint?