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Will automation lead to server-less restaurants?

Written by Tom Ryan

Reminding some of the automats of yore, a new fast-food concept, Eatsa, with national rollout ambitions, has opened in San Francisco without any servers or counter help.

The restaurant offers a menu of quinoa bowls featuring a variety of fresh ingredients. For example, "The Mediterranean" bowl is described as: "Quinoa Herb Salad and Arugula topped with Tomato, Cucumber, Artichoke Hearts, Kalamata Olives, Feta Cheeseand Dill Yogurt Sauce."

Here's how it works:

  • Customers select their order from an iPad, customize it and pay for it;
  • Their name, taken from their credit card, appears on another screen;
  • When the food is ready, a number shows up next to their name indicating in which glass cubby the order can be found;

Eatsa's founders said the automation saves money on both payroll and real estate by not hiring people to work in the front of the restaurant. At $6.95 per bowl, the system helps bring healthy food to the marketplace at a more accessible price. With some further automation in the preparation stage, the system promises speed as well.

Eatsa
Photos: Eatsa

"It's essentially lunch on demand," said Scott Drummond, a co-founder, in a press release. "Eatsa's Order Anywhere concept translates to zero wait time for customers. No more waiting in line. No more $12 lunch salads. Just delicious food that is nutritious, affordable and quick."

Eatsa's virtual cashier also remembers every customer, allowing for "highly personalized interaction and tailored suggestions."

Several articles on Eatsa explored whether the next evolution of automation would be server-less restaurants. The fate of lower-skilled service jobs has become a sensitive topic amid minimum wage hikes and the mandating of health benefits to be paid by employers of a certain size in some cities, such as San Francisco.

Writing for the Financial Times, Andrew McAfee, a co-author of "The Second Machine Age" and a blogger for FT.com, believes many of the interactions with human servers — ordering, hearing about specials, getting the bill and paying — are "distractions from my restaurant experience, not additions to it."

He adds, "This poses no danger to our shared humanity; we will grab our robo-generated quinoa bowls and iced coffees and, while eating them, talk to our colleagues, friends and families just like today."

"We can sit and debate all day what the implications are for low-wage workers at restaurants, but I don't think that's fair," David Friedberg, another c-founder, told The New York Times. "If increased productivity means cost savings get passed to consumers, consumers are going to have a lot more to spend on lots of things."

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