Time Machine

Short order cooks

Name: Cooks, Short Order: employment and wages since 1900
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Cooks, Short Order (SOC 35-2015)

Also called Grill cook, Line cook, Prep cook, Snack bar cook, Broiler cook

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 138,650 US short order cooks, with median pay of $35,880 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 227,360, in May 2003. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 35,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for short order cooks: Kitchen Display System, 1990 to 2015.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 5.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

0% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
0.94 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.94. BLS counted 167,480 of these jobs in May 2013 and 138,650 in May 2025 (-17%, a change derived by Future History).

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 11 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Short order cooks: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2015

Chicago

Future History. "Short order cooks: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2015.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_35_2015, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Short order cooks: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/35-2015}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time

187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Lunch Wagon Cook (horse-drawn night lunch wagon era)

Known then as Lunch Counter Cook / Hash House Cook (stationary lunch car era)

Known then as Diner Cook / Short Order Cook (classic diner golden age)

Known then as Short Order Cook (post-diner decline; lunch counter and snack bar roles)

Known then as Cooks, Short Order (BLS SOC 35-2015)

Known today as Cooks, Short Order (BLS SOC 35-2015)

Projected to still be called Cooks, Short Order (BLS SOC 35-2015)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

139K

Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$35,880

Est.

≈ $34,960 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1872

Walter Scott of Providence, Rhode Island launches the first documented night lunch wagon, serving ham sandwiches, boiled eggs, and pie to late-shift newspaper workers from a horse-drawn cart with windows cut into its sides. Scott continued the business for 45 years, until 1917. His operation is considered the direct ancestor of the American diner and the short order cook as a distinct occupation.

Beat · 1887

Thomas Buckley of Worcester, Massachusetts begins manufacturing "lunch wagons" commercially, selling them to operators across New England. Commercial production transforms the lunch wagon from a one-off improvisation into a replicable business format. This marks the moment the short order cook's workplace becomes a standardized, purchasable product.

Beat · 1913

The Jerry O'Mahony Company of Bayonne, New Jersey begins mass-producing prefabricated lunch cars, shipping them by rail to operators nationwide. O'Mahony's fully-equipped units arrive ready to operate: range, griddle, fryer, steam table, stools, and counter all installed. By mid-century O'Mahony and competitors (Silk City, Worcester Lunch Car, Mountain View) had shipped thousands of units, creating the landscape of mid-century American diners.

Beat · 1940

The diner industry approaches its peak: roughly 6,000 diners operate across the United States by the end of World War II, concentrated in industrial New England and the Mid-Atlantic, serving shift workers, truck drivers, and late-night customers. American Heritage magazine later described the short order cook of this era -- one nicknamed "the Spider" for his speed -- as moving so fast he seemed to have eight arms. The occupation is at the height of its cultural visibility and economic importance.

Beat · 1948

Richard and Maurice McDonald redesign their San Bernardino, California drive-in restaurant around the Speedee Service System -- an assembly-line kitchen that reduces wait times from 30 minutes to 30 seconds by eliminating the made-to-order cook in favor of specialized stations. The model becomes the blueprint for the fast food industry. McDonald's passes 300 locations by 1960 and 6,000 by 1980, drawing the lunch and breakfast market away from traditional diners and short-order establishments.

Beat · 1960

February 1, 1960: four Black students from North Carolina A&T sit at a whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, initiating the most prominent lunch counter sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement. The Greensboro Four are refused service but remain until closing time. Within a year, similar peaceful demonstrations occur in over one hundred cities. On July 25, 1960, after nearly $200,000 in losses, Woolworth manager Clarence Harris asks four Black employees to change out of their work clothes and order a meal at the counter -- the first integrated service at a Woolworth lunch counter. The short order cook's workplace -- the lunch counter -- becomes a central site of the Civil Rights struggle; integration of lunch counters transforms the racial composition of both the workforce serving them and the customers they serve.

Beat · 1965

The diner's long decline accelerates. McDonald's, Burger King, and the fast-growing chain restaurant sector undercut the traditional diner's price and speed advantages. Department store lunch counters -- a major employer of short order cooks since the 1920s -- begin closing as shopping malls and suburban strip centers replace downtown department stores. Woolworth's, Kresge's, and Grant's lunch counters, which had employed thousands of short order cooks in their heyday, gradually shutter through the 1970s and 1980s.

