Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that things won't change enough in service jobs to matter by 2019. But as to this:

> The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways

History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services.

Consider household servants.

They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed.

Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why.

Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution.

Could something similar happen in service work?

Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store.

Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

> Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

Then imagine that the notion that your coffee is "crafted" by a "barista"[1] is part of the brand that distinguishes their coffee from my reasonably adequate free office coffee machine, and the barista costs two cups of coffee and a muffin per hour, and makes a point of asking everyone in line if they'd like anything else with that, and suddenly the savings from touchscreen and voice enabled ordering look less massive.

Now that's a fashion that could change, just like most rich people who could comfortably afford someone to polish their fireplaces and silverware every morning and doff their cap to guests nowadays would think such an idea unthinkably pretentious rather than the hallmark of a respectable house, and many of them have learned to actually enjoy cooking. After all, some people actually prefer impersonal service from a kiosk when buying tickets or packed food these days; more if it offers a better queuing system. But the economics are more complex than simple staff minimisation, otherwise the Automat would have killed the fast food industry rather than vice versa. Let's face it, 90% of these venues providing service jobs wouldn't exist if people were a little more willing to sacrifice perceived food quality/image/freshness for cheaper food and beverages

[1]Yes, of course it's a teenager pressing a button. But brand image is silly like that.

Agree that brand is a finicky and powerful beast. And I picked Starbucks because it's the most ambitious example I could think of.

It will be a while before UX and polish of any automated (or mostly hands-off) storefront could compete favorably with our current servant-based systems.

But even in the case of ambitious examples, I think we'll get there. There are beloved brands that exist mostly as apps, which compete successfully with human-staffed storefronts. Unstaffed or mostly-automated physical storefronts haven't proven they can offer a quality experience yet when it comes to food and drink, but that could change; it's always possible that robotic attempts to date are the equivalent of hand-cranked washing machines.

> Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

We are already almost there. We have coffee vending machines. We have touch screen soda dispensers. Starbucks could wire in their mobile app to give customers a "redbox" coffee experience if they wanted to. I think it's part of their brand that a barista hand crafts your beverage rather than a machine do it, but who knows what their future direction will be.

I think we won't see full automation, but a drastic reduction in the number of people required to run a store.

For example, I went into an American fast food restaurant in Amsterdam once. Orders were made on a touch screen, you get a number, then someone at the counter hands you your order.

They still have kitchen staff, but instead of having 5+ humans taking orders you have 5+ kiosks and one person calling numbers.

The state of the art for self-serve is low right now; it's like comparing a servant to a hand-cranked washing machine (current coffee vending machine experience). But if you compare to modern models that go quietly to work and have affordances like locking/unlocking on touch and projecting green or red dots on the floor to let you know if they're done washing, preferences will change.

Currently, companies that make people self-serve with touchscreens in restaurants or grocery stores are most commonly giving them a hostile (even hateful) user experience. But as voice UI starts to be more common, and you can marry visual and voice ...

This is a really great point and something I had not considered. If everyone did it at the same time (like washing machines) it could indeed happen and make everyone more miserable, the human worker coffee shops become 'top end' like tailor made suits.

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