A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They seem to have a good UI (although they started working on it over 20 years ago).
https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2011/03/10/in-touch-with-foo...
Also, what's wrong with a ham and cheese sandwich with mayo and Cesar dressing (in the article)? That's one thing that is great about the Sheetz UI is that I can add buffalo sauce, ranch/mayo, and bacon to nearly every sandwich, which is delicious. My all-time favorite is a bacon, lettuce, mayo, and buffalo sauce cheeseburger or chicken sandwich on a pretzel bun.
Please rewrite, this is borderline discriminatory and quite offensive. Some "old guys" can be as capable to handle such UI as some "young guys".
Disclaimer: half-old guy.
[EDIT] thanks for replacing "old guy" with "technophobe".
[Edit] Also, you called it "PC" so, yes you are minimizing it.
Not because iPads are inherently superior to old style PoS systems (they are not, they can't provide tactile buttons) or because any one UI they offer is particularly good, but because they herald a new era of lower barriers to entry into the PoS terminals market.
Even the most utterly technophobic volunteer mum can operate it. So good.
https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/Shopping/Catalog/HMI_(H...
than a huge mess of buttons and wires.
Just look at that linked product! Less than $500 and you have as many buttons and labels as you can shake a stick at, and it's all behind a pretty color display. I can hardly buy 3 buttons, a vinyl overlay, and pay for the labor for the wiring of that stuff (plus the PLC that you'd now need behind it all) for $500. Much less pay someone to make physical modifications to the completed machine when someone decides they need 4 buttons.
You say it's the fault of the "UI designers" who think they're working with pixels and X/Y coordinates. The situation far worse than that! The person who writes the UI for these is probably an EE thinking in terms of the primitive ladder logic that drives the machine. And it doesn't help that the software you use to configure these things is pretty terrible.
That said, DUMP THE GODDAMN RESISTIVE SCREENS IN THE TRASH. Seriously those things were fucking garbage when they were invented, now that we have capacitive screens, there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to keep making me endure the touch technology of 2001.
While we're at it get them out of my fucking car too.
A raspberry pi + touchscreen is 1/5th of that. RPi is capable of running Qt5 which would be a solid UI choice.
How the heck have they survived?
Essentially, the touchscreen is an RPi and touchscreen, plus some industrial enclosure, strengthening, and connectors all wrapped up into a product. That integration is definitely worth $400. Or, if you want the name brand stuff, the Allen Bradley version of the same will set you back another $2000.
Does it still have all these things after you've modified it?
Value was added. Sometimes, simply knowing what product to purchase is worth hundreds of dollars.
What about when jobs start to disappear and the economy as we know starts to change for the worse? Either by affecting us directly, or the markets which we are a part of, I don't think this will be a positive thing.
Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or water, which is much more labor-intensive than today's mills. Before that, the grinding process was even more labor-intensive.
Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.
http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3...
I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article
That human gets paid a salary and earns a living.
And that human could presumably choose not to push the button if the expresso machine tries to become sentient (in theory).
Once manufacturing is underway, the process is typically made as efficient as possible and made to scale. The work that went into design and testing can now be scaled to thousands or millions of units which is a great return on investment. Each unit has a one time cost for materials used for parts, with some long term maintenence costs.
Operation requires only an electric energy draw. If that energy is from a clean source such as solar, this unit isn't having much of any further negative impact. Operation could last years or decades depending on design and whether or not the product is superceded, at which time its parts can be recycled. Even then, the time spent on design will be used to create the next version.
Supplying the machines with goods is already a task handled when goods are delivered to the location and stocked, so there isn't going to be much or any overhead added there. Plus, we can automate that too (self-driving vehicles for transportation, robots for the last leg of delivery and stocking).
Human workers do not scale in the same way that machines do, and aren't typically as efficient at this type of task.
Finding suitable human workers is difficult and can take considerable time and resources every time one is hired.
Human workers are expensive, and this is an ongoing neverending cost. This cost will not scale down as you hire more workers or work them for a longer time (unlike machines).
Human reliability is hit and miss. Also, you cannot work them 24/7. There is lots of downtime and you would require at least 3 or 4 humans to replace 1 machine if the task requires 24/7 uptime.
The enegry that humans consume and their waste is typically not effecient. Three meals a day, often including animal products which are costly in terms of resources and environmental impact. Then there's waste treatment for them. And the energy costs to deliver the food from a farm to their location, and even farm growing and harvesting.
