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Restaurants are figuring out how to do without servers

• pandasun 8y ago
  San Francisco has the world's richest companies, but you can't even walk the street without running into a several homeless people every single block. Go figure, very 'progressive'.
  • notadoc 8y ago
    It's like that throughout the entire west coast, there is a severe homeless crisis that is entirely ignored. But this is unrelated to the article.
    • mwfunk 8y ago
      It's not ignored at all- AFAICT the biggest problem is that there's no critical mass of people who can agree on what to do about it. Furthermore I'm not sure that there's even a critical mass of people in SF who think it's a problem. In any thread about homelessness in SF, you will see at least a few locals get very incensed that anyone is complaining about the sheer numbers of homeless on the streets, and accuse people who would like to move them off sidewalks and into shelters as being heartless monsters. I don't know how many SF locals are in the homelessness-as-a-human-right camp, but enough to be visible here and elsewhere, and probably enough to muddy the waters even further politically. I've lived in the Bay Area for 10+ years and it always seemed like no one could even agree on what the problem was, much less a solution.
  • abritinthebay 8y ago
    There’s a LOT more to it that that. Part of why you DO see them is policing and treatment of the homeless population has been (until recently, anyhow) much more progressive & humane. ”Out of sight, out of mind” is not good policy.
  • walrus01 8y ago
    There are generally two categories of homeless: People who can actually get back on their feet again and hold a regular job, and the long term either mentally ill, or mentally ill + drug/alcohol addicted who are not capable of holding down jobs. Just because empty positions exist doesn't mean that the available "talent pool" of homeless could theoretically fill them.
    • vertexFarm 8y ago
      It's kind of a chicken or the egg situation on a long enough timeline. Unattainable housing combined with the fact that 40% of people in this country don't even have $400 in savings drives a lot of people out on the streets, and try being out on the street long-term without developing mental problems or a habit.
    • StanislavPetrov 8y ago
      The ability to "hold a job" is only tangentially related to the ability to "get back on your feet" while being homeless. Having no fixed address, no place to shower, no clean clothes, often having a criminal record (as a result of homelessness not true criminality - vagrancy, trespassing, ect) makes it very, very difficult for even otherwise capable people to get back on their feet and find (let alone hold) another job. Many people with a roof over their head and all the amenities of modern society are capable of holding a job (especially a menial one), but entirely incapable of pulling themselves out of dire straights.
  • woah 8y ago
    Many of the most self righteous progressives in California have made a few million off their ramshackle bungalows and would like to keep the housing prices sky high. Incredibly, they argue that increasing supply would make prices higher, even though the past 40 years have conclusively disproven that, to their great enrichment.
    • abritinthebay 8y ago
      NIMBY’s are not Progressive. They’re practically the definition of Conservative. There’s just this wildly mistaken belief that CA (and SF in particular) is populated by ultra-left people. The Bay is centrist at best.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        >The Bay is centrist at best. If SF is centrist I want less than nothing to do with the whatever is left of it. I'm sure if you want to pick and choose an issue to use as your measuring stick you will find that a substantial chunk of people in SF do not have a far left position on an issue when a far left of center position hurts them personally. However, justifying exceptions to the rule when the rule is not in your self interest is pretty common. Fiscal conservatives don't complain when the government pisses money away on things they like. Commies will gladly redistribute all the wealth that isn't their personal wealth. Few people are so dedicated to their beliefs that they advocate against their own self interest. Edit: Is it the slight against SF or the observation about humanity that people don't like?
        • drb91 8y ago
          SF is conservative in some ways, liberal in others, just like.... everything. However, if you look at the money in the area, it’s not hard to see how the culture will eventually clash with leftists.
        • abritinthebay 8y ago
          Most of the rest of the developed world is to the left of SF. Especially Europe.
  • scarmig 8y ago
    Homelessness as a problem always has to be scoped at the geographic level where freedom of movement exists. In the case of the USA, that's national. The strongest predictors of homelessness are population density, walkability, and climate. Homeless people move to places that have those and away from places that don't. There's a theoretical case for provision of services driving homeless migration to the cities that provide services, but it's silly to imagine "progressive" policies generally being the reason why people are homeless. In San Francisco, if you're priced out of your home, you don't end up homeless for years on end; you need severe mental health issues or addiction to account for that. San Jose and San Diego are hardly wildly progressive, but they rank near the top on homeless population.
