Fast food restaurant firms are doing exactly what the principles of economics predict any firm will do: balance their use of the factors of production (land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship) so as to maximize profit. For as long as there have been firms, firms have done that. As technology makes it possible to do so and do so without guessing about the outcome, doings so means, among other things, trading labor for capital when cost-benefit of a given firm's business model analysis shows that the long-run returns to investment in capital outstrip those returned to labor.
Perhaps the single most effective strategies for increasing the profitability of a firm that uses labor to produce, sell and deliver their wares/services is to get the customer, as much as possible, to perform the labor.
- Drinks -- fast food restaurants transferred the labor of dispensing soft drinks from the cashier to the customer.
- Check out -- Volume retailers implement self-service checkouts, transferring the cashiering function to the customer.
- The entire selling process -- Vending machines and websites shift the whole selling process to the customer thereby leaving the firm with the costs of production and product delivery.
- Delivery -- Mail-order delivery transfers not the function of delivery to the customer, but rather the cost of delivery. Mail-order limits the seller's delivery costs to those incurred in transporting a finished good from the production line to a warehousing location; moreover, because customers don't generally enter warehousing locations, the costs of creating and maintaining it so that it appeals to and is safe for customers is also avoided.
The ordering kiosk is not an innovative means of transferring elements of labor from employees to customers; it's merely a now-available and now-cost-effective means of doing so in the fast food industry.
As for the notion of fast food restaurant employees bringing one's food to one's table, well, I think that's mostly poppycock. McDonald's may very well initiate the kiosk program that way, but I suspect that after the kiosks have been deployed to about 25% of McDonald's stores, if that many, workers delivering food to one's table will stop other than in customer specific exception scenarios. After all, what do in-store customers do now? They order and wait for a cashier to call their order number, whereupon customers approach the counter to retrieve their food.
Quite simply, whenever and wherever firms can profit-effectively reduce production and sales costs, they will, and they'll use whatever tools are available to do so. It's never been otherwise, and it's not ever going to be.
