Restaurants And Companies Are Hiring Virtual Cashiers And Employees Over Zoom To Save Money

The following report is by Fortune (excerpts):

At Sansan Chicken in the East Village of Manhattan, a cashier will greet you with a wave and a smile—but they’ll be over 8,500 miles away. Instead of a human standing in front of you, you’ll instead see a face on a screen, working over video chat all the way from the Philippines. Brett Goldstein, an AI start-up founder and owner of Launch House Venture, stumbled upon the restaurant late Saturday night when he was hungry for Japanese fried chicken. He told Fortune it’s the future of fast food. 

“I had this ‘aha’ feeling of, ‘Okay, this makes a lot of sense,’” he said. 

Goldstein shared his experience at the chain on X. He said the service was friendly—more so than the average New York cashier—and while he placed his order at a self-service kiosk, the cashier stood by and controlled the restaurant’s point of sale system in case he had any questions. After Goldstein was finished placing his order, he had an option to tip the remote cashier. 

Happy Cashier is the company behind the virtual cashiers, and a spokesperson confirmed that it hires employees from the Philippines to video call into the restaurant.

The food was good, Goldstein said, despite his chicken katsu curry setting him back an “insane” $20. But the real talking point was the impact that virtual cashiers could have on the fast-food industry.

Put yourself in the restaurateur’s shoes. Minimum wage is going up. Rent is going up. Either they’re going to have to increase the cost of the food, which you can only do to an extent… or you can cut costs.

he told Fortune.

Sansan’s virtual cashiers are part of a growing movement of restaurant automation and the introduction of technology that limits the number of human workers in a store at a given time. It’s particularly popular in the fast-food industry, where companies are looking to grow profit margins in a time of mandates increasing minimum wages for these workers.

“They have a clear niche; they’re not going to revolutionize their offering,” Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Fortune. “Their brand is to provide relatively cheap food, so labor costs matter more for them.” 

Labor accounts for 36% of an average restaurant’s costs, according to a March Bank of America note, and using automation to cut down on menial tasks while outsourcing labor to foreign workers could be a way to save money. 

Mohammad Rahman, professor of management at the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business at Purdue University, told Fortune that hiring virtual workers, including those from the Philippines, would cost restaurants like Sansan only 10% of what they would pay in-person cashiers.

Rahman said that despite a $3.75 hourly wage—the rate for virtual cashiers in similar restaurant concepts—being a pittance for U.S. workers, it’s a substantive amount for workers in the Philippines. The $3.75 hourly wage is about $600 per month, translating to more than 33,900 Philippine pesos (PHP), which is well above the median monthly wage for Filipinos of 18,400 PHP, according to Statista.

“It’s just like any other kind of outsourcing,” employment lawyer Jonathan Pinkus told the Star. “If you’re sending jobs to people in a different country, you’re only obligated to comply with the labor standards of that country. Being virtually present in Ontario doesn’t change that.”

Whether or not foreign workers stand to benefit, outsourcing this work puts fast-food restaurants in a precarious position, Acemoglu said. While virtual workers can be called upon in a time of U.S. labor shortages in the fast-food industry, those jobs could just as easily threaten workers looking for those minimum wage jobs.

If it displaces workers, especially in the local labor market, from the jobs that were open to them, that would have impacts on their livelihoods and communities. 

he said.

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY

Without judging the ethics of companies who are now doing this, this is another canary in the coalmine that the U.S. and Western economies are breaking and bottoming out. Businesses cannot afford to pay living wage that keeps pace with inflation, and businesses are forced to deal with a mountain of expenses out of their control. You can thank the several years of draconian lockdowns and Covid mandates for that, and all the money printing and market manipulation that came packaged with it.

This venture will only be short-lived as AI and robotics will quickly outmode this concept in the next few years.

Proverbs 10:15 The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty.

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[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).

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