    • dahdum 8y ago
      It's not the reason most end up homeless, but progressive policies applied incorrectly can certainly exacerbate the problem. Excluding the dirty kids who choose the lifestyle, the easier you make it to be homeless and drug addicted the less likely they are to seek treatment. In Ottawa I remember the mayor pleading on television not to give any handouts or cash to the homeless, so they'd seek out the govt services that would help them. SF enables them far more than most cities...they can shoot up in broad daylight in a Bart station or busy street with no police response.
  • dmode 8y ago
    It is a combination of many things including 1. Treating homeless in a humane way, rather than just as garbage that need to be discarded with (Nevada pays homeless people to move CA) 2. Generous homeless services 3. Location of homeless services close to City center 4. Gentrification of small City leading to previy homeless zones suddenly colliding with posh apartments 5. Rising rent 6. Opiod crisis 7. Nice weather 8. Foot traffic
• shah_s 8y ago
  Am I missing something? Plenty of restaurants have self serve policies.
  • notadoc 8y ago
    That was my first thought too, and that applies to nearly every fast dining or fast food restaurant, not just in San Francisco or the USA, but also elsewhere in the world. Many fast dining restaurants exist where you order your own food at a counter, they call your order name/number, and you bus your own table. It's fast and obviously must be efficient for the restaurant otherwise they wouldn't do it. I don't see a problem with that either.
  • alistairSH 8y ago
    I think the point is these new selfs-serve options are higher-end (at least in terms of food and drink options) than previous examples. But, I don't see this becoming normal. Certainly, I dine out when I don't want to prep my own meal. Having the drinks refilled for me is part of that experience. And while I wouldn't classify myself as a foodie, I am willing to pay for quality service.
  • ProfessorLayton 8y ago
    I guess what's missing is that many of these self-serve restaurants with $22 pan roasted salmon or whatever still have 20% tip preselected on the payment screen.
    • NullPrefix 8y ago
      To tip the chef?
      • paulie_a 8y ago
        I assume that the chef is paid from the 22 dollars the customer paid.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• mandioca 8y ago
  Please stop linking articles with paywall, it’s tremendously annoying on mobile. Thanks
  • firloop 8y ago
    Very tired discussion, see "Are paywalls ok?" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
    • flowerbeater 8y ago
      Not saying that paywall complaints are okay, but just because YCombinator decrees it so, doesn't mean that we can't offer an opinion about something. If Hacker News instituted put in the FAQ that links to blogs was not okay and no discussion is allowed, that doesn't mean we shouldn't complain about it if we think it's bad for the site.
      • s73v3r_ 8y ago
        People getting paid for their work isn't something we should be complaining about, though.
    • nostalgeek 8y ago
      The issue is how many people actually read the linked article when paywalled before leaving a comment on the thread. Which leads to a drop in discussion quality since nobody even knows the content of the article at first place, so it quickly becomes totally off topic.
  • chobo 8y ago
    Feel free to pay for your content.
• SurrealSoul 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but as someone who pays the majority of a resturant waiter's salary via tipping, I don't think it's an issue of the restaurant saving the $5.50/hr. I have never seen an article hype up the McDonald experience so much. [Side tangent, I hate the concept of waiters. If I am having a romantic dinner with my wife, I would much rather get her a cup of water than have someone butt into our conversation]
  • rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
    Go to dinner in Europe. The wait staff is paid a humane wage and they won’t bother you at all unless you wave them over. This was my experience across Germany, Poland, and Italy, so I assume it’s a continental preference. YMMV.
    • dvtrn 8y ago
      This is my preferred method of service, not as a means of disparaging service industry workers (hell I still am to this day part time because I make one hell of an old fashioned #humblebrag) but rather in support of them. One shouldn't feel like they have to go and figuratively grovel their patrons into a tip by showing up every three bites to ask if I need anything, just to walk out at the end of their shift feeling like they've earned something. If there's ever a call for a workers revolution in food service (in addition to the Fight for Fifteen) sign me the hell up.
