Restaurants Are Scrambling for Cheap Labor in 2019
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In Korea, there is a button on every table you can press to get the attention of waitstaff. No more inefficient hoping to catch eye contact when they walk by.
A lot of places now make you walk up to a register and pay as you leave. No more having the waitstaff make 2-3 trips to your table just so you can sign.
Having iPads or something for ordering is another step, but may take longer to recoup those initial investments.
Focus only on a few speciality dishes, rather than offering 200 items.
Edit: there’s also the automat, which was in fashion in the early 1900s in America, I believe. There was the Eatsa chain but it folded, apparently due to “expanding too fast.”
I completely agree with your points. The menu was horribly complex, such that orders were always wrong. Getting things remade took forever, and it often wasn't my fault. Either the customer would forget to specify something, or the cook wouldn't read the ticket correctly. In a less busy restaurant, things can be fixed easily, but not in this one.
Payment was also quite slow, as you noted. Constant trips, constant check errors. Constant haggling about wanting things for free because of some slight error.
The place should have offered 10 standard dishes. The amount of food inventory and wine inventory spoiling because of disuse/no space was abominable.
The kitchen was always a frantic mess and the cooks frequently undercooked things or cross contaminated. There was no room for carefulness because the line was always out the door.
I ultimately left because at 7.50 an hour, supporting myself was hard. Tips were frequently better at lunch because the kitchen could prepare meals better. But $400 a week was not cutting it in NY, with no health insurance.
I praise automats as the future!!
I never realized how inefficient this U.S. practice was until we were in a hurry to catch a movie after dinner. It took 15 minutes to pay the bill when it should have taken 2.
In Brazil, when you ask for the check the waiter brings the wireless charge card machine to your table.
In most parts of Asia, if paying by cash, the busboy already has the right change in hand for all common denominations of bills. The transaction takes less than 5 seconds.
I have never been to China, but I imagine with the ubiquity of mobile payments there, it's even more efficient.
At some restaurants near me, the waitstaff now hand you an iPad instead of a menu. Once we got over the clunky UI, it made ordering a lot more efficient.
I imagine you could embed a short 15s video to explain what the dish is (if needed).
Having said that, it’s still the best terminal you’ll find in Newark, so ... eh.
I don't know, they're ok. I wouldn't use the iPads to surf but they're a great food ordering tool. The one advantage is that the seats at these iPad stations are usually very comfy. They also free you up from having to look for seating at a busy food court. I was once able to order Popeye's from several gates away where things were quieter, and my food was brought to me.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1167138/ipad_installations_...
I bet they recoup their investments pretty quickly. Waitstaff isn't reduced though -- they still need lots of people to bring out the food, but the operation itself is fairly efficient.
In my town (Central PA) only 1 restaurant had this technology and they stopped using it for some unknown reason.
Sadly the only really automated ordering system in place is at Applebees and at McDonalds. You can order and pay 100% at your table. Unfortunately they can only bring you insta-food so not a good trade off IMHO.
Who'da thunk that if you are hostile to immigration (or even undocumented workers) you'd find the low level jobs in the US wanting for labor. I thought these were AMERICAN jobs. Sigh.
I'm shocked whenever I go to the US and servers walk off with my card! Canadian cards to chip and pin in the US as well and some retailers are confused when their terminals ask for the pin.
The abuse typically involves underpayment in the form of fixed income and unlimited hours, or required overtime without additional pay as per employment law.
More recently, I’ve become aware of two major fast food franchises with a cheap labour scam so common it must be known or knowingly ignored by the franchisors(1 in Aus, 1 in NZ).
It is a scheme where immigrants are sponsored for work visas in entry level exempt fast food management jobs working unlimited hours for $60k salary a year.
The problem is the immigrants pay back $60k thru seperate channels for the opportunity, effectively becoming indentured servants for 1 year.
That is so incredibly unethical and immoral, if not illegal(unsure about that, but questionable quasi-legal at best).
I can understand, if not sympathize, with how and why this has come about.
Looking in from the outside, the fast food and quick casual restaurant industry is ruthlessly competitive and cannibalistic.
Restaurant owners/franchisees and franchisors would be well aware of such financial subsidy benefitting directly(franchisee bottom line) & indirectly(franchisor P&L leverage to push for higher reinvestment/co-marketing).
