(Bloomberg) — Carl Jr.’s CEO Andrew Puzder has a vision for his very own automated restaurant. “Machines are always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” Puzder said in Business Insider.
Inspired by his visit to Eatsa, an automated restaurant located in San Francisco, Carl Jr.’s CEO posits that a machine-assisted eatery may be an attractive prospect for millennials who, according to him, seem to favor ordering through kiosks rather than people. But Puzder’s ‘eyes on the prize’ mentality isn’t centered around the youthful audience insofar as its main interest is increasing efficiency and profitability; this pivot comes as a direct response to new expectations surrounding employee compensation in the fast-food space following McDonald’s reforms on its wage policy in New York.
While Puzder himself isn’t against setting a minimum wage higher than the current $7.25 an hour at the federal level, he warns that jumping to $15 an hour can cost millions of employees their jobs on a national scale.
“It sounds good to say we’re going to give everybody a raise,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “but I don’t think people think about the implications of that. If the business community doesn’t speak up, the politicians who garner votes by making those claims and passing this legislation are just going to keep saying things that just aren’t accurate. It’s important to speak up, so I did.”
Puzder says the he sees this opportunity for innovation as providing a stepping stone for entry-level workers to climb the ladder and fill managerial roles. In his own words, “There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing new and unskilled employees work their way up to managing a restaurant… [government mandates impose costs that] make automation a more viable option for business, [but] we could never take out all the front-line employees. You have to have people behind the counter because [customers] are used to that and people are more comfortable with it.”
Puzder, who views restaurant automation more so the way most view a vending machine, hopes to model Carl Jr.’s mechanized vision after Eatsa’s, where tablet-ordered foods are retrieved from cubbies, not handed by robots.
“Customer service is still very important and, for now, having access to a person is important to assure smooth experiences for everyone” Puzder says to the Los Angeles Times.
This article was written by Ido Lechner from PSFK and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.