      • zeth___ 8y ago
        A summary of why I don't expect good service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9PSg0sQyfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9PSg0sQyfs
    • hrktb 8y ago
      You have the opposite problem though. Getting a waiter's attention is a PITA and you'll easily wait 15min to get more water or order something else. This is solved in Japan with the call button in family restaurants, I'd actually want an app to queue requests without needing the waiter to come to the table first.
• SilasX 8y ago
  Kind of inflammatory way to phrase it[2], but to save you the time: restaurants are shifting to models that use less waitstaff, closer to fast casual. In the first example, they say that runners bring the food but you have to fetch your own water and go to a counter for each wine glass; sadly, it was ambiguous on how orders are placed. This is kind of to-be-expected as the wage/cost-of-living ratio dips too low so that lower-labor models are preferred. [1]. My peeve about these kinds of models is the ambiguity of the tipping situation; it's obviously not full service, but it's not zero either. And places like Super Duper are zero service (you stand in line, fetch your order, and bus your table) but still guilt you into tipping. I don't know the amount for "this satisfies the standard expectation". [1] If you automatically say "lol pay them more", it's not that simple: higher prices and you'll scare off too many customers -- into fast casual and home cooking -- to cover overhead. Take lower profits and it may not pay enough to be worth the investment. [2] Edit: original version was something like “... putting diners to work”.
  • CodeCube 8y ago
    My rule for tipping is: - someone takes my order, and busses my table: "full tip" (whatever that means to you) - I stand in line to place the order, but someone busses my table: "50% tip" - I stand in line to place the order, then bus my own table: "Look in the mirror, and shoot myself some finger guns"
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      Is 50% a typo? Because for 50% I better have gotten at least a handjob.
      • SilasX 8y ago
        I think they mean 50% of the full, reference tip amount. If the full tip is 20%, then 50% there means 10% of the bill.
        • paulie_a 8y ago
• crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Sure, whatever. Cause $2.35/hr is just sooooooo expensive. So we sucker diners to do our labor for us, and , 'pass on the savings' HAH. Try, "Nobody wants or can afford to do the work for such a pittance, so nobody does." I hope those businesses that do this die. Then again, won't really need hope. New restaurants easily die within 1 year. Good riddance.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Agree with the sentiment, but in California servers make the regular minimum wage. There is no special "tipped wage" like there is in other parts of the country.
• abritinthebay 8y ago
  “Specific SF restaurants are too cheap to pay proper wages to their staff” would be a more correct title. This is not a general problem in SF.
• vertexFarm 8y ago
  Housing costs in places with good economies and lots of jobs are getting absolutely ridiculous compared to the median wage. I guess people are supposed to look at less glamorous cities, but if everyone affected by this did that then they would probably run out of opportunities, fill up, and have housing prices shoot up as well. Something's gotta give here. There's a real disconnect between the prices and the ability to pay. Who is paying for these things? People with lots of generational wealth? People with upper-middle class jobs yet no savings and razor-thin margins due to living expenses? That's so shitty.
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    It has to do with artificially low interest rates. The Fed should have been bumping them up years ago, forcing liquidity into other parts of the system. It would be better if there was a more natural way to set rates. Also - it has to do with perpetually extending our visibility into our economic future, i.e. as loan times get longer and longer - the lenders win as housing prices go up. If everyone had the same term mortgage, and it was fixed - this issue would not cause problems for for housing inflation. But as we go collectively from 25 years to 50 years to 75 years ... well, housing prices go up.
    • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > It has to do with artificially low interest rates It's predominantly a supply problem. Interest rates are low across the country, yet San Francisco is in a unique situation.
      • throwaway2048 8y ago
        Out of control real estate prices are a problem across most of the usa, although particularly accute in SF.