Just because immigrants are willing/able to agree to a fixed term indentured servitude, doesn’t make it ok.
I’m a legal immigrant myself and I have a legal immigrant starting his first day tomorrow(after a 6 month search).
We only had the opportunity to employ him after he was poorly treated(due to leveraging him with implied threats with his work visa) here in NZ and after he was poorly treated in Qatar and Bahrain previously.
"Job creators".
It's a social experience, not a utilitarian 'fuel me up' encounter.
If you cut back on that, the whole product is less valuable, so cheap labour is really important. If it gets too expensive, 'average' people won't go any more.
You could have the best quality food in the world, but if it's ordered via a McDonalds' style kiosk and comes around on a conveyor belt to a plastic, unmade table, most would probably not bother (at the price a "restaurant" would charge, anyway).
In the UK we have Wetherspoons' pubs. There's an app you can use to order food to a table. It's great and I use it often. But it's low-end food that does the job.
At a "real" restaurant I want the lighting, the waiter, the wine glasses, the atmosphere.
Without that, well, 40+ quid goes a _long_ way in the supermarket.
Strongly agree with this. There's a Bib Gourmand pizza restaurant right next to where my wife and I live, and she always wants to get pizza from there "to go" so we can watch a movie together. It's great food, but it seems a little absurd to spend $24 on pizza just to eat it at home. In my opinion, half of what I'm paying for is the nice ambience of the restaurant itself. (However, I will say that paying a third of the price for a nice bottle of wine does make carryout dining much more appealing.)
For me, it's not so much the serving experience, but the experience of eating with and around others in a "third place".
I did a little thought experiment: would I prefer to eat with a restaurant full of people and 1-2 mediocre servers, or be lavishly served by impeccably trained waitstaff in a restaurant with only a few patrons?
I concluded that the former would be my preference every time. I figured my interaction with servers is typically less than 5 minutes in duration, but my interaction with the restaurant environment is often about 1-2 hours.
The limiting case would be McDonald's.
Which has it's place, but is hardly a place to go for a social occasion.
But in my opinion (and it's just me -- I do see your point of view and it does make sense to me), service itself is only a small part of the experience. I just got back from dinner at a sit-down Indian restaurant where service was minimal but the food was amazing. I had a good time. My expectations may be cultural however. Most Asian restaurants have minimal service, and I usually hardly notice if the food's good. There's still service in a sense (the busboys bring out the food) but interaction is minimal.
All that said, I still want humans in the picture...
p.s. this is an aside and has nothing to do with your observations, but there is one McDonald's where it wouldn't be inconceivable to go for a social occasion: the McDonald's HQ in Chicago, where they serve an international menu. Interestingly, though you order on a touch-screen, bussers bring out the food to you at your table, like at a restaurant.
This sounds like the Blockbuster mentality where they thought people wanted to go to the store and browse.
At such a "restaurant" I'd want all that, but also with a button I can hit to call a waiter over. And clearing my payment from the table (credit card chip reader on the table) without needing the waiter to be available.
I just got back from a resort in the US that was probably the worst trip I've ever had. It was high season, so prices were insanely higher than the rest of the year. But every single section of the hotel (housekeeping, engineering, front desk) and F&B (servers, bartenders, bus staff) was insanely understaffed. People were frustrated and downright angry at the staff and, eventually, at each other.
We're at this tipping where something has to give. We're at or nearly at full employment and everyone is happy to spend money again...but wages won't budge.
I could also talk about other sectors like retail. Have you been in a Target or Wal-Mart lately? Even stores like Target, which are usually immaculate and fully stocked all the time have large empty spaces on the shelves and entire classes of items are short or missing.
Where do we go from here?
European style: Higher prices, shorter hours.
Japanese style: more automation, vending machines for everything.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen those issues you mention with retail.
Fundamentally the problem is that the price people are willing to pay won’t support the required number of people at such “high” wages. Either the price has to go up or the experience has to become cheaper.
Or you just fly overseas to Mexico and enjoy much cheaper labor at Cancun or Cabos. Every time I look at resorts in Hawaii I conclude that I should just go to Mexico instead.
/s