As Jobs Disappear, Can Restaurants Become a Battleground for the Push Against AI & Automation?
Last month, after 29 months of job gains, the number of available restaurant jobs fell. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to last month’s earnings of 24 thousand and monthly earnings of 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising, especially since restaurant sales rose slowly but surely throughout the year.
Could this be a temporary setback? Perhaps, but there’s also the possibility that it’s an early sign of a long-term, possibly irreversible decline in the restaurant industry’s job market as emerging technologies take hold.
And by new technology, I mostly mean automation and artificial intelligence. All one has to do is scan the headlines of the past 12 months to discover that the restaurant industry is catching the heat of automation. Major chains from Chipotle to Sweetgreen to McDonald’s are experimenting with ways to automate their restaurants.
Then there’s AI. Last month Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Google where they are testing a new AI-powered solution called Wendy’s Fresh AI at the drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio. The company said this is the first of what will likely be many locations using the technology. McDonald’s has also been experimenting with AI technology, which its executives believe is, in some ways, better at handling customer interactions than humans.
“Sometimes people forget to greet people, they forget, they make mistakes, they don’t hear back,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s chief customer engagement officer, told CNN. “A machine can have a consistent greeting and stay calm under pressure.”
This wave of new technology goes beyond robotic arms and simulated voices taking orders at the drive-thru. There has been a recent surge – accelerated during the pandemic – in digital kiosks, mobile ordering apps, and QR code ordering at tables. This has resulted in an increase in the number of digital touch points designed to speed up the process and, to some extent, reduce the reliance on human intervention.
It’s hard to fault the operators. A large number of restaurant workers left the industry permanently during this period of violence, and since then, operators have struggled to fill vacant positions. Despite offering higher salaries and improved benefits, many open positions remain unfilled due to lack of interest. If it’s hard to find workers, why not let technology take over?
Which brings us back to how we humans will be affected by all these new technologies. Employees are increasingly being outsourced and with all this new technology, changing job descriptions to something that can feel like working an IT help desk. Others find that technology is increasingly taking away opportunities to connect with people in the work they enjoy.
“Those touch points are lost in mobile ordering,” said one former Starbucks barista. “So, it’s like, ‘Here’s your order, bye.’
Then there is the threat of job extinction as automation and AI take hold. While none of the big chains have rolled out robotics or AI so widely that they’ve taken away key positions in the front or back of the house, it’s only a matter of time before early pilots become the main engine of production. Sweetgreen has actually announced its new robotic dishwasher is the future, and both Wendy’s and McDonald’s have hinted at wider use of automation and AI.
As we teeter on the precipice of an automated and AI-enabled restaurant industry, are we starting to see signs of a backlash fueled by fear of job loss? There are subtle signs. When the Chileans showed off their Bear Robotics server trial in a Facebook video last year, some analysts pushed back. “Stop trying to erase people!” wrote one. Another commented, “Another reason why I never set foot in Chili’s. Some editorialists say that while operators may benefit from automation, employees and customers lose.”
In some cases, workers displaced by new technology have begun to retaliate. As detailed in our interview with restaurant owner Andrew Simmons, he struggled when a former employee who protested the deployment of robotics at his San Diego restaurant began lashing out on social media and called the local health department.
Is this early push a sign of a larger anti-technology movement? That remains to be seen, but ignoring these early indications of the neo-luddite movement would be ill-advised, according to one professor.
“The various symbols currently circulating in public discourse are not immediately obvious, nor are they directly anti-technological or anti-progress,” writes Sunil Manghani, Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique at the University of Southampton and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for AI. “However, without a doubt, symbols are the emerging concept of ‘protest’. As Hobsbawm reminds us, the Luddites were not against machines in principle, but rather in those machines that threatened their lives and communities, we will probably start to see opposition to software in principle, but different forms of software; opposition, in particular, to who uses new technologies.”
Today the resistance can be seen in an employee fighting here or there or in social media against the new automation. However, these temporary signs may become the norm, especially if job numbers continue to shrink while more restaurants adopt robots and AI. Some studies say that more than 80% of restaurant jobs can be handled by robots, and some experts see millions of jobs being replaced by AI or automation within a decade.
And, of course, it’s not just restaurant jobs. Other lines of work, from the arts to industry, are threatened by new technologies. And as more and more workers see unionization as a priority in the fight for equal pay, it is also evident – as evidenced by the writers’ and actors’ union strike – the fear of a future livelihood of whether or not workers will be replaced by technology.
Still, the restaurant industry, perhaps more than any other, is ripe for automation and AI takeover, which is why I think it could be a central battleground for pushback in the form of the automation neo-luddite movement. Restaurant chains are the second largest employers in the US, and two – McDonald’s and Yum Brands – are the top three employers in the country. Although Andrew Yang’s campaign warned of societal collapse due to robots and AI did not achieve much in 2020, there is a good chance that he was ahead of his time, and we may see future politicians campaigning on an anti-automation platform with restaurants as one of the focal points.
Readers of The Spoon know that we’re not anti-technology here. In fact, we have covered almost every food robot out there and will continue to do so. But since we see many signals about a strong backlash against the rise of automation and AI, I think it would be wise for the restaurant industry to start to get ahead of this growing problem and think about how to balance new technology (and often necessary) and take care of their employees.
Otherwise, they risk losing control of the narrative as more and more people plan to resist the onslaught of AI and robots.
Come hear experts talk about the impact of automation and AI on food operations at the Food AI Summit on October 25.
