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My take away is that the overall labor per customer decreases because workers are spending less time on non-cooking/serving tasks. The paper implies the efficiency gain is in how labor is used rather than production or serving efficiency. This seems like an anticlimactic conclusion.

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Yup, they pretty much state that explicitly right in the abstract. I think we have a relatively rare example of a clickbait scientific paper title, here!

“If everyone’s doing takeout, you need fewer employees” isn’t exactly a shocking revelation.

It feels worth measuring formally so that the scientific community can basically treat this as a known, citable fact and have some numbers to work with.

I do wonder if the somewhat elliptical, high academic writing (“take-out” in quotes as if it’s an exotic term) and talk of a mystery being solved is to deflect criticism that this feels obvious or like a WSJ story.

It never ceases to amaze me when tech people take issue with jargon in other fields.

The authors use academic tone because they’re academics writing for academics.

The conclusion might feel obvious to you (very conveniently, when you’ve already been handed the answer) but what’s notable is proving it with data and rigorous analysis.

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