The “automated” stores are less about reduction in labor cost and more about improving the overall operation and growing sales (thus increasing jobs.) It does help labor cost because the labor that is staffed is more efficient, but that’s more of a tertiary outcome. They still employ roughly the same number of staff, and potentially will employ even more as efficiency of the process grows.
Simplest way I can explain this is thinking about the order kiosks. One of the worst parts of fast food is that most people aren’t actually trained at birth how to order right, and secondarily it introduces another couple of humans who are fallible and won’t get it correct. EG: customer comes into McDonald’s and says “I want the whopper basket.” Crew person, internal: “wtf are they talking about, I guess I’ll give them a big mac.” Then the customer comes back pissed off because they actually wanted a quarter pounder with fries, it has to be remade distracting the kitchen, manager, that crew person, etc further.
Also, the entire time the customer is ordering, it’s engaging a whole crew person. To scale up and take more orders, you have to add an additional crew person for each order you want to take concurrently, and because customer flow is not 100% predictable, this isn’t even really possible. Most McDonalds have like 4 kiosks, and you’ll only find that they’re all used at the same time for maybe a grand total 3-4 hours a day. To replicate that with a human, you would have to be like “I need you to work from 7:23-7:59, and you to work 11:46-12:07, and you to work, 12:03-12:07…” which literally no one is going to do, and isn’t actually that predictable regardless. No automation means some customers are going to come in, see a line, and peace out. This means lower sales, and lower overall employees.
With automation, the demand can be filled much more often and a whole massive point of complexity is removed. In the example above, the customer comes in wanting a whopper basket, looks at the menu and goes “oh they call it a quarter pounder here” and clicks the buttons. Because they can now capture more demand, kitchens are busier and there are more orders to deliver, so they move that person who was going to be extremely inefficient by comparison serving customers 1:1, and move them to a kitchen position or to an expo position.)