Basically... it appears that humans are going to be too expensive to hire very soon. That's just self-service kiosks, but imagine if you were able to get your food for half-price (aka the same price before the $15/hr wage hike)? Which restaurant would you go to, really?
http://www.businessinsider.com/wendys-workers-will-lose-jobs...
The whole "robots cooking" thing is a lot easier to manage when "cooking" is essentially rote assembly of identical, pre-made products. That's also why the food is disgusting.
They will if they have a competition.
Their usual MO though isn't to pass savings alone, and they've never lacked for competition.
Back in 2002, Star Trek Nemesis was released in New Zealand. It had already been out in the rest of the world, the "see it again" campaign had been run, and DVD releases had hit the shelves everywhere else.
But not in New Zealand. My friend there told me that he had been waiting to see it for months, then waited two weeks after its release ("to avoid the crowds") before going in to see it. His words:
"I went in there on the second Thursday after opening day, clutching my twenty dollar note, and stopped to look at the billboard to find out what time it was next going to run. It wasn't. It had been whisked off the screens before two weeks were up."
This particular film was apparently the catalyst of a massive lobbying campaign for their government to ban commercial imports of international DVDs within six months of the release date of a film, because that (and piracy) were the reasons people hadn't flocked to the cinema to see it and other films.
I picked up a watermelon from my local farmer's market this weekend. It was about the size of a bowling ball and was $6. I went to Kroger and found watermelons 3x the size, shipped from across the planet, for $5. "Normal" operations are quickly becoming luxuries. Seriously, there's no reason for me to ever buy from a local farmer except to make myself feel wealthy.
Likewise...
It's going to be more like a survival mechanism or a "staying relevant" rather than a "hey suddenly I can sell you a burger for $0.82."
I'm in these places to get some food and get out in a hurry. Streamlining that process is all good.
There's lots of automated food preparation in the plants that make frozen dinners and airline meals. But those,too, have a narrow product range.
A good place to start would be at the back end. Build a robotic system which can take a tub of random dishes, tableware, and trash, separate them, apply blasts of hot soapy water to anything that needs pre-cleaning for the dishwasher, load the dishwasher trays, and start them down the conveyor to the dishwasher. Everybody hates that job.
In france, picard does gourmet frozen foods, with very good reviews.
