Fast-Food Industry Sets Sights on Automation

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s CEO is intrigued by the idea of a fully automated fast-food restaurant.

March 21, 2016

NEW YORK – Business Insider reports that Andy Puzder, CEO of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's parent company CKE Restaurants, visited the fully automated restaurant Eatsa in California and liked what he saw.

"I want to try it," Puzder told the news source of his automated restaurant plans. "We could have a restaurant that's focused on all-natural products and is much like an Eatsa, where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up and you never see a person."

Operating an employee-free restaurant could be a possibility, according to Puzder, who is also an outspoken advocate against increasing the minimum wage. “With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs,” he told the news source, adding, “You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants.”

Puzder has penned op-eds in the Wall Street Journal on how a higher minimum wage would result in fewer employment opportunities. “The feds can mandate a higher wage, but some jobs don’t produce enough economic value to bear the increase. If government could transform unskilled entry-level positions into middle-income jobs, the Soviet Union would be today’s dominant world economy. Spain and Greece would be thriving,” he wrote.

A mandated 40% increase in labor costs, he notes, is why the fast-food business is “investing big” in automation. “If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive—this is not rocket science," Puzder told the news source.

While Puzder agrees that it’s unlikely a machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, automation could have an impact on tasks such as grilling a burger and taking food orders. In taking away the human factor, Puzder said machines are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

An automated restaurant would also resonate with millennials because they are used to higher-tech offers and they won’t have to socially interact with (human) restaurant employees.

"Millennials like not seeing people," Puzder told the news source, adding, "I've been inside restaurants where we've installed ordering kiosks ... and I've actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there's a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody."

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