How Restaurant Automation Will Fundamentally Alter Society

A brief thought experiment to start this one off: let’s run through a typical evening out at a nice restaurant.

It’s just you out for the evening; all your friends are home sick, the boyfriend / girlfriend is visiting his or her mom, whatever. When you walk through this thought experiment, you’ll see a lot of points of contact with other human beings, and a lot of points where it’s easy to wonder: what if the whole thing were a lot more efficient?

Walk in the door, and be greeted by a human server, who then leads you to an available seat. It doesn’t really matter if you wanted a different one, because this is the only one that’s available in the area of the waiter / waitress on duty. Said waitstaff member then eventually emerges to take your drink order, and potentially your meal order if you act fast.

The order is taken back to the kitchen and prepared by various cooks—see episodes of “Kitchen Nightmares” for more information here—and then the completed order is brought to you. In an effort to demonstrate that the restaurant cares about you, the customer, the waitstaff member in question returns to your table semi-randomly throughout your stay and asks how everything is. Eventually, a check is brought to you, which you pay via one of several methods, change is brought where applicable, and optimally, a tip is left.

There are several points in that thought experiment that could have been automated, and we’re already starting to see how such can be.

Even places like Taco Bell are allowing users to place orders in advance, to be ready for pickup upon arrival. Mobile payments systems allow that pre-order to be pre-paid-for as well, and automated comment cards take the place of a waitstaff member randomly stepping in on your meal to ask how things are.

Indeed, a new San Francisco restaurant called “eatsa” opened up, fully automated, and using iPads to not only let users order meals, but also pay for meals, which are subsequently dispensed through small glass compartments. While this is perhaps an extreme example, it’s not the only one. Some Japanese restaurants use conveyor belts to deliver food, and restaurants from Chili’s to McDonalds have offered up some breed of automated order system.

On a certain level, this might sound great. No more waiting, no more hassle, no more chipper “How is everything tonight?” breaking in when you’re just trying to eat a meal in peace and think about life in general. Just food, and peace, and occasional human contact as people bring food and drink and that’s it.

Customers are of mixed opinions about this, of course, as some want to be able to ask questions. Full automation would preclude this, and anyone who’s ever dealt with an interactive voice response system that makes you scream “I don’t know his extension!” knows how far wrong this can go.

That human presence may also prove more necessary in the end. With the recent furor over minimum wage, particularly in food service where such is prominent, restaurant owners are left with tough choices about raising prices to cover rising labor costs.

Automation, meanwhile, drops those needs through the floor; a couple people on hand to cook and answer questions beats a full-service waitstaff. But what happens to all those people who lose jobs as a result?

There’s no shopping there. No groceries, no books, no video games, no doctor’s visits. How much damage is done to the overall economy because all the fry cooks and wait staffers lost jobs? Sure, there are new openings in robot maintenance, but nowhere near the number; that’s half the point, after all, reducing costs by reducing staff by automating more of the meal.

So indeed, we have the very real potential to change society as we know it with restaurant automation, and it’s not immediately clear if that change is for the better. Job loss, greater convenience, potentially even lower prices…all these things add up together to make a portrait of a very deeply altered society, all because we ordered and paid for our meals from a smartphone.