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

“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,” founder of an AI startup said.

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…