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It's surprising businesses haven't turned to automation. At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ord

by n8cpdx 5y ago

It's surprising businesses haven't turned to automation. At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready, and using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. A lot of these businesses just can't survive if they meet the wage demands of people who have benefitted from substantial stimulus over the last 2 years. Automation would increase the quality of their service and reduce costs in the long run. I keep hearing about how much workers hate these jobs, so they should be happy to see them go away. Edit: every example I gave above has been observed successfully in action. They just haven't been widely deployed enough to become a norm. Other jobs that can be replaced: - host -> seat yourself sign - server -> pager, bus your table, ordering tablet (with just ordering, don't put ads and games like they did 5 years ago) - barista -> robot/dispenser tech can manage several facilities simultaneously - retail/grocery -> see what Amazon is doing - cleaning/janitorial -> robots and more innovative cleaning apprpaches could save a lot more effort. Japan has self-cleaning public toilets.

skybrian 5y ago
Might this be happening already? It seems like ordering at the counter is becoming more popular compared to full service, even for somewhat upscale food. Also, food trucks are popular.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  As a parent of small kids, I really appreciate being able to pay while ordering as opposed to waiting for the waiter ( hmmm… ) while the children get antsy. Of course, Now that I think about it, I’ve never asked if I could just pay after ordering. The force of habit, huh!
ianbicking 5y ago
I'm afraid I can't find the graph, but I saw something showing that food service revenue has fully rebounded since the pandemic while food service employment has not. That would imply that labor saving is already in effect. It would also be unsurprising that not every restaurant would handle it equally well.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Or they could just have raised prices.
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    All of the local restaurants have raised prices. I've overheard a few restaurant owners talking and it seems customers don't like even small price increases. They also indicate the price increases are necessary for supply costs even as they raise wages and can't fill positions. A lot of restaurants are just cutting menus/services to be able to stay on top of demand. This strikes me as hugely economically inefficient, but whatever they don't have much choice in the matter. People on HN like to say "just raise wages" but I don't think they like to consider what a world without affordable restaurants looks like. Maybe that is the way to go, but there should be more acknowledgement that "pay every cook like a software engineer" means there will be far fewer restaurants and far fewer people employed as cooks.
    - rland 5y ago
      To me, if 50% of restaurants close tomorrow, fine. There are people who dine out 3, 4, 5 times a week, who don't really know how to cook anything beyond microwaved meals... that's completely insane! And I think that's kind of what all of this hysteria is about. Because yeah, if the price of a burrito went up by $2-3, those people would have to learn how to cook some basic meals for themselves. Not so long ago, dining out -- having another human being cook & bring you your food -- was a luxury, reserved for special events. This is something completely different.
      - warkdarrior 5y ago
        > There are people who dine out 3, 4, 5 times a week, who don't really know how to cook anything beyond microwaved meals... that's completely insane! I am not sure we have to be judgemental about other people's cooking skills to decide that restaurant workers deserve better pay. Everyone has some expertise, and some people choose to not learn how to cook, and that is ok.
rebuilder 5y ago
The problem with this is, if the barista gets automated, the customers buy better coffee machines and stop going to the cafe. An exaggeration, but you see my point perhaps. Unless your service is really purely about bang for buck, trying to automate it in ways that are visible to the customer can have downsides. McDonald’s could probably go full robotic. Starbucks? Not sure, maybe. It would be a little offputting. Your local (good) pizza place? Not likely.
- prepend 5y ago
  This is not my experience. Watching Starbucks and my other local coffee places implement app/cashier less ordering it seems like more customers and more purchases. Ordering on my phone while I’m the way is easier than talking with a human. And easier to add stuff on. I’ve never considered buying an espresso machine and bypassing my local coffee place. Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless. The cashier is the slowest and most error prone part of the process.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    I had a daily Starbucks habit before the pandemic. During the pandemic I just made pourover coffee at home with some half & half, and even now, eighteen months later and I'm doing more out in the world again, I only get Starbucks about once or twice a month. It's not like it's hard to make okay coffee, it was mainly part of me being out and about.
    - prepend 5y ago
      So you replacing Starbucks had nothing to do with them automating their cashiers. Rationally, we should all make coffee at home rather than spend $2-7 per day on coffee. My point was that Starbucks can help with their labor shortage by eliminating cashiers and just having a kiosk or app.
  - rjsw 5y ago
    > Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless. Seems to work fine for McDonald's.
wazoox 5y ago
> most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready... Which means "extracting free work from the customers", which is basically Marxism 101, "how to extract value from live work". My answer in such a place is to go straight out. I NEVER use the "automatic cashes", thank you very much. > ... using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. Robots are a sham, they're just a scarecrow to force workers into obedience. You'll replace more easily a lawyer with a robot than a toilet cleaner or a cook. Robots are fragile and horribly expensive. Good luck with that. Just friggin' pay the people decent wages, for chrissake.
- prepend 5y ago
  Robots are better at menial, repetitive tasks. No matter what you pay a cashier, they will never be better than an ATM. Free humans to do menial work. I think it’s pointless to try to improve wages for these low end jobs. Similarly with fruit picking. It pays poorly and is hard and dangerous. The solution isn’t to improve wages, but to automate. Humans shouldn’t be forced to do meaningless jobs.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    According to the parent commenter Marxism 101 is to treat humans like pitiful cogs that need to do the same shit work over and over and over. I’m a leftist but I think peoples quality of living is much more than a good wage. Automating certain shitty jobs can free up spend for giving other more fulfilling jobs a better wage.
    - prepend 5y ago
      I think the solution to that is to just put robots in place of “pitiful cogs.” I think it’s quite depressing to keep humans in pointless roles. I was once a security guard and it’s terrible work. So boring. The pay was crap. Of course, I would have liked more pay. But I was much happier getting a different, better job, than even doubling my pay.
- 5y ago
rapnie 5y ago
