McDonald’s without any contact with human labor is already in the U.S. and South Korea and is coming to Poland too, and it may foretell an automated retail future with dramatically fewer people working, writes Jacyk Fraczyk for Poland’s Business Insider.
When visiting a McDonald’s restaurant and watching the employees work, you might get the impression of a well-functioning machine, with the function of the operation largely reliant on human labor. What if, instead of people, they put machines there? This idea is being implemented by the world-famous fast food chain. Cases where the customer will not see the employee, recently started operating in South Korea, and several are already operating in the USA. In some cases, even food prep is automated, enabling these fast food chains to run almost entirely without people.
In Poland, such projects are also being tested, although in the retail sector. I am talking about autonomous Żabka stores. So, how are they doing?
Companies must pass on rising costs to the customer: increase margins or encourage them to buy more often. Higher margins with simultaneously rising prices of semi-finished products mean higher prices, and this will drive away rather than attract the customer. However, it is also possible to do it differently, by eliminating some of the costs, for example, the employee from the customer service process.
Actually, why shouldn’t a machine prepare and serve hamburgers and fries for us?
McDonald’s has just opened a restaurant in South Korea where the customer won’t see the employee. The ordering process is done using touch screens, but we already know have that experience from restaurants in Poland. The difference here is that the ready meals are delivered into compartments that customers have to knock on to pick up their order. The flap opens and in the container we receive hamburger, fries or whatever else we wanted to buy.
McDonald’s has been operating similar ideas since this year in Texas and California, where machines prepare meals and artificial intelligence is used in drive-thru restaurants to collect orders, and in Arizona, robots even take ordered meals outside to customers.
The videos of such service on YouTube have hundreds of thousands of views. Such a restaurant only needs limited human service, so the problems of finding labor disappear.
In the growing number of countries with a high number of pensioners and problems with finding workers, perhaps such eateries will be a necessity in the future and not just an option.
In Germany, at the end of September, there were 66,000 vacancies in the restaurant and hotel sector, or 3.4 percent of all jobs in the sector, but two years ago there were twice as many, according to Eurostat. In France, there are 57,000 positions waiting for applicants, or 4.1 percent of jobs. In the Czech Republic, there is a shortage of as many as 8.4 percent of employees in the industry, in Greece 8.3 percent, in Austria 6.4 percent, and in the Netherlands 5.3 percent.
At the end of March, Greece reported a shortage of as much as 18.4 percent of restaurant and hotel workers. In such a situation, which will be further exacerbated in the future by the aging of societies, such autonomous restaurants may become not only an interesting novelty but a necessity. This is especially the case as the examples of Germany and Western Europe show that immigration does not solve the problem of the lack of workers, as less than one-third of newcomers work.
In Poland, although there are only 0.8 percent of vacancies in restaurants and hotels, we have an accelerating trend of an aging society. In terms of the age proportion of the population in society, with 19.6 percent of people aged 65+, we are catching up with the “old people of Europe,” i.e., the Germans, and the pace of aging is surpassed only by two of the world’s large countries: South Korea and Thailand. And yet in McDonald’s, you see mainly younger staff.
The convenience store chain Żabka currently has a total of over 11,000 stores in our country, 44 of which operate as stores without human service under the Żabka Nano brand. The Żabka press office refused to answer our questions about the intensity of traffic in them compared to standard Żabkas, but Business Insider’s own calculation revealed that the stores without human service made less than a quarter of the revenues of the regular stores in 2023.
There is a clear barrier somewhere, perhaps an aversion to technology, or uncertainty about how it works, which discourages customers from such outlets, when they can choose “normal” ones next door. Żabka tried to improve Nano’s profitability last year by relocating 13 outlets and closing 16. Hybrid stores with machine service offered at normal locations at night and on the holidays are also being tested.
