The Future of Flipping Hamburgers
By Phil Noble
Last week, I saw the future of flipping hamburgers – and most every other type of fast food. It was at a restaurant called Eatsa at 1626 K Street in Washington, DC.
It was both fascinating and at the same time frightening – for a whole lot of reasons but especially for fast food workers in South Carolina, and everywhere else for that matter.
More on Eatsa but first a little background.
I’ve been interested in the impact of technology on the restaurant business for a few years now. Because so much of our economy in South Carolina is based on tourism, we have lots of restaurant jobs in our state; there are 7,800 restaurants and bars with 197,000 jobs or 11 percent of our economy.
About two years ago, I happened into a restaurant in Myrtle Beach with a few friends for breakfast at a place called the Eggs Up Grill. We sat down, looked at the menu and when the waitress came to take our orders, she took it all down by tapping on her iPhone, which sent our orders directly to a screen in the kitchen. It was pretty interesting stuff. Then I found out that the whole thing was linked up to the restaurant’s inventory system for eggs, bacon, etc. and ultimately it all linked up with the restaurant’s suppliers.
It’s all called supply chain management. Though it’s not a new thing, the fact that the technology had filtered down to a mom and pop restaurant was surprising to me.
Now, back to Eatsa. When I walked into the restaurant last week, it looked and felt different – kind of weird.
There was a bank of 12 to 15 kiosks with iPads against the right wall, several rows of brightly lit little shelves with glass doors across the back wall, a few tables and chairs on the left and a long stand-up table down the middle. The walls were essentially bear with lots of stainless steel, glass and mirrors. It was spooky quiet with just a little light funky elevator music playing in the background.
There was only one restaurant employee and one girl at a table eating. The restaurant guy was leaning against the long table playing on an iPad that had a connecting earpiece.
That’s it, one guy.
A few words with iPad man sent me to the bank of kiosks on the right wall. I swiped a credit card, scrolled through the menu, made my food and drink selection and hit order. In a flash, my name and a number came up on a blue screen beside the little shelves with the clear glass doors.
I went over to talk to iPad man but before 3 minutes had passed, my food showed up on the shelf behind a now flashing glass door corresponding to my order number. As instructed, I tapped twice on the top right corner of the glass door, it flipped opened and I retrieved my food.
That’s it, quick and easy.
As I sat quietly eating my food, several folks came in, tapped on their cell phones and they immediately got their food from behind a glass door and left. For others, the food was already behind the glass door even before they walked into the restaurant.
Welcome to the future of fast food.
After I ate, I ambled over to talk with iPad man again. He was quite happy to talk as he was pretty bored. Here’s what I learned:
• The restaurant was started in 2015 in (where else) San Francisco. There are three locations in San Francisco, two in New York and two in Washington.
• The whole restaurant runs with just five people, iPad man and four people in the back. (They would not let me look in the back). The whole food preparation process is done by robots.
• The people in the back just sort of watch the robots, wipe up any spilled food, tinker with and calibrate the robots and just sort of be there in case something happens. iPad man says nothing ever does.
• They open early and stay open late. The breakfast meals go for about $3 and it’s hard to spend more than $8-9 on a whole meal during other hours. The choices are fairly limited, all the dishes are served in a bowl and the whole menu is vegetarian.
• They are very quick. Some orders come up in under one minutes and never more than three or four. They serve about 350 to 400 people a day with most being carryouts.
• And the food was good – not out of this world great, but good enough. It was good enough that more than half the customers come in once or twice a week. It was mostly fru fru dishes like quinoa — stir-fried, with arugula, parsnips and red curry. Most customers work in the nearby office buildings and are in a hurry to get back to their desk.
• The whole place and the whole experience reminded me of The Jetsons cartoon show of my youth.
• Now the idea of cutting cost, especially labor cost, in the restaurant business is nothing new. Some old timers may remember Horn & Hardart automats in New York; the last one closed in 1991 (younger folks can Google it). And, the ultimate reduction in labor cost is the vending machine.
• Eatsa is the logical, radical extension of this low labor cost concept – all enabled by robots, digital technology and ubiquitous mobile phones.
• The scary part of all this, particularly for South Carolinians, is what this could mean for fast food workers. There are about 72,000 fast food workers in our state. On average, they work 24 hours a week and have an annual salary of $11,000. And, they are not just a bunch of kids earning spending money. About 25 percent are parents with kids and 40 percent are 25 years old or older.
• The average wage is under $9 an hour. iPad man said he makes between $12-15 an hour – but there are only 5 employees in Eatsa vs 15 per shift in most fast food restaurants. Pretty compelling math.
• Now, don’t get me wrong, every McDonalds and Burger King isn’t going to look like an Eatsa any time soon. The whole thing may flop but the trend is clear: more technology and fewer people equal lower cost.
• And, because we in South Carolina have done such a poor job of educating our workforce – a very large segment of our economy is relegated to low wage jobs. There are even many high school graduates that can’t qualify for restaurant jobs. Checking on just one job board, I found openings for 752 restaurant jobs in Columbia, 635 in Charleston and 552 in Myrtle Beach – and yet, there are over 100,000 people unemployed in the state today.
So, like most every other problem we have in this state, it all comes down to improving education so that our children can qualify for real jobs with a real future.
Flipping hamburgers is not, and never will be, how we build a better economy for our people.
We can do better.
Phil Noble has a technology firm in Charleston, is Co-founder of EnvisionSC and writes a weekly column for the S.C. Press Association. Contact him at phil@philnoble.com and get his columns at www.PhilNoble.com.