> At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready Automation, automation, digital transformation, sure we can do it all. But in many cases it makes things suck a bit more, and life crappier overall. If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service. You pay for it (maybe not in USA though). At the last place I visited some guy dropped a tablet on the table. It said 'Next-gen Restaurant Experience' at the back. We got to fiddle a long time to type our 6-person order in. Crappy. Last time I visit there. > retail/grocery -> see what Amazon is doing They facilitate rat-race shopping. No more small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you. Just in and out, and back to work. We this kind of automation every time we lose small social interactions that are important in a healthy society, imho. Sorry, end rant/
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  I think it really is highly dependent on the individual. For your example with restaurants I have the absolute opposite preference. When I go to a restaurant I'm usually dining with friends so the social aspect is already covered - I don't want/need to make small chat with a waiter. Would be completely happy with an automated process there, for my mind that means more of my tip might go to the cook who is actually preparing my food in the first place.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    With the waiter it is more about someome friendly taking the order, giving some advice, noting down some special preferences. And before that everyone looking at their own menu card at ease (okay, having 6 tablets might be an improvement then).
- gruez 5y ago
  >If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service. You pay for it (maybe not in USA though). >At the last place I visited some guy dropped a tablet on the table. It said 'Next-gen Restaurant Experience' at the back. We got to fiddle a long time to type our 6-person order in. Crappy. Last time I visit there. I'm definitely okay with fiddling with a tablet if it meant I didn't have to pay a 15% tip. >They facilitate rat-race shopping. No more small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you. Just in and out, and back to work. The amount of "small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you" I see happening (ie. when waiting in line) is approximately zero. In that case, the loss is zero.
beej71 5y ago
It's nice to have a server check on you even if seating and ordering are automated. It's worth something for the experience. The last place I went to like that, the owner was working probably due to lack of staff. He was wearing a Rolex Explorer II.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  95% of the time, I prefer eating at restaurants with no waiter and where you pay up front for the food. So much time and money wasted on talking to someone for something that would take me 10 seconds to do. Waited service is okay for special dates and business meals or something.
novok 5y ago
Ordering automation is there with order-and-pickup apps like doordash and instacart, it's just they charge a fee that costs more than doing answering the phone typically, which is why restaurant owners tend not to like them. Also those kind of seat yourself / serve yourself places exist, they're called fast food typically. Look at mcdonalds, chipotle or subway for example. That setup is actually very old, from the time before computers. Places that serve alcohol like waiters although, because they are essentially alcohol salesmen that boost sales, and alcohol are big profit drivers for restaurants.
root_axis 5y ago
You're greatly overestimating the reliability of such technology and greatly underestimating the costs of it. There's a reason automation has not replaced these roles, it's simply not (yet) capable or cost effective. Source: I worked for a startup that built restaurant automation solutions and witnessed first-hand how difficult this is. It'll get there some day, but we're a long ways off.
asciimov 5y ago
You must want to live in a frigid world bereft of human connection. I recently went to a place that had no welcome/front end staff, just workers making a product (desserts) and a two kiosks at the front to take your order. The kiosks interface was poorly made and confusing for a first time person. Worse, there was no sign telling me to step forward and order using the computer nor was there any sort of line to know who had already ordered and who were waiting to order. Over all it was a terrible experience and as such I don't plan on going back.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  Yes, but even you are recommending automation as the solution here (a sign to direct people is automation). If restaurants do it poorly that is of course an issue, but it's not like rude servers and bad service don't exist.
lm28469 5y ago
I'd stay at home if going to a restaurant was like you just described it. Also, you, and many people, seem to forget that the role of the economy is to provide for the people, not the other way. If you automate everything without providing viable solutions you're just pushing people to shitier jobs over and over. If going to a coffee shop meant going to some sort of self service machine, pushing a few button and getting a machine made Nespresso pod coffee I'd just stay at home and save the money.... What's the end goal of all this ? Automate everything, skip all human interactions, destroy every small restaurants/coffee shops ? This "automate everything" attitude is so weird, almost like some people want to dehumanise humanity. You know what would be the absolute automation, providing the best experience for everyone, for the least amount of energy spent ? Being in a coma in some form of pod, fed artificial thoughts and food/oxygen through tubes. Automation only make sense if it delivers us from work, not if it pushes people into worse positions.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  The economy doesn’t exist to serve “the people” (referring to a specific class), it exists to serve “people.” That number of people being served can very well grow or shrink over time. The existence of automation doesn’t guarantee it is strictly decreasing; consider the automobile industry for example, which created millions of jobs.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  Your comment betrays a lack of imagination when considering what a coffee robot entails. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w As far as humanity is concerned, perhaps it is uniquely human to bitch about low paid service jobs (even when they aren't all that low pay) while also bitching about those jobs no longer being necessary. If the labor I interacted with regularly took their jobs seriously and had good customer service skills, I wouldn't be so quick to cut them out of the picture. Unfortunately my experience is that at least in the US, the culture of work varies wildly by region, and most of them aren't all that good for the consumer.
EliRivers 5y ago
Speaking purely about food service roles, as I recall, the minimum wage for tipped food services roles in some places is 2.13 USD per hour, made up to actual minimum wage if tipping doesn't reach that level. Labour costs are, in many cases, really small; the capital and running costs of automation could well be comparable already.
eesmith 5y ago
> - host -> seat yourself sign > - server -> pager, bus your table, ordering tablet > .... They just haven't been widely deployed enough to become a norm. Attempts to revive the Automat (a century-old concept along those lines) haven't gone so well in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat FEBO does this in the Netherland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO , though also with in-person ordering. > observed successfully in action And failed in action.