None of this is as effecient or "green" as a renewable energy draw such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric delivered over a power line.
On many levels, humans are a poor replacement for machines in predictable tasks such as making a coffee or a sandwich for a chain restaurant. Humans are good for social work, and making coffee is not social.
In terms of someone needing a job, even if that job is meaningless and unnecessary, basic income should be provided instead. But that's a whole other conversation and we aren't there yet.
Point is: Machines are efficient. Social impact is a different conversation.
On top of that, the jobs it does require are skilled. Engineers to design it, mechanics to repair it. They aren't jobs like a barista that you can get without any experience or education. Even the work of assembling it can be outsourced to some third world country, or automated itself.
That is not necessarily true, as the company could be subsidizing its labor costs in order to gain salad-vending marketshare.
A robot has no way of knowing if the coffee will taste good or contains rat poison. It's just going through the motions. If it serves you a dud drink you can't argue with it, you just got scammed. Post an angry Yelp review if it makes you feel better.
Fewer, higher value employees has been the trend in many industries for the past few hundred thousand years.
You can, however, force people to lower their expectations until they can be trivially formalized. That's what happens with tea/coffee vending machines. The dispensed drink is really bad, but it's uniformly bad, and since people don't expect quality coffee from a vending machine, they don't complain.
The cashiers are gone. The fry cook is gone. The drive-thru order taker is gone. The cooks are gone.
You'll still have a preparer that will probably also do running (they'll bag the multiple, separate items up and take them to the front). You'll have a shift manager that will help with a bit of everything (eg if a customer has a problem with the order kiosk or payment). You'll still have a human cleaning the building and parking lot, taking out trash. There will also obviously be people routinely involved in machine maintenance, installation, etc.
There will be some complication with condiments and food layering. There will probably be a position for food ammo reloader, that keeps the machines loaded with whatever that machine cooks / prepares.
It would be possible to get rid of the bagger/runner, but it'd probably be cost prohibitive and needlessly complex to assemble the various robots on a line that could also bag properly.
At its best, eventually, this system will produce more food (1.5x to 4x I'd guess), at a lower per customer cost, with superior food safety (including hygiene). Then it's a question of how much of that gain gets competed away (benefiting customers) and how much goes into the pocket of the owners.
Starbucks will be similar. They won't get rid of all their humans, they'll reduce their number significantly.
It's likely to be a decades long, piece by piece, transition. The early results won't be spectacular for either customers or franchise owners, it'll take many years of gradual improvement.
A robot just does what it's told.
Starbucks used to have manual machines and the results were...variable. Some days you'd get a substandard drink, but if you got someone who knew what they were doing, the results were fantastic.
It's like before the coffee would be anywhere beteween a 6 and 9 out of 10. Now they're consistently 7.5 out of 10 every time. Boring, predictable, never bad, but never great.
Eventually automated systems ought to be able to do this better than most people can. Why couldn't there be engineered sensors that could detect such things very well?
And given that the act of making good-enough coffee isn't a very difficult task (given how readily available and quickly trained "baristas" are), and how mechanical the process is already, im not sure there's anything to suggest it isn't do-able. Its more likely a matter of cost and scale
Replicating this with electrical sensors is a pretty complex task we still haven't managed to get working, after all we are not only talking about replicating the sense of taste but also the sense of smelling and how they interact with each other.
Generating a brand new style of good coffee might need the interaction though
How to calibrate a sensor for something like that on a per user basis? I don't know, but apparently it's possible because "electronic noses" do exist but are mostly used in laboratory settings, probably on account of their price.
There's also a reason why we still use pigs and dogs for work that require good smelling senses, like search&rescue or truffle foraging. Training these animals is very expensive, but it still seems to be the cheaper option compared to building "smellobots", so I doubt smelling sensor are far enough along to be put into a ton of kitchen bots at small cost.
This is not a trivial matter! Cost is entirely the reason a host of technologically-possible automation hasn't happened outside a lab.
The sun will eventually engulf the Earth rendering this argument irreelvant.
Smell, taste and poison are all matters of physical molecules and how these interact with human physiology. We already understand these to some extent. We can already build devices that can detect some of these things to some extent. We have no grounds to say it's impossible for a human-level ability of it to be engineered. (Note that lack of positive evidence against X is not the same as positive evidence for X).
