Cincinnati’s Xavier University has broken new ground with the nation’s first pizza vending machine. Excerpt:
Xavier’s dining service makes hundreds of artisan pizzas every day and 70 of them will go into this machine at a time.
Customers simply walk up to the machine and select which type of pizza they want. They’ll have a few options to choose from including pepperoni, cheese and veggie, but those will vary based on what’s popular.
The machine takes the pizza they select from a refrigerated compartment and lifts it into a convection oven.
After about three minutes, the pizza is done cooking and the machine drops it into a box that is then delivered through a slot and into the hands of the hungry student.
A medium pizza has a 12-inch diameter, similar to what a customer could get at places like Domino’s, and costs $9.
When the machine is getting low, employees are notified through their phones and can refill the machine before it is empty.
“It’s an idea that’s time has come,” Kiah said.
Yes, it is an idea whose time has come. Why?
The ever-increasing calls for a $15/hr minimum wage, that’s why.
We already have burger machine manufacturers making their presence known. Anyone who thinks this is anything but a response to the increased agitation for government mandated minimum wages for burger-flippers is kidding themselves. Why not the same for pizza makers?
Granted the process still requires cafeteria workers to assemble the pizzas, to load them in the pizza machine; add to that a maintenance guy to fix the pizza vending machine when it (inevitably) breaks. But the cost in man-hours will still be lower than staffing a pizza deli 24/7, and the machine will deliver hot pies to cash-poor college students at any hour of day or night, at a lower price than the deli would mandate – especially if the deli workers are paid an Imperially-mandated $15/hr.
Isn’t technology great? Look for calls from the political Left to regulate these pizza machines in the name of “fairness.”
