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Jobless Future: Shake Shack’s Humans Out, Robots In

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Pic shows: This restaurant has robot as waiters. A Chinese restaurant owner inspired by the restaurant Bots from the hit US show Sam and Cat has created a restaurant filled with robots. The robot restaurant on the TV show features robot waiters like Tandy and Bungle, and now a restaurant in Ningpo, a seaport city in north-eastern China's Zhejiang province, has also taken on robot staff. Although wages for the robots in the city's Liancheng shopping mall are non-existent, they still do not come cheap at around 6,000 GBP each. But with a five-year-warranty on each robot, and the fact that they only need to be charged four-hours-a-day, the owner Lu Dike, 48, reckons in the long-term it is going to save a fortune on wage bills. And the robots have not just been popular with fans of the US series, but also with people who have not even seen the show and want to experience being serviced by robot staff. The "waiters" navigate their way around with the use of an optical sensing system, enabling them to independently serve food to any table within the restaurant. Additionally, the robots have the capability to speak up to 40 phrases in Mandarin Chinese, such as "enjoy your meal". And restaurant owner Dike is even being pressured now to put the robots on sale for people to take home. He said: "I get asked at least once a day if I'm prepared to sell one of them, who knows, maybe it might be a good sideline." One of those who wants to buy one was customer Xu Yuan, 34, who said: "I really like the service and I think I would really like one at home, my son has been pestering me ever since we came here for a snack after a trip to the movies." (ends)

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A new Shake Shack opening up in New York City’s East Village is trading human cashiers in for robots in order to pay the rest of the shop’s employees a $15 an hour wage. (Shutterstock)

 

TIM PEARCE
Energy Reporter

A new Shake Shack opening up in New York City’s East Village is trading human cashiers in for robots in order to pay the rest of the shop’s employees a $15 an hour wage.

The newest building is an experiment that Shake Shack management hope will direct the future of the company. They want to attract a more skilled and committed workforce by automating some jobs and paying higher wages to the rest, the New York Post reports.

“The Astor Place Shack will be a playground where we can test and learn the ever-shifting needs of our guests,” Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti told the New York Post. “[It] represents our dedication to innovation and to providing the best for our guests and for our teams.”

Former President Barack Obama praised Shake Shack in 2014 for its “great burgers” and the fact it pays employees “more than 10 bucks an hour.” He made the remarks eating at one of the company’s restaurants while campaigning to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“This is an important tool for us to help create more pathways into the middle class and make sure that if you work hard in this country, you can succeed,” Obama said according to WSJ.

If the trailblazing Shake Shack branch in the Big Apple survives, it will be paying its workers what the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and 2016 Democratic Party platform endorses to be the federal minimum.

“This is why the economic fantasies of Barack Obama and the ‘Fight For $15’ just aren’t practical when confronting the reality of running a business in 2017,” AR Squared spokesman Jeremy Adler told The Washington Free Beacon. “As economists have been saying for years, the impact of dramatic minimum wage increases is fewer jobs and economic opportunities for working people, as Shake Shack is demonstrating today.”

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