Today is the third class in your current four class set. We will begin class with a causal conversation. Our reading this week is about bunsik. Our listening is about robot ordering systems in restaurants. Please note this story is from 2015. Please listen to as much as you can. We will finish with our grammar sentences.
Click HERE for the reading
STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:
I'm at an Uno Pizzeria & Grill in Framingham, Mass., and the doors are just about to open for the lunch rush. Everybody's getting ready. Manager Andy Sklar is psyching up the servers, talking to them about the specials and the LTOs - that's the limited time offers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANDY SKLAR: Anybody know what the main theme of our summer LTO will be?
UNIDENTIFIED SERVER: Lobster.
SKLAR: Lobster. Lobster is back.
VANEK SMITH: Lobster sliders, lobster pizza, lobster rolls.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SKLAR: It'll have fries on one side of the roll, and then we'll have the power slaw on the other side. So I know your next question is, Andy, what is power slaw?
ROBERT SMITH, HOST:
Oh, that's definitely my question. What is the power slaw?
VANEK SMITH: So I'm still not exactly clear on this. He did describe it. It's apparently coleslaw with Goji mix in it, like the Goji berries, I think. Anyway, I was going to ask him about it, but there was no time. We were already on to the specialty cocktails.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SKLAR: OK, so two new drinks. Both of the drinks are served in these wonderful mason jars.
VANEK SMITH: One of the servers asked if the customers got to keep the wonderful mason jars.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SKLAR: No, no, no, no.
VANEK SMITH: Everything is almost ready. The tomato sauce is simmering. The dough is rising in these deep dish molds, and the servers are ready to push the power slaw.
SMITH: Psyched for the slaw.
VANEK SMITH: But one more thing has to happen before the restaurant can open.
SMITH: The robots.
VANEK SMITH: Somebody's got to turn on the robots. It's Jorge Castillo. He is walking from table to table with a stack of these square batteries, and he's pushing them into the side of these little computer tablets that sit on every table.
JORGE CASTILLO: It turns on by itself. It takes a couple of minutes for it to turn on. Once I'm done with that, I just go around and make sure they look nice, wipe them down.
SMITH: This is the Ziosk. Ziosk. Imagine a sturdy iPad about 8 inches tall, about 7 inches wide. And this is going into thousands of chain restaurants across the country. The Ziosk is in Chili's and in Applebee's and soon most Olive Gardens and, of course, Pizzeria Uno.
VANEK SMITH: The Ziosk will greet you, take your order, entertain you, let you pay right there at the table. It's basically a computerized waiter.
Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Stacey Vanek Smith.
SMITH: And I'm Robert Smith. Today on the show, waiters become the latest group of workers to meet the machines that may eventually replace them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPONSORSHIP)
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VANEK SMITH: Before the robots came to Uno Pizzeria, it was a really laid-back place to work. That's according to Kelsey Picknell. She worked at Uno for almost a decade. She left last year, but she still remembers exactly how she used to greet the guests.
KELSEY PICKNELL: Hi, my name is Kelsey. I'm going to be taking care of you today. Can I get you some drinks to start out and maybe recommend an Arnold Palmer or raspberry iced tea?
VANEK SMITH: She sold a lot of Arnold Palmers. Kelsey took some time off to travel, and when she came back they were there - the tablets - on every single table. And she says her job changed completely. It's 11 o'clock time to open the doors for the lunch rush. Jorge Castillo is the keeper of the keys. He unlocks the door.
So we're open for business?
CASTILLO: We're ready. Let's make some money (laughter).
VANEK SMITH: A few minutes later, the first customers start filing in. And so far, it just looks like any other restaurant. They walk up to the hostess. They get seated. The waiter comes right over to the table.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM: My name's Tom, by the way. Just so you know, drink specials are right here. We also have Pepsi products.
SMITH: Sounds remarkably similar to the performance that Kelsey put on - the Arnold Palmer pitch.
VANEK SMITH: Except for right after that, Tom launches into operating instructions for the Ziosk.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM: This is the Ziosk. You can order appetizers, desserts and drink refills on it.
VANEK SMITH: This introduction takes a really long time because there are all these different instructions for all the different things the Ziosk can do. It can take your order. There are these games that you can play on it. There's '80s trivia. You can pay on it.
SMITH: And then there's the button.
VANEK SMITH: The button. It's the call server button, kind of like the call button on an airplane. And when you push it, the waiter is supposed to drop everything they're doing and come right over to your table immediately, no matter what.
SMITH: Waiters hate this thing.
VANEK SMITH: Yes, they do. One server I talked with at another restaurant told me she calls this the kill myself button.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM: This is a call server feature. We don't get this aside from seeing the red, blinking light. So if you hit that, that notifies us to come over. But there's no real other notification other than a blinking light. So if I don't see it, I might not come over immediately.
