Meet the Burger Robot That Will Change Fast Food Forever
Fast food workers of the world, your enemy has a name, and it is Momentum Machines. The company has created a "burger robot," which could effectively eliminate the need for fast food chains to hire human workers. The assembly line like machine is efficient and could change the nation's economy in serious ways.
According to Momentum Machines, its burger robot can produce about 360 hamburgers an hour, or one burger every 10 seconds. It can also "slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible." The device takes up only 24 square feet of space and can do the work of about three human workers.
The first of the machines comes equipped with a conveyor belt that sends the uncooked patties through a gas grill, and another belt that adds toppings, like onions, tomatoes, and pickles. The exit ramp combines the cooked patty with the toppings and the bun, and even wraps the burger.
If you consider that the average fast food chain spends about $135,000 on human workers per year, the burger robot could end up saving companies about $90,000 per franchise per year. If a company has locations across the nation? Momentum Machine's co-founder, Alexandros Vardakostas, says the savings could eclipse $9 billion. "Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” Vardakostas told Xeconomy. "It’s meant to completely obviate them."
As you might guess, this has people outraged. Thousands of people will be unemployed. It will devastate their lives. Vardakostas explained his take on this issue on the company's blog.
"The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment," writes Vardakostas. "The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy."
Of course, companies are free to spend their savings however they feel like. So take a guess as to how many would spend more on ingredients? Yeah, not many. As for Momentum having to hire new workers, that's great, but has nothing to do with all the people losing their jobs at the fast food chains. It's a nice attempt to spin the story, but the reality is that the burger robot will not help people who work at fast food companies. It will only help the companies.
[Image via Flickr - SteFou]