  • StanislavPetrov 8y ago
    Perhaps the official policy of the FED for the last 11 years shouldn't have been to artificially drive up home values? This has been the explicitly stated policy ever since Tim Geitner suspended mark-to-market prices on MBS securities. The plan was to lower interest rates and subsidize the housing and debt markets until these worthless derivatives held by banks and wealth managers (and pension funds who foolishly took risky gambles with retirement money) were in the green, so they could be offloaded. In that sense, the plan has been a success - the banks and the wealthy derivative owners made out like bandits. Home prices have rebounded. This is all great for the owners and the wealthy and terrible for renters, young people, and the less-well off who still need a place to live but have been priced out of the housing market by a Federal Reserve that threw them under the bus for their true constituents.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "San Francisco Restaurants Can’t Afford Waiters." Uhhhh. No - that is really the wrong way to say it. There's a supply/demand mismatch obviously. Clearly the wealthy residents of SF simply don't want to pay ... for some reason. I think there is something sneaky going on - when I lived in SF, restaurant prices were disturbingly cheap. As a Canadian, I'm used to not very good prices. But in SF, I couldn't grasp it. I know that they employ a lot of undocumented labour, and I suggest this might have something to do with it - i.e. - a resto starts employing undocumented workers in the back simply to 'stay alive' - but then it forces other restaurants into the same competitive bind. And then they start moving into other jobs - forcing those layers of the value chain to have 'real wages' that are under minimum wage. This is effectively what has happened in farming - and the same thing could be hitting restaurants - it's one of the more pernicious aspects of irregular immigration and employment.
  • efficax 8y ago
    SF is full of rich people but it also has a normal share of middle and lower income residents. As high rents eat up more and more of their budgets, they have less and less money left over for other things, like dining out. If the restaurants raised their prices to pay a better wage, then only the rich could afford to eat at the restaurants, and there not being enough rich people, they would go out of business. Maybe the Bay area should be forced to feel the effects of its insane housing market in this way, but the individual restaurant owners aren't going to respond to these pressures by going out of business, they're going to try and reduce costs so they can keep prices low.
    • frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
      Yes but their response is to create demand for a foreign, undocumented underclass in place of raising wages for native workers. In fact that impulse is part of what makes it so that the Bay doesn't have enough people who make enough to eat out enough to support business. Ending our reliance on a captive labor force will raise prices but it'll raise wages too.
      • 8y ago
• CompelTechnic 8y ago
  There sure is a lot of righteous indignation in this thread. I am eager to see the fallout of the imminent minimum wage increase (hopefully not too much human suffering). With the similar event that happened in Seattle recently, the initial government-funded study of the outcome came back with results favoring the conservative opinion. Naturally, the liberal local government quashed this study and performed another. Similarly, if you google "Seattle minimum wage study" the results are a mixed bag, and more informed by opinion than data. Take everything you read with a grain of salt, and stick to first-hand data as much as possible. Here is a good, minimally biased (although by a libertarian-leaning economist) synopsis of the initial results: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/seattle-minimum-wage-study.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...
• rhc2104 8y ago
  Note that in SF, waitstaff earn minimum wage plus tips- they do not earn a far lower hourly wage like many other parts of America.
  • s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Which is as it should be. The concept of a "tipped wage" is absurd on it's face.
• TipVFL 8y ago
  "Inside these restaurants, it’s evident that the forces making this one of the most expensive cities in America are subtly altering the economics of everything. Commercial rents have gone up. Labor costs have soared. And restaurant workers, many of them priced out by the expense of housing, have been moving away." I feel like so much of this could be fixed if we had a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone. It's hard to imagine that this housing bubble can last much longer, it's distorting everything to such an extreme already. The cost of housing doesn't have to keep increasing, just look at Germany: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-worlds-best-run-economy-home-prices-just-keep-falling-because-thats-what-home-prices-are-supposed-to-do/#55ef61506ad0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-w...
  • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > * a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone* The former has a terrible track record of leading to the latter, particularly in America (where housing is treated as a proxy for savings). Regarding Germany: "During the current real-estate cycle, i.e., from 2009 to 2017, house prices have risen 80% in large metropolitan areas (A cities) and c. 60% in B and C cities. In 2017, the number of newly completed residential units looks likely to have risen to more than 300,000 for the first time in the current cycle; in 2018, it might climb to 335,000. However, assuming that there is demand for at least 350,000 new apartments, the gap between supply and demand should continue to widen in both years. As demand remains high, upward price pressure will continue. This suggests that prices and rents will rise further in all major cities. Overvaluations are rising, and the risk of a price bubble on the German housing market is increasing. The price uptrend is likely to continue for several years to come, at least in most major cities in Germany" [1]. [1] https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000460528/The_German_housing_market_in_2018.pdf https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000046...