When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.
Of course this comes more easily to places with free education.
If we replace all of those jobs what do they do?
I have always thought there is a far-future dystopian story in that somewhere; society has evolved IT and automation to the extent that only the top 25% of individuals actually "work" and everyone else has leisure. The 25% decide they want a leisurely life also, causing the collapse of society...
There are lots of stories of American coal miners going into tech when the mining jobs dried up. But their process of getting there is through charitable organizations, not a proper educational program.
The 25% that actually work should be rewarded with luxuries. Financial means to travel, own their own house, drive a nice car, etc.
And we'd also provide the opportunities for people to learn what is necessary to move from the 75% to the 25%.
> The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.
And that's another one - will that high skill job exist after 2-4 years of retraining?
The underlying narrative is a fear of automating lots of other things. The new wave of automation is still uncertain, we don't know how to identify nevermind personify the symbols and culprits of it. Automated kitchen robots are a nice stand-in for automation generally. Like the robots in the jetsons.
An extremely larger population that any other period in time (more than double what was merely 100 years ago), combined with the most extreme productivity improvements and new technologies like AI and robotics that can make most of them redundant in a few large fell swoops.
Plus, the fact that for most of humanity's existence, the masses mattered mostly if they were useful to some end, not for their intristic value as human beings.
People always matter at least to themselves.
To those that run society and determine policy.
>People always matter at least to themselves.
Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty.
Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.
I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best case) post work future would be inevitably reduced in spirit?
So, it's more likely that they'll be left to rot, than that they'll be provided for and allowed to be included is a "post work future".
I'm just objecting to the idea that working for a living is necessary for self esteem or self actualization.
It has done, in the past, and these concerns have not been without merit.
The Ur-Case is that of the Luddites. When weaving machines came onto the fore in 19th century Britain, groups of saboteurs fearing for their jobs wrecked the machines with rocks and hammers. The Crown response was swift and unflinching. Machine-breaking was made a capital offence and the Luddites were put down with the violence typical of 19th century law enforcement.
Nowadays we look on and shake our heads. In the long run the Luddites' fears were unfounded. Mechanisation improved productivity, which meant more cloth could be made cheaply, which increased the size of the market, boosted purchasing power and opened up new markets for new kinds of work.
In the short run, however, things were not so comfortable for the workers of Northern England. The 'compensatory effects' of technological improvement took many years to land. In the meanwhile an entire generation of men were reduced to penury.
Perhaps these technologies will open new markets after all. But how quickly? And will the jobs compare? What happens when the work human beings like and are good at disappears? What happens when only trivial jobs remain? What does that do to people and their relation to society?
It was a protest about shit working conditions caused.
"It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt progress of technology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
The modern day equivalent would be the French anti-Uber strike:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber...
CATO's agenda, of course, requires depicting the French taxi drivers as "luddites protesting technology" which neatly illustrates exactly why the misconception has persisted for so long:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-...
American elites want:
* A convenient scapegoat for outsourced manufacturing jobs which they are to blame for.
* A convenient scapegoat for jobs lost to austerity which they are to blame for.
* A perennial threat to hang over uppity worker's heads to head off threats of unionization.
I wouldn't pay for that, and IMO this robot has a long way to go before I'd agree it can make a "mean" salad.
In other words, instead of replacing the cook by a machine, we should train him to cook better. And we should train people to make the difference between a soulless dish and a good one.
(I cook for myself and I can assure you that a machine can't cook; it can assemble ingredients, that's for sure but there's no creativity (and believe me, the simplest dish, if infused with creativity, can taste so much better))
I think you're completely discounting what cooking involves when it's someone with skill and experience, and that's unfortunate.
Mastering a technique might mean constant adoption to changing ingredients and parameters, temperatures, timing etc. That is not fundamentally impossible to teach to a robot.
Massive knowledge, excellent sensory inputs of all kinds, precision motor skills etc are not creativity. Certainly there is a long way for robots to improve before they can handle what a human is able to. But I have no doubt that they will get there sooner or later.
The last thing you want from your line chef is 'creativity'.
Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create jobs, we would go back to manual labor to make produce our food.
