US companies have been outsourcing production and some customer service for quite some time, but waitstaff? One new restaurant in New York City is doing just that. Customers who enter the establishment are greeted by screens where hostesses wait on a video call from the Philippines.
Economic Motivations Behind a Technological Shift
Specializing in fried chicken and ramen, the restaurant has the varied names of Sansan Chicken, Sansan Ramen, or Yaso Kitchen, depending on which location you find in Manhattan, Queens, or Jersey City. The video screens aim to exploit the significant wealth gap between New York City, where the minimum wage is $16 per hour, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia, where a worker’s hourly pay will be closer to $3.75 per hour.
This leads to a different dining experience. A restaurant hostess working from home will greet and talk to customers, take their orders, and then the terminal will accept payment. At the end of the transaction, customers are prompted to add a tip of up to 18% to their bill. Despite the extreme pay disparity between the hostess and local staff, they reportedly split their tips with managers and staff at the restaurant.
To be clear, neither the restaurant nor the hostesses have disclosed how much they are paid. Reports have also been looking for other essential information, such as who owns the restaurants and whether the hostesses work for the restaurant directly or are hired out by some other third-party company. Employees needed to be more forthcoming with information when asked about their bosses.
AI Avatars Dream of Electric Retail
Brett Goldstein, a tech expert and investment entrepreneur, went viral when he discovered the restaurant and posted about it on X (Formerly Twitter). In the thread, which started with one post that has been viewed more than 18 million times, Goldstein wrote, “Today, this is a Filipino woman behind a screen, controlling a POS system—but it’s not crazy to believe that probably in the next six to twelve months, this could be an AI avatar doing all the same things.”
Goldstein recalled working on the R&D of a system like this one back in 2013, when he was employed by a company that outsourced, ironically, to the Philippines. He says the technology “Wasn’t quite there” then, but that’s changed.
While his initial reaction to the restaurant was one of excitement, he changed his mind after some thought, writing in a tweet, “Now my mind is wandering to this dystopian future where you live in this concrete jungle and none of the businesses you interact with have actual humans in them… Maybe a punishment for us not treating retail workers more human.”
Already Missing the Human Connection
Customers who have tried the restaurant have little to say about the food and have many opinions about the remote hostesses. Among their reactions were observations about the lost human connection. One customer felt that supporting a local business should support local employees, saying a community connection has been lost. On the upside, the tips mean a great deal to the workers from the Philippines, where the median wage is around $325 per month.