by n8cpdx 5y ago

skybrian 5y ago

Might this be happening already? It seems like ordering at the counter is becoming more popular compared to full service, even for somewhat upscale food. Also, food trucks are popular.

rebuilder 5y ago
As a parent of small kids, I really appreciate being able to pay while ordering as opposed to waiting for the waiter ( hmmm… ) while the children get antsy. Of course, Now that I think about it, I’ve never asked if I could just pay after ordering. The force of habit, huh!

ianbicking 5y ago

I'm afraid I can't find the graph, but I saw something showing that food service revenue has fully rebounded since the pandemic while food service employment has not. That would imply that labor saving is already in effect. It would also be unsurprising that not every restaurant would handle it equally well.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Or they could just have raised prices.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  All of the local restaurants have raised prices. I've overheard a few restaurant owners talking and it seems customers don't like even small price increases. They also indicate the price increases are necessary for supply costs even as they raise wages and can't fill positions. A lot of restaurants are just cutting menus/services to be able to stay on top of demand. This strikes me as hugely economically inefficient, but whatever they don't have much choice in the matter. People on HN like to say "just raise wages" but I don't think they like to consider what a world without affordable restaurants looks like. Maybe that is the way to go, but there should be more acknowledgement that "pay every cook like a software engineer" means there will be far fewer restaurants and far fewer people employed as cooks.
  - rland 5y ago
    To me, if 50% of restaurants close tomorrow, fine. There are people who dine out 3, 4, 5 times a week, who don't really know how to cook anything beyond microwaved meals... that's completely insane! And I think that's kind of what all of this hysteria is about. Because yeah, if the price of a burrito went up by $2-3, those people would have to learn how to cook some basic meals for themselves. Not so long ago, dining out -- having another human being cook & bring you your food -- was a luxury, reserved for special events. This is something completely different.
    - warkdarrior 5y ago
      > There are people who dine out 3, 4, 5 times a week, who don't really know how to cook anything beyond microwaved meals... that's completely insane! I am not sure we have to be judgemental about other people's cooking skills to decide that restaurant workers deserve better pay. Everyone has some expertise, and some people choose to not learn how to cook, and that is ok.