Yes we definitely need more people on disability watching Maury
Any midtown/downtown NY salad bar can turnover 10 peoples' salads in the time this machine took to make 1. There's no way this machine's operating cost is better than that. Sure, you could scale up these machines, but then the human-staffed salad bars are winning on floor space (and rent). It looks like you could only fit 2-3 of these machines in the footprint of the average NY salad spot.
The only place this might win is where salad consumption is infrequent, in which case for food safety reasons, you probably don't want to be eating the salad there anyway.
What a silly statement. There's already an excess of available labor.
> ...and capital to do other things.
What a nice, sugar-coated way of saying "This will make the rich get richer."
Of course, I probably sound like I'm against automation and I'm trying to save jobs, and I'm really not. But let's not pretend that lowering business costs helps anybody but the shareholders, and that creating unemployment is a GOOD thing.
Freshness? If the buisiness is preparing the vegetables in the kitchen before providing them to the machine then the salads might taste fresher than factory packaged salads >1 day old.
I guess we should look at any New Thing, and say, what existing boring thing is this really?
And of course the same thing will happen here too. Now robots can make "hand made" caesar salads. But eventually the same social constructions will be created against that and in preference to man-made "hand crafted" caesar salads. Under a blind taste test man-made and robot-made foods will be indistinguishable but without the blindfold there will be enough culture and clever rethoric created to trick the senses, and we'll be back to where we were a few years ago.
I hear the stand-in-line-as-a-service industry is growing as well. Anyone with a lot of free time can get paid to stand in line. It’s great! Who wouldn’t want such a bright future?
Allow me to be sentimental for a moment. I agree that some jobs, perhaps even most, can be done "better" by a robot. At least, if we're defining better as more cheaply or "to spec". However, when I go to a nice restaurant, I go because I enjoy the Chef's style, their ability to express their art through cooking. Sure, a robot could do something like that, especially at chains like Burger King, but for my personal incentive to dine at a restaurant, it's unlikely a robot could do a "better" job than a human chef.
That said, you're right, we need to avoid the foolishness of passing the buck when asking "what will our children do?" We can't agree on social issues now, how the hell will we agree when even more people are unable to contribute meaningfully?
Citation needed. Live music is a healthy economy, but I am not sure a majority of listeners of a given artist are particularly driven to go to that artist's concerts. I suspect only a passionate minority is interested.
Even at many restaurants today the person who's name is above the door as it where rarely touches the food. So as long as that person is the one who is responsible for designing the recipes and menus and plating what difference does it really make if the dish you are served was prepared by a robot or whatever line chef happened to be on duty that day?
Robot cleaners, maintenance, etc... I highly doubt we will have a fully automated robot loop that takes care of themselves anytime soon, so there's always going to be a need for humans in the chain.
A strong argument is made that the options for new jobs are rapidly diminishing, as automation eliminates jobs by skill level, while at the same time the economy is not giving people time to retrain (people most imperilled by automation are usually those living paycheck-to-paycheck). Those two things were not simultaneously true in the past.
There will always be something to transition to. It's not because we cannot imagine it that it means there is nothing ahead of us. Like 75% of the jobs people have nowadays did not exist 100 years ago, and nobody at that time could have imagined them.
Sure, humans will go on (unless we nuke outselves), but that doesn’t mean it will be easy or fun to live through if we just presume it’ll all be fine.
I'd prefer to ask another question: is it time to change our society, to go away from paid jobs? A job is one of the things that currently defines us, one of the first questions you ask someone you just met is often to know what job they are in.
If all jobs were automated, we could have more interesting occupations: taking care of our childrens, elders, neighbors, growing our garden, reading, art, etc. Many sci-fi authors saw the job being automated and society changing toward this. The question is how to we make the transition.
It will be less drastic than people anticipate, as always with automation/ai. Different jobs will become more available and (hopefully) the value of those jobs will increase. Manual/tedious jobs that used to be considered low-brow will hopefully become "artisanal" or appreciated, and fill the gap.
A butcher used to be a respectable profession that would earn an honest days living. Maybe now, instead of a butcher working for his employer (with a cashier, accountant, manager, sales person), they will operate as their own employer. Other micro-focused based companies will handle the other needs for a fraction of the cost.
In the end, efficiency prevails with capitalism and tech in general.. Having a population with a low work force seems both inefficient and impractical. Life will find a way...
There's only a problem if we're expecting people to get that money from... wait for it... jobs. So let's lower interest rates and make it easier for everyone to borrow money. That will boost spending and create jobs! What could possibly go wrong?
