Rise of the Restaurant Robots: Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Others Bet on Automation

No surprise here. Labor costs in CA, NYC, and other HCoL areas are driving this trend. It started with self-checkout and ordering kiosks, and this was obviously where it was going to end up.

I wonder what this will do to fast-food and fast-casual prices in the medium- and long-term. Will it ever result in price drops, as the technology is commoditized and rolled out at scale? Or will it only slow the rate of increase, as machines are swapped in as a substitute for the least economical human labor?

I've related the anecdote here before of meeting someone who had made their pile in automating bowling alleys, postwar, then almost losing it again when they attempted to follow up by automating restaurants.

Maybe they were just six or seven decades too early?