rebuilder 5y ago

The problem with this is, if the barista gets automated, the customers buy better coffee machines and stop going to the cafe. An exaggeration, but you see my point perhaps. Unless your service is really purely about bang for buck, trying to automate it in ways that are visible to the customer can have downsides. McDonald’s could probably go full robotic. Starbucks? Not sure, maybe. It would be a little offputting. Your local (good) pizza place? Not likely.

prepend 5y ago
This is not my experience. Watching Starbucks and my other local coffee places implement app/cashier less ordering it seems like more customers and more purchases. Ordering on my phone while I’m the way is easier than talking with a human. And easier to add stuff on. I’ve never considered buying an espresso machine and bypassing my local coffee place. Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless. The cashier is the slowest and most error prone part of the process.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  I had a daily Starbucks habit before the pandemic. During the pandemic I just made pourover coffee at home with some half & half, and even now, eighteen months later and I'm doing more out in the world again, I only get Starbucks about once or twice a month. It's not like it's hard to make okay coffee, it was mainly part of me being out and about.
  - prepend 5y ago
    So you replacing Starbucks had nothing to do with them automating their cashiers. Rationally, we should all make coffee at home rather than spend $2-7 per day on coffee. My point was that Starbucks can help with their labor shortage by eliminating cashiers and just having a kiosk or app.
- rjsw 5y ago
  > Similarly, I wish all fast food went cashierless. Seems to work fine for McDonald's.

wazoox 5y ago

> most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready... Which means "extracting free work from the customers", which is basically Marxism 101, "how to extract value from live work". My answer in such a place is to go straight out. I NEVER use the "automatic cashes", thank you very much. > ... using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. Robots are a sham, they're just a scarecrow to force workers into obedience. You'll replace more easily a lawyer with a robot than a toilet cleaner or a cook. Robots are fragile and horribly expensive. Good luck with that. Just friggin' pay the people decent wages, for chrissake.

prepend 5y ago
Robots are better at menial, repetitive tasks. No matter what you pay a cashier, they will never be better than an ATM. Free humans to do menial work. I think it’s pointless to try to improve wages for these low end jobs. Similarly with fruit picking. It pays poorly and is hard and dangerous. The solution isn’t to improve wages, but to automate. Humans shouldn’t be forced to do meaningless jobs.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  According to the parent commenter Marxism 101 is to treat humans like pitiful cogs that need to do the same shit work over and over and over. I’m a leftist but I think peoples quality of living is much more than a good wage. Automating certain shitty jobs can free up spend for giving other more fulfilling jobs a better wage.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I think the solution to that is to just put robots in place of “pitiful cogs.” I think it’s quite depressing to keep humans in pointless roles. I was once a security guard and it’s terrible work. So boring. The pay was crap. Of course, I would have liked more pay. But I was much happier getting a different, better job, than even doubling my pay.
5y ago

rapnie 5y ago

> At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready Automation, automation, digital transformation, sure we can do it all. But in many cases it makes things suck a bit more, and life crappier overall. If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service. You pay for it (maybe not in USA though). At the last place I visited some guy dropped a tablet on the table. It said 'Next-gen Restaurant Experience' at the back. We got to fiddle a long time to type our 6-person order in. Crappy. Last time I visit there. > retail/grocery -> see what Amazon is doing They facilitate rat-race shopping. No more small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you. Just in and out, and back to work. We this kind of automation every time we lose small social interactions that are important in a healthy society, imho. Sorry, end rant/

throwaway675309 5y ago
I think it really is highly dependent on the individual. For your example with restaurants I have the absolute opposite preference. When I go to a restaurant I'm usually dining with friends so the social aspect is already covered - I don't want/need to make small chat with a waiter. Would be completely happy with an automated process there, for my mind that means more of my tip might go to the cook who is actually preparing my food in the first place.
- rapnie 5y ago
  With the waiter it is more about someome friendly taking the order, giving some advice, noting down some special preferences. And before that everyone looking at their own menu card at ease (okay, having 6 tablets might be an improvement then).
gruez 5y ago
>If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service. You pay for it (maybe not in USA though). >At the last place I visited some guy dropped a tablet on the table. It said 'Next-gen Restaurant Experience' at the back. We got to fiddle a long time to type our 6-person order in. Crappy. Last time I visit there. I'm definitely okay with fiddling with a tablet if it meant I didn't have to pay a 15% tip. >They facilitate rat-race shopping. No more small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you. Just in and out, and back to work. The amount of "small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you" I see happening (ie. when waiting in line) is approximately zero. In that case, the loss is zero.

