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:


An employee pours frozen fries in a basket and dunks it in oil
After a while, an alarm rings and an employee has to come to manually raise the basket from the oil
An employee put the fries in a bin and salt them with a handheld salt shaker
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?
Automation would increase the upfront cost of opening a McDonald restaurant. Which wouldn't be a good thing for its franchise business.
Also, you have to take into account that by automating its store McDonald's will drastically increase its electricity consumption (which will not only increase its costs overall but might impact its brand image in terms of global warming). So in other words, automation wouldn't be such a cheap alternative.