# Why is there so little automation at McDonald's?

I'm currently at a McDonald's in Norway (so, not a country where labour is dirt cheap, even for relatively unqualified jobs), and I'm struck by how manual every process is, from cooking the meat to assembling burgers to serving. The fries-making process is particularly baffling. It goes like this:

1. An employee pours frozen fries in a basket and dunks it in oil
2. After a while, an alarm rings and an employee has to come to manually raise the basket from the oil
3. An employee put the fries in a bin and salt them with a handheld salt shaker
4. The employee shovels the fries into little bags that are brought to the trays

It seems like it would be trivial to automate away the second step here (for example by having the basket rise by itself after a set time), and not that hard to have the rest done by a machine either.

Other industries employing unqualified labour, like groceries stores, have spent considerably more money and effort into automating their checkout lines, for example. Why hasn't the fast food industry followed suit?

• McDonalds focused on its supply chain in terms of mechanisation. Feb 3 '19 at 1:53
• Is this even true? In my experience McDonald's is full of computers. Computers for taking orders (customer kiosks), computers for entering orders (employee kiosks), computers for displaying which orders are ready and which are delayed, computers that display the menu (with different items highlighted based on time of day), and probably lots of computers you can't see for payroll, inventory, and other operations.
– BKay
Apr 5 '19 at 19:20

In Norway the average McDonalds employee makes $16 an hour. Lets estimate that the average McDonalds store makes 50 baskets of fries every day. Lets estimate that it takes on average 30 seconds to pour fries into the fryer. 30 seconds to remove the fries from the fryer. 30 seconds to pour salt on the fries and 30 seconds pour the fries into the paper bags. This means that on average McDonald's spends 100 min worth of labor (30 sec * 4 times * 50 baskets) a day on making fries, which costs them$26.66 per day. Now on top of making fries this employee can also help customers, clean up the store, and perform other tasks as well when they're not making fries.