Beat · 2021

Miso Robotics deploys the Flippy Fry Station at White Castle and Jack in the Box locations across the US, marking the first large-scale commercial deployment of an AI-powered robotic fryer in a short-order-adjacent kitchen context. Flippy handles up to 120 fry baskets per hour, monitors cook temperatures, and removes baskets when done -- automating the most dangerous and physically demanding station on a short-order line. By 2025-2026, Miso has integrated NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator into next-generation Flippy units and has deployed at multiple chain locations. This is the most consequential technology development for the occupation since the introduction of the commercial electric fryer in the 1930s.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1872

In 1872, a Providence, Rhode Island man named Walter Scott quit his day job and converted a horse-drawn wagon into a mobile kitchen, pulling it through the streets after dusk to sell hot food to the workers at the Providence Journal and the city's other newspapers -- people who kept late hours and had nowhere to eat when restaurants closed at eight. Scott sold ham sandwiches, boiled eggs with bread, and slices of mince and huckleberry pie for a nickel each, and a full plate of chicken for thirty cents. The wagon had windows cut into each side so customers could approach and order; Scott cooked and served simultaneously from within. He continued the business until 1917. His model spread quickly: by 1884 Samuel Messer Jones had built the first wagon with an interior kitchen and bench seating; in 1887 Thomas Buckley of Worcester, Massachusetts began manufacturing "lunch wagons" commercially and selling them to operators across New England. Charles H. Palmer patented an improved design in 1891 with a counter that separated cook from customer and stools bolted to the floor. The term "short order" entered the American vernacular by the early 1890s -- first recorded in print around 1890-1895 -- to describe the food these wagon cooks turned out: items that could be assembled and plated in minutes, unlike the slow roasts and stews of formal restaurants. The Jerry O'Mahony Company, founded in 1913 in Bayonne, New Jersey, began mass-producing fully prefabricated "lunch cars" and shipping them by rail to operators nationwide; by mid-century O'Mahony and a handful of competitors had shipped thousands of units. The 1940s and early 1950s were the golden age: roughly 6,000 diners operated across the United States, concentrated in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, serving shift workers, truck drivers, and late-night customers who needed a hot meal fast. The cook behind that counter -- moving between the flat-top griddle, the fryer, and the steam table with a speed that gave at least one of them the nickname "the Spider" -- was the short order cook at the height of the occupation's cultural visibility.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace short order cooks? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

→ 2035

-5.2%

BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 35-2015 (Cooks, short order): 138.7 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 131.5 thousand in 2035, a change of -7.2 thousand (-5.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.

Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"

2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)

94%

probability

What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 35-2015 Cooks, Short Order: probability of computerisation 0.94, rank 601 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"

2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)

of tasks

What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 35-2015.00 Cooks, Short Order. Shown: human-rated β = 0, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0; GPT-4-rated β 0. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for short order cooks

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onGrill, fry, and finish proteins (burgers, eggs, bacon, chicken strips, pancakes) to order, adjusting heat zones and cook times in real time across multiple concurrent tickets.

Grill, fry, and finish proteins (burgers, eggs, bacon, chicken strips, pancakes) to order, adjusting heat zones and cook times in real time across multiple concurrent tickets.^[4],[6]

Tools picking this up

Flippy Fry Station ↗

Where your edge is

In QSR kitchens deploying robotic fryers, pivot to prep, quality-check, and plating roles that the robot cannot do; in independent diners robotic fryers remain rare and hand skills stay central.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor and discard food items past their hold or safety window

Monitor and discard food items past their hold or safety window; track waste by type and quantity so the kitchen can adjust purchasing and portion sizes.^[7],[8]

Tools picking this up

Winnow VisionAI ↗

Where your edge is

Let an AI vision system (Winnow) log waste automatically so you spend time adjusting prep quantities rather than manually recording discards; kitchens using Winnow report food cost reduction.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrep ingredients before service: slice, portion, bread, and stage proteins and vegetables so the line runs without gaps

Prep ingredients before service: slice, portion, bread, and stage proteins and vegetables so the line runs without gaps; rotate stock and label containers with date-and-time stamps.^[9],[10]

Tools picking this up

ClearCOGS AI Prep Forecasting ↗

Where your edge is

Use AI-generated daily prep sheets (ClearCOGS or similar) to calibrate quantities against forecasted demand rather than gut feel, cutting overprep waste and mid-shift shortages.