beej71 5y ago

It's nice to have a server check on you even if seating and ordering are automated. It's worth something for the experience. The last place I went to like that, the owner was working probably due to lack of staff. He was wearing a Rolex Explorer II.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
95% of the time, I prefer eating at restaurants with no waiter and where you pay up front for the food. So much time and money wasted on talking to someone for something that would take me 10 seconds to do. Waited service is okay for special dates and business meals or something.

novok 5y ago

Ordering automation is there with order-and-pickup apps like doordash and instacart, it's just they charge a fee that costs more than doing answering the phone typically, which is why restaurant owners tend not to like them. Also those kind of seat yourself / serve yourself places exist, they're called fast food typically. Look at mcdonalds, chipotle or subway for example. That setup is actually very old, from the time before computers. Places that serve alcohol like waiters although, because they are essentially alcohol salesmen that boost sales, and alcohol are big profit drivers for restaurants.

root_axis 5y ago

You're greatly overestimating the reliability of such technology and greatly underestimating the costs of it. There's a reason automation has not replaced these roles, it's simply not (yet) capable or cost effective. Source: I worked for a startup that built restaurant automation solutions and witnessed first-hand how difficult this is. It'll get there some day, but we're a long ways off.

asciimov 5y ago

You must want to live in a frigid world bereft of human connection. I recently went to a place that had no welcome/front end staff, just workers making a product (desserts) and a two kiosks at the front to take your order. The kiosks interface was poorly made and confusing for a first time person. Worse, there was no sign telling me to step forward and order using the computer nor was there any sort of line to know who had already ordered and who were waiting to order. Over all it was a terrible experience and as such I don't plan on going back.

n8cpdx 5y ago
Yes, but even you are recommending automation as the solution here (a sign to direct people is automation). If restaurants do it poorly that is of course an issue, but it's not like rude servers and bad service don't exist.

lm28469 5y ago

I'd stay at home if going to a restaurant was like you just described it. Also, you, and many people, seem to forget that the role of the economy is to provide for the people, not the other way. If you automate everything without providing viable solutions you're just pushing people to shitier jobs over and over. If going to a coffee shop meant going to some sort of self service machine, pushing a few button and getting a machine made Nespresso pod coffee I'd just stay at home and save the money.... What's the end goal of all this ? Automate everything, skip all human interactions, destroy every small restaurants/coffee shops ? This "automate everything" attitude is so weird, almost like some people want to dehumanise humanity. You know what would be the absolute automation, providing the best experience for everyone, for the least amount of energy spent ? Being in a coma in some form of pod, fed artificial thoughts and food/oxygen through tubes. Automation only make sense if it delivers us from work, not if it pushes people into worse positions.

ironmagma 5y ago
The economy doesn’t exist to serve “the people” (referring to a specific class), it exists to serve “people.” That number of people being served can very well grow or shrink over time. The existence of automation doesn’t guarantee it is strictly decreasing; consider the automobile industry for example, which created millions of jobs.
n8cpdx 5y ago
Your comment betrays a lack of imagination when considering what a coffee robot entails. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2iAGuRvN1w As far as humanity is concerned, perhaps it is uniquely human to bitch about low paid service jobs (even when they aren't all that low pay) while also bitching about those jobs no longer being necessary. If the labor I interacted with regularly took their jobs seriously and had good customer service skills, I wouldn't be so quick to cut them out of the picture. Unfortunately my experience is that at least in the US, the culture of work varies wildly by region, and most of them aren't all that good for the consumer.

EliRivers 5y ago

Speaking purely about food service roles, as I recall, the minimum wage for tipped food services roles in some places is 2.13 USD per hour, made up to actual minimum wage if tipping doesn't reach that level. Labour costs are, in many cases, really small; the capital and running costs of automation could well be comparable already.

eesmith 5y ago

> - host -> seat yourself sign > - server -> pager, bus your table, ordering tablet > .... They just haven't been widely deployed enough to become a norm. Attempts to revive the Automat (a century-old concept along those lines) haven't gone so well in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat FEBO does this in the Netherland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO , though also with in-person ordering. > observed successfully in action And failed in action.