VANEK SMITH: I wanted to see how this whole thing was going to play out. So I got a booth; I ordered a drink; and I just watched how this new partnership between machines and humans works. There were waiters rushing by with trays of drinks and these huge deep-dish pizzas. I saw a few kill myself buttons go off.
SMITH: And you could see why so many restaurants are starting to put these Ziosks in because it solves this fundamental problem that anyone's been to a restaurant knows about, which is the server is never there when you really want them, when you want some extra bread, when you maybe want another soda or the classic - you're looking around trying to make eye contact trying to pay your bill, making that little check-writing gesture in the air. That doesn't happen anymore at Pizzeria Uno.
VANEK SMITH: No. In fact, when I was ready to order, I just pushed the call server button.
Can I get the guacamole burger?
TOM: Guacalicious burger?
VANEK SMITH: Yes.
TOM: How would you like it cooked?
SMITH: I noticed that you said guacamole burger and not Guacalicious burger, like it said on the menu.
VANEK SMITH: I did not want to say Guacalicious.
SMITH: I can understand that.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter). And as I was sitting there waiting for my burger, I was watching people order on the machines and play games on the machines and then pay on the machines and just leave right away. It was so fast.
SMITH: And when we talked to the people who make the Ziosk, the Ziosk company, they said this is their big selling point. That the average time a customer spends at a table drops by 10 minutes. Ten minutes off the average time if you use a Ziosk. And in the restaurant business, this is huge. There's a whole calculation, right. The faster the people leave, the faster you can seat the next customers. And by the end of the day, you can serve dozens more people than you otherwise would've served. And this means making more and more money in a restaurant, even though you don't have to expand the number of tables or expand the number of servers.
VANEK SMITH: Not only that, but customers spend more money in that shorter time. And the reason is the Ziosk is really good at selling stuff. In fact, in some cases, it's better than people at selling stuff. This is especially true with desserts. Some of the restaurants that have put Ziosks in have seen dessert sales rise by 30 percent.
SMITH: Thirty percent, which is remarkable until you think about it a bit. I mean, we've all been there, right? We've had a huge restaurant meal, and the waiter comes over with a little piece of paper with desserts listed on it and says, do you have room for something sweet? And you think, is this waiter judging me?
VANEK SMITH: This is what I heard from Evan Monti. He used to be a server at a Pizzeria Uno's with Kelsey. And he told me that he used to see the embarrassment on people's faces when he asked them about dessert because, in a lot of cases, those people had just eaten a pretty serious meal.
EVAN MONTI: You go out to these places like Uno's and you're getting this huge pizza, with how much cheese did they use to say? Two pounds or something ridiculous like that.
VANEK SMITH: Whoa.
PICKNELL: That sounds very extreme (laughter) but, like...
MONTI: It's a lot of cheese. And so if you have somebody come over and say, hey, are you interested in dessert? Well, no, you're not. But...
SMITH: But if a computer asks you that question - say, Ziosk shows you a photo of a beautiful bread pudding with salty caramel sauce, you think, who's going to know? Who's going to know that after eating two pounds of cheese, I want bread pudding.
VANEK SMITH: And the picture of that bread pudding is key. Manager Andy Sklar at Pizzeria Uno told me that the pictures that pop up on the Ziosk are really beautiful, and customers respond to it.
SKLAR: You know, look at the picture. And no matter how well I could describe bread pudding with salty caramel sauce, nothing can do it justice like that picture with the ooey, gooey caramel dripping off of the cake and the ice cream in the background, right?
SMITH: It seems like a pretty good situation for everyone involved. So the customers are coming and going faster. The restaurant is able to serve more people. And, in fact, the servers are making more money. They make money on tips, and tips are based on how much they sell. And even if Ziosk is selling the bread pudding, the waiter can still get the tip on it.
VANEK SMITH: And the tips are actually higher because when you pay on the Ziosk, it suggests a tip of 20 percent. The servers I talked to all said they love that.
SMITH: So this is one of those classic win-win situations. But there is another thing that you may not see that Ziosk is doing.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah, I ran into this right after I finished my burger. And I was getting ready to pay and this little survey pops up, asking me to rate my restaurant experience and to rate Tom.
How attentive was the staff? What'd you think of the speed of the service?
On each of these things, I am rating Tom on a scale from 1 to 5. Usually when you take these surveys, you don't really think about it. But the servers do 'cause every day, the Ziosk takes an average of all the numbers that people put in and spits out one number. For every server, every day, it boils down to one number from 1 to 5. And that number gets sent to Tom's manager, Andy.