Where short order cooks go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

Food Service Managers
US median pay
$69,390 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+5.8%
First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers
US median pay
$44,080 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+5.4%
Cooks, Restaurant
US median pay
$37,390 (May 2025)
BLS outlook 2025-35
+12.1%

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Food Service Managers

Food Service Managers handle the full operational picture: hiring, budgets, compliance, and customer experience. The transition requires business skills beyond cooking, but short order cooks with a broad view of kitchen economics and staff dynamics have a credible path here.

What you'd add

· P&L basics and food cost percentage management
· Restaurant POS and reporting tools (Toast, Square)
· Food safety management certification (ServSafe Manager)
· HR basics: hiring, onboarding, progressive discipline

What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one

Tools of the era

How has the work of short order cooks changed since 1872?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Lunch wagon: cast-iron griddle and open flame (horse-drawn mobile kitchen era)
Walter Scott's 1872 lunch wagon set the physical template for short order cooking: a compact workspace, an open flame or charcoal grill, a cast-iron griddle, and a cook who had to do everything -- prep, cook, serve, and collect payment -- alone or nearly so. The tools were the same as any household kitchen of the era; what was new was the operational context: speed, volume, and a counter separating cook from customer. Charles H. Palmer's 1891 patent formalized this spatial layout. Commercial lunch wagon manufacturers (Thomas Buckley of Worcester from 1887; later Jerry O'Mahony in Bayonne from 1913) standardized the equipment fit-out: a gas burner or wood-burning range, a flat-top griddle, a coffee urn, and a steam table for pre-cooked items.
Prefabricated diner: stainless steel, commercial gas range, and steam table (golden age kitchen)
The Jerry O'Mahony Company and its competitors (Silk City, Worcester Lunch Car, Mountain View) introduced the prefabricated stainless-steel diner from 1913 onward, shipping fully outfitted kitchen units by rail to operators across the country. The diner kitchen of the 1930s and 1940s was a marvel of compressed efficiency: a six-to-eight-burner commercial gas range, a large flat-top griddle, a deep-fat fryer (commercial electric fryers became standard in the 1930s after Pitco Frialator introduced its first commercial units), a steam table for hot holding, a coffee urn, and a sandwich prep area -- all within a workspace that might be twelve feet wide and four feet deep. The cook who staffed it during peak service was managing simultaneous tickets from multiple stools and booths, keeping each item at the right stage without written orders. American Heritage magazine immortalized one such cook, nicknamed "the Spider" for his eight-armed speed.
McDonald's Speedee Service System: assembly-line kitchen (fast food kitchen design)
In 1948 the McDonald brothers redesigned their San Bernardino, California drive-in restaurant around an assembly-line principle they called the Speedee Service System: a limited, high-volume menu, each station dedicated to one task (grilling, dressing, bagging), and a workflow that reduced wait time. The Speedee kitchen was not a short order kitchen -- it was its structural opposite, eliminating the multi-task, made-to-order cook entirely in favor of specialized stations. But its influence on the surrounding restaurant industry was profound. By demonstrating that a limited menu executed with assembly-line precision could serve thousands of customers per day at low cost, McDonald's and its imitators (Burger King from 1953, Wendy's from 1969) drew customers away from traditional short-order establishments and accelerated the diner's long decline. Independent short order cooks who remained were increasingly valued for exactly what the fast food model could not replicate: the ability to handle custom orders, a varied menu, and made-to-order cooking for a full-service breakfast and lunch.
Effect on the work
The fast food kitchen model is estimated to have contributed to a decline in traditional diner employment between 1960 and 1980, as McDonald's grew between 1960 and 1980 and drew a substantial share of the lunch and breakfast market away from independent lunch counters and diners.
Restaurant POS with kitchen printer (paper ticket era ends)
The introduction of dedicated restaurant point-of-sale systems with kitchen printers in the mid-1970s -- IBM's POS terminal arrived in 1985 for larger chains; smaller systems from Squirrel Systems (founded 1984) and others served mid-market -- began replacing the handwritten ticket spindle with machine-printed order slips. For the short order cook, the kitchen printer was a quality-of-life improvement: printed tickets were legible, sequenced, and could include modifier codes ("no onion", "over easy") without relying on a server's handwriting. The printer did not change what the cook did; it improved the accuracy of the instructions. By the early 1990s, printed tickets were standard in chain-format short-order establishments; independent diners often retained the handwritten ticket longer.
Kitchen Display System (KDS): first-generation screens replace paper tickets
The first kitchen display systems reached the restaurant market in the late 1980s, initially too expensive and fragile for most independents. By the mid-1990s they were standard in high-volume QSR and fast-casual chains. For the short order cook, the KDS replaced the spinning ticket wheel and the pile of printed slips with a wall-mounted screen showing all open tickets, color-coded by elapsed time, with individual item status. The cook could "bump" finished items off the screen with a touch, triggering the front-of-house system to notify servers. Ticket time visibility and queue management improved measurably: KDS studies in the 2010s routinely showed improvements in average ticket time and significant reductions in order errors. Toast KDS, launched in 2016, brought affordable cloud-based kitchen display to independent restaurants at a price point previously available only to chains.
Robotic fryers and AI prep forecasting (Miso Robotics Flippy, ClearCOGS)
Miso Robotics launched the first AI-powered robotic fry station ("Flippy") in 2017, deploying at a CaliBurger location in Pasadena, California. By 2021 the next-generation Flippy Fry Station was operating at White Castle and Jack in the Box locations, handling more than a hundred fry baskets per hour -- roughly double a human fry cook's throughput. Flippy addresses the most physically hazardous and labor-intensive task on a short-order line: managing a commercial deep fryer at sustained high volume. In parallel, AI prep-forecasting tools like ClearCOGS (founded 2021) began generating ingredient-level daily prep sheets from POS history, weather data, and local events, reducing overprep waste at pilot locations. These tools represent the most concrete near-term technology change in the short order cook's working environment: not full automation of the role, but partial automation of its most repetitive sub-tasks.
Effect on the work
Miso Robotics positions Flippy as a complement to human labor rather than a replacement, redeploying fry-station workers to prep, quality-check, and plating roles the robot cannot perform. Actual headcount effects at scale remain undocumented in public research as of 2026.

