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Comment by arcaster | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand the appeal of these restaurants. While living in Boston I went to the MIT "automated" wock-esque' restaurants a few times. It wasn't even that, "automated" per-se outside of the wock-cooking. Humans still handled a majority of meal prep, stocking machines, and dealing with payment problems.

IMO I'd rather have spent less money at the neighboring Chipotle for better food.

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I recently left the Bay Area to live in a major city in another state, and now that it's a little easier to see the tech forest through the trees, I see that for now, very few people want a lot of these types services outside of usual tech centric hubs.

It's like in the Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano: there are certain services where people enjoy the human touch; I think food service is one of those.

I'd prefer less human touch on my food.

Certainly automation of food service was a problem solved in the early 1900s for those that wanted fast food and coffees without being asked by someone if they'd like fries or a muffin; just turned out that in most situations it was actually a less successful business model...

Honestly, when it comes to slices of pizza or a burger (fast food in general), I couldn't care less about the human touch, and I've been to some of the best pizzeria's / burger joints in NY/LA/SF.

I might care my first time going, but anytime after that, I just care about getting my food and eating it.

Machines don’t put mustard on when you tell it no mustard. Machines don’t give you attitude either. Machines don’t spit on your food or do any number of disgusting things that fast food workers have been known to do.

Machines will never comply with "Can I please have more than the two ketchup packets that management woefully let's you give me?" or "How are you doing?"

Yeah but you can't actually see and hear the people getting paid shit to chop up veggies, so it feels less exploitative

Also-- There's more than one company doing that?? Or just one with several locations

The goal is to make the same product for cheaper.

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