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Because, again ironically, this is the kind of work that is hardest to automate. Unless you completely re-design restaurants so that you can fit in industrial robotics the way they do in car manufacturing, and maybe one day they'll solve that, you can't replace humans who can go up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, vacuum and dust and polish, etc.
'Intellectual' labour can be automated because you can break it down into steps that can be done by a computer programme. You can more easily automate the jobs of the accounts department than you can that of the contract cleaner who earns minimum wage emptying the bins and doing the vacuuming. Boston Robotics is still working on its Atlas robot, which to me right now still seems like a gimmick - it was supposed to do search-and-rescue work back in 2013 but I have no idea if it's ever been used in the field for real operations, as distinct from trials and tests. The reason I say "gimmick" is yeah, it can run a parkour course, big cheers, but would you trust it to clean your bathroom? (Sure, eventually they'll get it working, but it'll be a lot longer to replace grunt work labour than white collar desk jobs).
Applebee's is largely automated in that most of their food is mass-produced off-site and then heated in a microwave. People who go out do not want to dictate their order to a robot that they might have to outsmart, like I have to trick my washing machine and dishwasher into doing things.
The last mile will always be hard.
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The tricky part is that some mundane work and some intellectual work is easy to automate, but in many cases it's hard to tell ahead of time just how hard it will be. You can predict trucking and data entry will die off, but what will it take to crack cooking or construction or hairdressing?
And the white-collar work will be equally scattershot at approximately the same time. "It's all on the computer so it should be easy to capture inputs and outputs right?" is the kind of assumption that makes a million AI researchers' foreheads hit the desk. We'll certainly get there eventually but in this case the specifics matter.
If all the grunt work went first, we could hope for a smooth transition to post-scarcity. Sorry, we automated away your job scrubbing toilets, but on the upside production is so cheap that you can survive off your 19 twitch subs as a league of legends vtuber. But if the robot revolution happens in patches more or less randomly, then there are people with real social power that they stand to lose, and that implies chaos.
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Separately, new tech is always a gimmick, until it's not (though I agree most gimmicks are not new tech). I wouldn't have trusted Atlas to run a parkour course, until it did. Who's to say Boston Robotics will stop short of cleaning bathrooms? It seems unlikely there will be a fundamental limit in the tech that prevents that.
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