This isn't any different than a vending machine or those coke dispensers with a touch screen flavour picker.
The real job loss will be when this is a real robot that is fresh tearing the romaine and whisking the dressing after you press the buttons and delivering an actual caesar salad.
I would think that while it may be challenging, I don't see it as unthinkable that we could have a robot tear leaves of romaine and spinning a whisk.
These examples need to be game changers to convince people, a fancy vending machine isn't going to scare anybody.
A replacement fry cook, sous chef or truck driver will.
The example that comes to mind is about ATMs and bank teller jobs: when ATMs were introduced it actually increased the number of teller jobs because branch offices became cheaper and banks opened more of them.
Discussed in:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...
E-coli, listeria, and other nasty bacteria and viruses like hepatitis are no joke, yet most places have zero tools to test for those things.
> We aren't going to be talking to robot waiters any time soon.
Robot waiters? Probably not. But using our phones to order delivery, self-ordering kiosks, ipads on tables? The future is already here, and it's increasingly automated. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the latest employment numbers show a sharp dip in the employment among food service employees.)
Maybe after about 10 times when you've "learned the menu" you might find it easier.
I always order the same thing at In-n-Out, for example, and would love to say, "Give me a 557-343-901-043" -- or better yet, scan a QR code that had what I want to order. And they have just about the simplest menu ever! (one reason I love them) If I could do that at other fast food restaurants, or Starbucks, where you might want to order the same Very Specific thing, without having to go through the tedium of explaining it or entering it into a kiosk / web form every time, I bet it would be a huge thing.
I will be surprised if Starbucks doesn't let you do this already, or isn't working on it.
I make the same order every time at my local burger chain, but I make it using an app from my desk, scheduled to be ready by the time I get to the store. Literally the best solution from my point of view.
This is also (coincidentally!) the product the company I work for offers. :)
I have had fast-food workers mess up my order so many times that I'd rather just give it to a machine.
There are few things more annoying than taking my food to the table, seeing something on it that shouldn't be, walking back to the counter, saying "Excuse me, I asked for no lettuce or tomato", and waiting for them to re-make it.
Nope, but in Japan in some cheap sushi joints, you can order your sushi on a tablet, and it is delivered to you via an automatic tray which knows exactly your seating location. No need to having "robot waiters" going around.
Idiocracy has it right again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-4LU79qbU
I think lots of automation will exist and already does in our economy in manufacturing, technology and many areas. However some automation isn't as desired by the consumer directly and ends up making more work like this salad bot.
First off, unless it is self cleaning it seems like it will take at least one attendant to refill and clean it.
Secondly, it looks like a food poisoning haven as lettuce is many times the culprit there.
Next, it looks like it will waste tons of product, which will be left in multiple days and goes back to the food poising or general bad ingredients.
The maintenance, cleaning, inventory/ingredient management and more make this probably not that great of an idea unless it is pumping out salads in a factory, as a vending machine it seems to be automation just to automate. I personally would not want a salad out of a vending machine.
Kiosk ordering is something that automation is probably good for, making the salad though on demand? Probably not.
And sometimes automation is about taking the easiest, lowest skill part of a process and making it slower and more difficult, which somehow still results in an NYT article.
I mean all it does is assemble the freaking salads from pre-chopped ingredients. That's it. That's the _easiest_ part of preparing a salad.
Horrible user experience.
- Can't tell how long the clip/gif is
- Can't skip ahead
- Can't go fullscreen
- No sound
For the most part, the deployment of capital into robots can only happen if it is going to displace people.
If the profit is under a given percentage then there shouldn't be any tax assessed.
I still think a simple progressive tax is better overall (no loopholes or additional taxes). If you can make mad cash efficiently, great, as long as you can't put on an "oil company" hat and avoid paying taxes on those profits.
If she says "a lot", you reply "good luck to you, and you alone". If she replies "very little", you say "right, so your tax is going nowhere."
Feels like possibly you are defending a local maximum.
Food is variable and dirty and the downside risk of not being clean is pretty bad, even acknowledging that robots will always wash their hands.
Maintenance, risk, and general exposure to meatspace, in every sense, means that knowledge workers will probably be the first to be automated out of a job.
Robots are only as clean as the company that owns and inspects them permits them to be.
A robot can't and won't do this.
