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restaurants

October 24, 2017

Can Daily Paychecks Make a Positive Impact for Food Workers?

Getting paid twice a month is pretty well ingrained into the minds of American workers. But startup Instant Financial thinks that paying lower-wage workers, like those in restaurants, daily paychecks may be a better way to increase financial flexibility and avoid monetary pitfalls.

Business Insider reports that Instant currently works with franchisees (not corporate) of companies such as McDonald’s and Outback steakhouse to reach roughly 150,000 people across the US. Once connected to the Instant mobile app, employees can ask for up to half of that day’s pay within an hour after their shift, and that money is accessible via an Instant debit card.

According to Instant Financial website, there is no fee for users to access their money via Instant Pay. There is an inactivity fee if no money is loaded or spent for 90 continuous days, and repeats monthly for the length of inactivity.

As the article points out, this shift to daily pay fits more with the millennial mindset. This is a generation raised on instant access to everything, so adding pay stubs to that makes sense. According to the people at Instant, getting a daily paycheck not only helps people avoid predatory lenders should a sudden money issue arise, but it also aids in employee satisfaction and retention.

And for Instant, there is a sizeable market in the food industry for its services. In April of this year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported

The industry with the highest percentage of workers earning hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (about 13 percent). Three-fifths of all workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, almost entirely in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received.

It might be easy and cliche that this is another example of millennials ruining everything, but this actually makes sense. Minimum wage is not a lot of money, especially in expensive cities such as New York, San Francisco or Seattle. For restaurant workers who don’t get cash tips to bring home at the end of the evening, getting paid within hours could literally mean getting home that night.

At the very least, Instant’s approach is an interesting one, and I’m curious to see how many restaurants sign on — or if this idea of daily pay spreads out to other industries.

October 17, 2017

Allset raises $5M to take waiting off the menu

You would be forgiven for rolling your eyes when you first hear of Allset. The reservations app, which today announced it had raised $5M in Series A funding (hat tip: TechCrunch), wants to make the dining experience more “efficient” by letting you reserve a table, order and pay all before you even take your seat.

At first, this seems like yet another case of Silicon Valley trying to disrupt something that was actually just fine, thank you very much. After all, a restaurant is more than just food. It’s the ambiance, the slowing down for a minute to enjoy a meal.

But that’s not always the case, especially when you are busy and need to maximize your lunch hour. Being seated and served in rapid, automatic succession is actually a great time saver. Or if you are having a lunch meeting, the ability to pre-order and pre-pay makes can take some of the social awkwardness out of the process and allow you to be more productive.

And Allset believes it isn’t just good for diners, the company says it can be a boon to restaurants, helping them become more efficient and deliver a VIP experience. In this regard the startup is just one of a slew of services looking to optimize restaurant processes and the business of eating out.

Speaking of business, Allset also provides a service that allows companies to offer faster restaurant lunch experiences for employees. Having worked a startup that had catered lunches every day, the ability to actually leave the office in a timely manner (and experience actual sunlight) would have been a great perk.

And just as Facebook has expanded its foray into food delivery, and AirBnB lets guests book reservations via Resy, perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a more business-focused social platform such as Linkedin expanding into the business of business lunches through some kind of partnership with Allset.

Allset is available in San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Greycroft led the funding round announced today. Founded in 2015, Allset has raised more than $8.35 million in total funding so far.

January 15, 2017

Can Tech Completely Automate The Restaurant Front Of House?

While we’ve seen a bunch of news lately about how food robots and automation are gaining momentum in the restaurant world, much of the action has been around ‘back of house’ operations and delivery, where robots and automation can specialize in completing repetitive tasks like making burgers at a lower cost than humans.

But the reality is, front of house is just as susceptible to automation. One of the most obvious places for tech is at the dining table itself, where companies like Ziosk are working to make servers more efficient and, in many cases, help restaurants reduce overall server headcount. Ziosk’s touch screens, which allow consumers to order, ask for refills and pay, are on tables everywhere from Red Robin to Chili’s to Olive Garden. In fact, the company indicated that their kiosks touch 50 million consumers in 3,000 restaurants in the US.

Fast food is even more susceptible to automation. Companies like Panera, Wendy’s and McDonalds are rolling out self-order kiosks nationwide, making fast food one of the fastest growing categories in what some predict will be a $73 billion self-serve kiosk market in 2020.

And then there are those restaurants creating entirely new restaurant concepts which take the front-of-house beyond just the kiosk and make them entirely human-less.

One of these is Eatsa, a San Fransisco based chain that has created a restaurant concept where the entire order and serve flow are done with automation. And if you think Eatsa’s quinoa meals are prepackaged boxes made somewhere off-site, you’re wrong: humans work to fulfill orders, only consumers never get to see them behind the wall of futuristic cubbies where the custom-ordered meals magically appear.

You can see how it all works in the video from Techcrunch below:

Eatsa's High Tech Quinoa To-Go

But do consumers want humans eliminated entirely in the front of house? Are restaurants going to eventually all become Eatsa-like order and pickup joints with nary a worker in sight?

My guess is human-less front of house operations will eat up a small but growing percentage of the overall restaurant mix, particularly in fast-food and casual dining markets where consumers often want to eat fast and affordably. But the biggest impact will be on specific functions. Much like Amazon has re-thought the grocery store in a modern context to use technology to automate a task (checkout), we’ll see restaurant chains starting to focus on those front of house tasks that can be reduced or eliminated with tech (like ordering).

I expect automation to have a much smaller impact in fine dining’s front of house operations. That’s because consumers are willing – and often times expect – to pay more for the experience, and that experience is usually highly dependent on the service of humans.

The ultimate question is how far will automation go and what does it mean for both restaurants and consumers? On the restaurant side, it’s clear a balance must be struck between increased efficiency and creating a compelling user experience.  If consumers see added benefit through expedited ordering and payment through tech like Ziosk, then why not?

But if going to restaurants becomes the equivalent of going to food ATMs, there’s a chance eating out will lose some of its appeal. Unless of course you frequent one of these many robot-restaurants popping up in China.

Then you may want your meal served by a robot waiter.

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