    • stevenwoo 8y ago
      What do you think of this proposal in the UK? London seems to have a similar problem to what we are seeing in US cities now but I don't know if causes are similar. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/25/home-ownership-out-of-reach-for-2-million-uk-families-says-thinktank https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/25/home-ownersh...
• codewritinfool 8y ago
  Literal serverless architecture.
• kennon42 8y ago
  My initial thought was that this was yet another post about serverless!
  • davidcamel 8y ago
    Similarly, I read the headline and thought, "What kinds of workloads do restaurants run on servers?". Oh boy.
    • jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
      Same, I was like "All they need is a POS system. Why would they need server infrastructure?"
• emilfihlman 8y ago
  This is pretty standard in most of Finland
  • 8xde0wcNwpslOw 8y ago
    I don't agree. Restaurants have servers as usual.
• grellas 8y ago
  On July 1, the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave. If a local government dictates that your base wage rate for a labor-intensive industry has to increase by 40% within less than a 5-year period and, on top of that, further dictates that you as an employer must provide those same employees with above-average health benefits together with paid leave of varying types above and beyond what market norms have been, well, at the end of that process, you are obviously having to pay a hell of a lot more for those employees than you did just a few years back, perhaps as much as 50% more. Real wage increases tie to rising productivity. I well remember representing highly-talented UNIX engineers during the early 1990s who were earning around $60K per year (adjusting for inflation alone, that number would still not be in the six-figure range today). Today, engineers of that caliber easily command six-figure salaries plus great perks. The best of them easily command $250k+ salaries. For employers trying to find such engineers, they have to open their wallets big time and, yet, they do. Why? Because, if you are a Google or a Facebook or a Twitter or an Apple, or any other preeminent company needing the services of such engineers, you are not trying to eliminate those positions simply because they cost a lot more today than they did in the early 1990s. You are desperately trying to add such people to your payroll because of what they can do for you. The changing tech world has magnified the productivity and value of what such engineers can do and therefore the salaries and perks they can command are far higher. But this is market-based and justified because the profits you can earn as an employer are also much higher owing to their work. The engineers of the early 1990s were just as talented as those today but their value was relatively less to employers than is the value of their counterparts today. Their productivity has vastly increased. Hence, so has their compensation. Compare that to what the city officials in San Francisco are doing with waiters and similar restaurant staff. Essentially, they have decreed (in the name of worker protection) that the cost to the employer of such employees shall increase by 50% or more over a short period when nothing whatever has occurred to increase their productivity. I went years working my way through school doing such work and it is very hard work indeed. The people doing it earn every penny. Yet those who did it 5 years ago at considerably less cost to the employer than those who do it today worked just as hard as their counterparts today. If those doing such work today are doing the same work, and their productivity has not materially increased, yet they are getting paid 50% more, something has to give. This article basically dances around the obvious by tying the discussion to the considerable expense of living in SF and to collateral issues affecting the city's living environment. In doing so, it does not discuss the obvious: when supply and demand dictates what people will do, and you arbitrarily raise the cost of something, it will affect demand by lessening it. That is why SF restaurants are moving to less labor-dependent models of doing business. Not all will do so but the laws of supply and demand have given them an incentive to do so and it should surprise no one that a good number of them are adapting. Perhaps this is all worth it because those who are now working as waitstaff in SF restaurants are doing much better financially and this is worth the trade off. But no one should pretend that this does not come at a price, perhaps a very high one, for those whose jobs have vanished along with the new business models. (By "new" here, I mean not that no one has had self-serve models before, which they obviously have, but "new" in the sense that restaurants that would before have never considered such models are now adopting them).