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Cooks, Short Order employment and pay by year

On record since1872

Latest US employment138,650 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$35,880 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-5.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1900	35,000	n/a	Est., Backthenhistory.com Researched context	Report
1945	120,000	n/a	Est., American Heritage (1993) Researched context	Report
1970	90,000	$4,200	Est., USC Scalar (employment) Researched contextEst., FRASER / BLS Bulletin 1712 (pay) Researched context	Report
1990	130,000	$10,500	Est., Chowhound (employment) Researched contextEst., University of Missouri Libraries (pay) Researched context	Report
2000	160,000	n/a	Est., O*NET OnLine 35-2015.00 Researched context	Report
2003	227,360	$16,430	BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic	Report
2004	225,740	$16,860	BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic	Report
2005	203,350	$17,230	BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic	Report
2006	189,610	$17,880	BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic	Report
2007	177,450	$18,630	BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic	Report
2008	168,770	$19,260	BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic	Report
2009	166,140	$19,520	BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic	Report
2010	171,780	$19,580	BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic	Report
2011	168,320	$19,780	BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic	Report
2012	162,320	$19,730	BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic	Report
2013	167,480	$19,780	BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic	Report
2014	180,800	$20,190	BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic	Report
2015	193,170	$20,780	BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic	Report
2016	183,990	$21,890	BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic	Report
2017	174,230	$22,740	BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic	Report
2018	155,840	$23,800	BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic	Report
2019	152,670	$25,150	BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic	Report
2020	123,350	$26,570	BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic	Report
2021	124,800	$28,560	BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic	Report
2022	133,290	$30,360	BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic	Report
2023	126,370	$34,130	BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic	Report
2024	150,420	$35,620	BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic	Report
2025	138,650	$35,880	BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Food Service

Where short order cooks go next

Food Service Managers

Lunch wagon: cast-iron griddle and open flame (horse-drawn mobile kitchen era)Lunch wagon1872–1913

Prefabricated diner: stainless steel, commercial gas range, and steam table (golden age kitchen)Prefabricated diner1913–1970

McDonald's Speedee Service System: assembly-line kitchen (fast food kitchen design)McDonald's Speedee Service System1948–1970

Restaurant POS with kitchen printer (paper ticket era ends)Restaurant POS with kitchen printer1975–1995

Kitchen Display System (KDS): first-generation screens replace paper ticketsKitchen Display System1990–2015

Robotic fryers and AI prep forecasting (Miso Robotics Flippy, ClearCOGS)Robotic fryers2017–present

Cooks, Short Order employment and pay by year

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