I think that if the robot is really transparent and there's a human inspecting, then people will be willing to live with it.
Reviewing your lease could be tricky because it could involve lots of external variables, cultural differences, changes over time, interactions with the law, and so on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC32345D87EF2F305
Also, leave this rock? It's the lushest place we know so far, by far, in a universe filled with millions of rocks. If we can't make it here, we can't make it anywhere else.
Not that AI has anything to do with that, or anything we do with AI. But the chorus of non-sequiturs will keep on rising, and as the emperor, now dancing seductive-esque, drops the last item of clothing, the buzzword singularity will have arrived. A way to murder billions and call it the lesser of two evils, carefully framed, will be found, too.
But that isn't what makes food and drink interesting. I enjoy going to a place because they pull a particularly great espresso shot and use it to prepare a macchiato in a way that I like according to proportions of milk and espresso that I think taste best... or a bar which has a particularly great wine collection according to my tastes... or a restaurant which has a fun twist on on a french classic which I like more than the original. Of course, each of these establishments could have a custom version of whatever algorithm you're envisioning which picks the perfect wines, pulls the perfect espresso shots, or prepares the perfect meal - but will they? Or will the platform that enables such extreme automation also enable such extreme commodification, like Starbucks vs a boutique coffee shop? I think it would.
In our Starbucks example - they also own Clover, the boutique automatic single-serve coffee brewer. It's a brilliant machine and makes a great cup of coffee. But it's artificially only available in certain markets, with certain collections of their own branded roasts. The macinery could be programmed to allow me to get a great cup of coffee at any Starbucks in America, but business incentives don't allow that (presumably - because Clovers are rare machines reserved for special store in major markets). Comiditization entails more than just automating the product and making things consistent and widely available. It also typically changes the incentives of the game and the people who are overseeing implementing them.
There's always going to be a need for human food preparers, be they chef or cook, as foodies will seek unique experiences that cannot be provided in the large quantities that machines are designed to satisfy.
In short, don't worry about it.
Where I come from, staff in cafés would kill to make a consistent coffee every time (and they mostly do) but they're stuck with old machinery. But now that Starbucks has delivered that, customers want to go back to an authentic experience that really has never existed.
The same thing will happen to food i.e most people would love to have decent restaurant meals delivered at a really low price. The fact that some people will try to taste gourmet food prepared by real chefs is rather irrelevant to say the least...
However, figuring out what makes a delicious recipe is something machines can't do. yet.
The veggies are pre cut - so they spend even longer dying and drying than freshly prepared.
There will be more waste - those pre-cut veggies won't last as long.
Serve sure, but how many people care about what goes on beyond the closed doors of the restaurant kitchen as long as food is up to standard. Would you really care if your steak was 'hand fried' by a line chef or fired by some kind of meat frying robot as long as it was of high quality done to your liking.
The 'problem' however (at least short term) is that line chefs are pretty cheap and advanced robots are pretty expensive.
Given it's sell is solving a problem that doesn't need solving I'm guessing it was made to be cheaper but it's not hence the pivot.
A solution to what? What exactly is the problem? Just because bacteria (and "viruses"? really?) may or may not be found in salad bars doesn't make it an emergency. Exactly how many people get sick, or die, because they ate at a salad bar?
It seems the problem is invented to justify the product.
* In March and April 2008, 22 customers were infected with hepatitis A from a Chipotle restaurant in California.
* In April 2008, over 400 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Ohio.
* In February 2009, an outbreak of campylobacteriosis was traced to a Chipotle restaurant in Minnesota.
* In July 2015, five people were infected with E. coli traced back to a Chipotle restaurant in Seattle, Washington.
* In August 2015 nearly 100 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Califorina.
* In August 2015, 64 people were infected with Salmonella traced back to Chipotle restaurants in the Minneapolis area.
* In October 2015, 52 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants, with 20 requiring hospitalization.
* In November 2015, 5 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants in Oklahoma and Kansas.
* In December 2015, ultimately 141 people (80 directly) in Massachusetts were infected with norovirus traced back to a Boston, Massachusetts area Chipotle restaurant.
* In July 2017, more than 130 people were infected with norovirus traced back to a Chiptole restaurant in Virginia.
(adding to your list, a Chipotle in Downtown Dallas was found to be infested with rats a few months ago... it was discovered when the rats started falling through the ceiling)