• gnicholas 8y ago
  Another approach: in Menlo Park, a restaurant offers workers a crash pad where they can sleep during the week. https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-restaurateur-offers-local-housing-to-workers https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-resta...
  • toomanybeersies 8y ago
    Luxury, I used to have to sleep in the storeroom if I had a double shift and didn't want to go home.
• ademup 8y ago
  I'm happy to see servers go. If "Include wait staff?" were a selectable checkbox on my dining experience, I would opt out every...single...time. I prefer to eat out as often as possible, and although I have had many wonderful experiences with talented wait staff, most act as gatekeepers between me and the food; me and payment; me and the real problem-solver. Servers often poorly represent the wishes of the establishment's owner, let alone the chef's. Good servers can certainly make an otherwise weak experience "fine", but they more often make decent experiences less-good.
• Androider 8y ago
  I'd prefer a serverless restaurant even if the price was exactly the same as with the full-service. It's like the difference between an old-style Taxi and an Uber, with the latter you just get up and go when you're done. The whole dance of flagging down the server to request the bill, get the bill, oops the server disappeared before you could pull out your card, wait for 10 minutes while they are off exploring Narnia in the kitchen cupboards. Finally they come to take the card and disappear again, what should have taken 30 seconds is now at 15 min+, hope you're not missing your show... ah, finally they're back! Now try to figure out the tip line, with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in your head while your house is burning down. Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining experiences. Much like Uber, which doesn't only cannibalize existing providers but actually creates a whole new category of short rides that you would never have previously considered using a Taxi for.
  • 67_45 8y ago
    This is not a substantive comment to make but calculating a tip is very easy. 15 percent of course is that standard amount. That is 10 percent plus 5 percent. Finding ten percent is as easy as moving the decimal over one place. If the bill is 15.69 ten percent of that is one dollar and 56 cents. Call it 1.50. we know that five percent is half of ten, so just divide that number in half and add it. So half of 1.50 is .75 and 1.50 plus .75 is 2.25. it's very easy.
    • mjevans 8y ago
      Part of the problem here is the 'tradition' of tips being a portion of the staff's wage. I'd prefer to see the 'tip' build in to the prices, workers paid a living wage, and any tip being purely an optional thing for great service.
      • refurb 8y ago
        I think if you asked a lot of server’s they prefer the below-minimum wage based plus tips to a “living wage”. I know plenty of servers who pull in an equivalent hourly wage of $30 on a good night. They’d get screwed if tips went away and they were paid a living wage of $20 per hour.
• Simulacra 8y ago
  I wonder if some of these establishments truly can't afford it, or they don't want to. It would seem MBA 101 to always reduce costs, and increases profits.
• Simulacra 8y ago
  I would prefer a server-less restaurant just so I don't have to worry about tipping. Reduction or elimination in wait staff may just appeal to the anti-tipping segment, which could have the intriguing result of increasing sales...
• thiscatis 8y ago
  How is this new. Have the authors ever been in a British (gastro)pub? Order at the bar mate. Also, no silly tipping rules.
• draw_down 8y ago
  If your restaurant offers the same experience as a fast-casual joint, except your prices are higher... is your food going to be better? If you’re offering the same thing as Chipotle but at integer multiples of the price, maybe the one that’s overpriced is you, not the servers.
• kevin_b_er 8y ago
  I figured this was coming. Under living-wage isn't sustainable and that's how restaurants were operating while still making thin margins. Except because everyone is too price sensitive with a race to the bottom on pricing, customer service is no longer valued. So we do away with customer service to keep the pricing the same rather than raise prices.
• cm2012 8y ago
  On a side note, the ordering kiosks in McDonalds are the best thing ever. Customizing an order is way less error prone this way than verbally. And the line is always shorter.
  • niftich 8y ago
    I've found the kiosks to be laggy and inconsistent in accepting touch input; any orders that have multiple different items take longer for me to key in at the kiosk than to verbally express at the counter. But having the ability to customize items to your exact specifications is very nice; reminds me of the old Burger King wrappers that had icons for ingredients around the edges, with the intention of their inclusion or omission for custom orders being marked, but it's a practice I've never observed being used. The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience to the kiosk, but it needs location to be on.
