Restaurant Automation? Too Early to Tell

choi

Michael Saltsman, The Employee of the Month Has a Battery; Minimum wage hikes are accelerating the trend toward automation --and fewer workers--in services. Wall Street Journal, Jan 30, 2014 (op-ed).
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303448204579342422527561620
("Tablet-based ordering [of food] is coming into vogue at US restaurants")

My comment:
(a) "Even coffee carafes left on the table for customers to serve themselves allowed restaurants to reduce the staff needed to fill cups."

carafe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carafe
(Coffee pots included in coffee makers are also referred to as carafes)
(b) Skip the second half (from the paragraph which starts with "Empirical studies") which discusses the disadvantages of minimum wage. Like most Republicans, I think minimum wage is a bad idea. But we should not get bogged down by the policy debate.
(c) However the last paragraph sounds inviting: "There's no limit on who can be replaced: San Francisco-based has a burger-flipping robot that replaces three full-time kitchen staff, makes no wage demands and stages no walkouts."
(i) Momentum Machines
momentummachines.com/
(ii) I saw its video a year ago and thought the robot was unwieldy. Do not know if improvements can save the day.