Happy Wednesday, dear readers!

I’ve got some news for you.  Now, don’t “flip out” (there’s a pun coming, so brace yourselves) but CaliBurger in Pasadena has put to work “Flippy” the burger-flipping robot.

It looks like flippy can handle about 12 hamburgers at a time, and works with a human assistant (at least for now).  The human assistant lays out the beef, salt the patties, and preps the buns.  He also applies cheese to the burgers as per order, and veggies as necessary.

Flippy, however, stands by the hot skillet, flips the burgers and takes ready burgers off the grill once they are done.  He also scrapes the grill for the next batch. CaliBurger is apparently planning to roll out Flippy and his cousins at all their burger locations.

The company that produced Flippy, Miso Robotics, advises that each unit costs “at least” $60,000 to buy and $12,000 per month in maintenance costs.

Assuming California does not extend workers’ compensation benefits to robots (laugh all you want, dear readers, you know full well there’s someone out there looking to be the first one to advocate a new “cause”), let’s look at the savings an employer can expect by moving to such a model.

Assuming a full-time cook, earning minimum wage in California on January 1, 2019, for an employer with more than 25 employees, will cost about $25,000 per year in salary.  Add on payroll tax ($2k) and unemployment tax ($1k), and then whatever your workers comp rate is as well as your healthcare package.

Now try to picture time off, training time for new employees, and the cost of retraining replacements.  All of that would buy you up to 40 hours per week.  But CaliBurger in Pasadena is open from 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day (and an extra two hours on the weekends).  So you’d need at least two cooks to cover all those hours and possibly more to allow for breaks and sick leave.

Also, let’s look at the workers’ comp: the burger flipper job will likely fall into occupation code 322 (fast food worker) which carries “G” occupational variant for wrist injuries.  Injuries resulting from repetitive motion, knee and ankle wear from standing at the grill for long periods of time, and skin injuries for reactions to the heat or oil might add up quickly.  Flipping burgers is by no means a job insulated from the risk of injury.

Pretty soon, a robot that does one of the least pleasant jobs at the restaurant for $60k to start and $12k per year doesn’t sound so bad.  But it gets better – between Flippy and the self-ordering kiosks at other fast-food locations, it is not unreasonable to expect a restaurant that employed 5-10 people at a time be reduced to 2-3 employees doing the least arduous and unpleasant tasks the industry has to offer.

As your humble blogger has opined repeatedly, this is just the start.  So many of us have our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor (or at the very least our careers) tied into an industry focused on humans doing work that occasionally causes injury.  What happens when less and less of the labor is done by humans?

Are you ready for that?