    • DrScump 8y ago
      The McDonalds in-app ordering and pickup is a superior experience ... If you don't mind the fact that they suck all your private Contacts information off you device and track everywhere you travel. Is it worth it? Really?
  • clircle 8y ago
    My wife and I were just at a McDonalds in Portugal that had about 10 kiosks placed in groups toward the front of the store. This was one of those multi-floor, 100+ customers at a time McDs. I like the kiosks for the reasons you mention, but the arrangement of them in the floor plan made it impossible for people to figure out how to form a line. It was just chaos.
    • cellularmitosis 8y ago
      I've seen similar problems with this layout at airport check-in kiosks (and been accused of "cutting line", when there was no obvious line, etc).
  • 8y ago
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  Is it just me, or does it feel like restaurant service staff provide less service than they used to? They're often spread out over too many tables, and it seems like their role is scripted rather than adaptive. The chain restaurant dining experience just seems very hollow now.
  • kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    I'm always bemused when walking into a nearly empty chain restaurant and the greeter has to struggle with where to seat you.
    • paulie_a 8y ago
      I was told I needed to download an app at one Chicago restaurant to get a table. It was nearly empty but the app said 20 minutes... It is a very well known place. I was also told by the bartender he is not going to get me a beer and a server will be around at some point. I got my beer eventually. But after waiting for a table for 40 minutes I just left without even paying, no one seemed interested in cashing me out. I literally had better service at the Chicago DMV.
      • logfromblammo 8y ago
        It's all part of the script. They insert an artificial expectation that one must wait to be seated to manufacture a sense of popularity, trendiness, and exclusivity. Sounds like another Chicago restaurant that I visited once. Once. That establishment remains to this day the only place where I have ever left a $0.02 tip--worst service I have ever experienced as a restaurant customer.
• ctdonath 8y ago
  Minimum wage is debtor's prison redux: if you don't produce enough, you're not allowed to produce anything at all. And some jobs just don't entail that much productivity.
• thisrod 8y ago
  In the eastern hemisphere, this kind of place is called an Australian style cafe. Old joke: some Australians take a taxi from LAX to their hotel. As they get out, the driver asks, "Your tip?" "Our tip is, live somewhere with a minimum wage, mate!"
• chobytes 8y ago
  Serverless has gone too far
• baby 8y ago
  While McDonalds has figured out how to have waiters bring you the food to your table here in France.
• cbhl 8y ago
  I feel like this is the logical conclusion of a living wage. If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the same for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for a server to do so. Honestly, the high cost of renting in SF has already made the "move to California and bus tables to get by while auditioning for movie / working on startup" dream impossible. This is just a side effect of the bureaucracy and housing policies here.
  • int3 8y ago
    > If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the same for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for a server to do so. I don't see how that follows. The opportunity cost per unit time for a skilled worker is typically greater than the living wage.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• Scramblejams 8y ago
  I eat at Outback and I &$@! hate their tablets. Who are all these people in this thread who don’t value a server’s knowledge and flexibility? It’s as if they’ve never been infuriated by an IVR system and cannot imagine that kind of horror landing in their restaurant booth when all they’re looking to do is enjoy themselves. Sometimes you want recommendations that come with more details than what the web guy baked into the hero piece. Sometimes you want something prepared a certain way, and the UI isn’t going to be up to it. Good luck getting that through an abused table tablet. So some servers underachieve. Fine. I still want one.
  • theNJR 8y ago
    You really need a waiter to recommend things at Outback ... Even at a local restaurant a waiters recommendation is always biased. I'd rather integrate reviews into the system.
