CLAMSHELL grills are making burger flipping obsolete at McDonald’s and other burger chains. Digital kiosks, tabletop tablets and cellphones are taking orders at eateries such as Domino’s Pizza. And at Silicon Valley start-up Zume, robots are being programmed to take over pizza assembly.Such labour-saving devices have been held out as counterweights to efforts to raise the wages of the lowest-paid workers in the US. But the early evidence suggests robots and other forms of automation are merely reshaping the work of people in food service. They are not — as they have in banks, on factory floors and in other sectors — replacing them.In spite of improvements in technology, minimum wage hikes in 2000-08 caused little immediate displacement of workers by technology, especially in kitchens, according to a study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chi-cago and DePaul University.There were slightly more workers per restaurant in 2015 than in 2001, according to data compiled for Reu...
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