The triumph of Mr. Pink?
By Well not exactly. Somebody still has to bring you your food:
Suri stresses that the console is not designed to replace waiters. “You still need people to bring the food, to fill up the glasses, for customers to [interact with] if they want to make, like, a really complicated burger order. It’s up to the restaurant to decide how to use it,” he says.
The Presto aspires to be the food-services version of the airline check-in kiosk or the ATM or the self-checkout at your local pharmacy. It makes a person’s job a computer’s job, and that cuts costs. Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table—making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.
The story goes on to speculate that one reason these types of things are not yet in wide use, even though the technology is pretty simple by contemporary standards, is that when restaurants use traditional waiters “labor costs are not 42 cents per table per hour, but they actually aren’t much more than that. Many waiters earn as little as $2 or $3 an hour, making the rest of their living in tips.”
I’m not following the economic logic here: given the standard structure of waitstaff compensation, surely tips are part of the restaurant’s labor costs as much as anything else?
Which makes me wonder how well the tipping structure works in general. I assume this the kind of thing enterprising social scientists have studied in detail. What percentage of customers tip at a sit-down restaurant? How much do they leave? How much does this vary depending on factors like actual quality of service, swankiness or lack thereof, type of food, region of the country, age of clientele etc etc? What about buffets? And what ramifications does all this have for systems like this, where the waiters will still be doing much of the work they’ve always done?