    • Scramblejams 8y ago
      Sometimes they'll get an unusually good cut of something and a good server will tell you. Reviews won't. (Nor will they help much at a restaurant that frequently changes its menu. And if the restaurant is responsible for the review system, invariably a bunch will end up hiding the negative reviews and flagging the customers who leave them, with predictable consequences. Seriously, reviews you're reading on the restaurant tablet are going to be somewhere between useless and a disaster that starts Twitter wars.) But getting back to my Outback example. Did you know if they pan sear your filet they do it with a weight on top of it? I didn't until a server told me, and gave me the option to skip the weight. (Much better result, by the way, even if it does take longer.) And did you know at Outback if they wood fire your filet they don't use a weight, but instead of the 17 spice seasoning they use in pan searing, they switch to salt and pepper? I didn't until a server told me, and gave me the option to go wood-fired plus 17 spice seasoning, which is a terrific combo. Drawing a larger point, computer people would rather deal with computers. I get it. But there's a whole world of possibilities out there you miss when instead of building relationships with the people you meet casually around you (like wait staff), you instead constrain yourself to the choices made available to you through silicon and Javascript.
• ulfw 8y ago
  Tips are about the dumbest American tradition I have seen. (Yes I know they exist world wide, but wayyyyy less commonly). So if I buy a $20 meal, I pay the waiter $3 to take my order, go to the kitchen, tell the chefs, go pick up the order, put it on my table and later take my credit card when I flag him down to pay. This should be included in the price. But hey. Whatever. $3. Fine. Now when I go to a fancier restaurant and order the same amount of food, where the waiter does the exact same job of taking an order, putting it on the table and comes back later to take my credit card I suddenly have to pay him say $20? Why? How on earth has his job changed in any way shape or form to earn so much more money than the previous restaurant's waiter for the exact same amount of work? I really do not get it. If anything, the Chefs and Sous Chefs should be tipped and should earn more at fancier restaurants because food preparation there often takes longer, is a more intricate affair and often needs more skills and experience. Not the waiting staff.
  • Double_a_92 8y ago
    The consulting and presentation in a fancy restaurant is harder. E.g. with a bottle of while. In a normal restaurant you might just a bottle put on your table. In a fancy they tell you about the wine. They have to hold the bottle right. You get to try a sip of it first,...
    • ulfw 8y ago
      That is true. If you ordered wine. Still gotta pay way more for when you just order a meal.
      • Double_a_92 8y ago
        It's probably still valid for a normal meal. You can get reccomandations, they tell you what fits good togheter... They have to serve it probably in some special way (that we don't even notice). Idk. Just because most people don't notice or appreciate the added service, it doesn't mean that it's not there. But yes, mandatory tips in general are stupid. It's the employers duty to pay their stuff a fair "base" salary. Tips should be additional income for extraordinary skill.
• ksec 8y ago
  >Can’t Afford Waiters. So They’re Putting Diners to Work. The city offers a case study of how high housing costs alter the economics of everything else, including restaurant service. Well not really housing but property market. Don't know why they "discover" it now. Well it has been going on in some places for well over a decade.
• orionblastar 8y ago
  This is why there are smartphone apps for various resteraunts. You order your tood and pay for it ahead of time and it is there waiting for you. First it was pizza places and now it is McDonalds and others. Wife and I went to a Wendys and nobody answered the drive through system. We only wanted small frosties so we went home without them. Other cars got mad that they were not taking drove through orders. These jobs are not 15 dollars an hour, but a lot of workers don't deserve that and will be replaced with competent workers or computers or kiosks or an app.
• RickJWagner 8y ago
  This is why $15 is not a sound idea. We need 'small jobs'. They're an important part of the ecosystem.
• vidanay 8y ago
  I've been in a half dozen restaurants of this style....in Manchester UK, London, and Frankfurt DE. I had no problem with the style of service.
• bwbw223 8y ago
  We need SaaS for restaurants...
• adityapurwa 8y ago
  In Indonesia tipping is not common, and I am glad that it is not. Mostly because I see that everyone here seems to be confused too on how much we should tip. Most restaurant here would have you choose your own table, then the waiter will give you the menu and leave you to choose, then you call them again to submit your menu, then the menu will be delivered to your table. (Other restaurant is like McDonalds I suppose, you go to the counter, choose and pay and got table number, sit and have the food delivered to you). It is a standard work that of course they were paid to do, and I dont think tipping is healthy, why would they hate me if i didnt tip them? Why would I tip them for doing their already paid job? Why would my colleague got better tip than me when im serving them? It ended up with so many speculations on people, which is not healthy (my opinion). If i want to tip, i usually just let them take the changes.