The only reason i can think of that is they get to push point of sale software out by using K8s from some central system. I cant think of a worse use/abuse of k8 as a software updafe system if that's what they are doing.
The other reason is they distributed their compute and resturants pay the power bill but that sounds just as silly.
Curious to know why you would use k8s at the edge
It absolutely smells of over-engineering, though. There are a lot easier ways of pushing software out than maintaining k8s locally; and they're almost certainly going to need to build a system which manages and monitors all these clusters...
Trust me, it would have been way easier to just hook this stuff up to the cloud :-P . I still dream that we will be able to some day.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2017/07/iot-edge-compute-chick-fi...
This would make a lot of sense with something like CockroachDB - if the restaurant was offline, their local data would be preserved. But, as soon as it goes back online, then corporate would have access to all of the data.