SKLAR: The zone of affection, so to speak, where people love you, won't leave you ever and will tell other people about you really is 4.75 or above, right. If you're at 4.5 or below, you're in a zone of indifference. People kind of like you, kind of don't, may leave you, may not.
SMITH: And the thing that amazed me about this restaurant was that everyone knows everyone else's number because Andy prints out a list of all the servers in the restaurant, ranked from best to worst, and he puts it on the wall, right there in the back.
VANEK SMITH: Remember Jorge Castillo, the guy who was putting the batteries in the Ziosks? I tracked him down and asked him about his score.
So how are your scores doing right now?
CASTILLO: I have yet to check them right now (laughter).
VANEK SMITH: Do you want to go check them?
CASTILLO: Yeah, sure.
Let's see. This is my name, Jorge Castillo.
VANEK SMITH: Jorge's name is at the very bottom of the list, and it's highlighted in pink.
CASTILLO: My Ziosk score came to 3.5, attentiveness at 2, food quality - 4, speed - 2. So basically what it tells me here is that I just got to be more attentive and just be more - be a little faster.
VANEK SMITH: So what does the pink highlighter mean?
CASTILLO: The pink highlight just means the people who basically need to improve. Like, and the green is...
VANEK SMITH: Oh, I'm sorry.
CASTILLO: (Laughter) No. That's a good thing.
VANEK SMITH: I'm sorry.
CASTILLO: That's a good thing. That just shows me that I just need to get - do better.
VANEK SMITH: Standing there with Jorge, I can see how people would hate this machine. It's like this little robot snitch that is telling on its coworkers.
SMITH: Yeah, but there is a reason for it because this solves a fundamental problem in restaurants, which is that the owners and the managers never really know what's going on at a table. They don't know if the server is actually selling the items they should be selling. They don't know if the server is being nice or rude to the customers. And so Ziosk is a sort of way to look into this fundamental part of their business that they couldn't see otherwise.
VANEK SMITH: I asked Andy Sklar about it, and I ask him, does he take these numbers seriously? Does he actually use them for anything?
VANEK SMITH: Have you ever, like, fired anybody based on their scores?
SKLAR: I've never fired anyone based on a survey score per se. I will tell you that the data that we're - provides us from Ziosk allows me to look at a long-term trend, which could lead to, you know, helping me make an employment decision on a particular person.
SMITH: Let's just say, if you were getting low numbers on the Ziosk, your long-term prospects for employment at Pizzeria Uno are not good, which is understandable. Bad workers do get fired. But the bigger question is what about the good workers? What about the servers who are getting all fives? What happens when Ziosk, which is doing a small part of their job now, starts to do more and more and more of their jobs? Do the good waiters end up getting fired in this scenario?
VANEK SMITH: I talked to Pizzeria Uno about this, and they said absolutely not. They have no plans to hire fewer servers or fire any servers. They told me the Ziosk is just a tool to help the servers do their jobs better.
SMITH: And this is a big deal when you're talking about machines coming to the workplace because there really are two scenarios - the machine stays a tool, just helps people do their jobs better, everyone is happy. Or the machine does replace people; it does take jobs away. As economists would ask is the Ziosk a complement to the worker or a substitute for the worker?
VANEK SMITH: Kelsey and Evan, the former servers, told me they think they know what's going to happen. And so did customers. They would come up to the tables, the customers would look up from their Ziosks, and they would ask them one question.
PICKNELL: Why are you even here if we have this? And I would just try and remind them of my purpose (laughter).
VANEK SMITH: Did it make you question your purpose?
PICKNELL: At times, yeah.
MONTI: They would make jokes about, you know, oh, pretty soon, there will be conveyor belts coming through, and we won't need you here. And, you know, they're joking around, but it was - a good point is at what point do you become the food runner, and then at what point do you stop making tips?
SMITH: And at what point do you not have a job at all? And this has big implications because 40 years ago when machines eliminated jobs in factories, a lot of people went into service jobs - retail stores, hotels, restaurants. They didn't pay as much, but they did seem safe from automation because the service sector is all about human interaction. It's all about warmth.
VANEK SMITH: And you can see why people are worried about robots coming into the service sector because Ziosk is not going to stop with restaurants. Any place where you look somebody in the eye and ask them how their day was and provide a service for them is fair game. You can already see robots showing up when you check into a hotel, when you rent a car, when you buy groceries.
SMITH: And these days, there's usually a worker standing next to that machine giving you operating instructions like Tom did; basically teaching you how to use the machine rather than interact with them.
VANEK SMITH: And a lot of these machines don't work that well now. But those machines are only going to get better. And what's not clear is if service jobs disappear, where are people going to go next? At Pizzeria Uno, the lunch rush is winding down. I have finished my guacamole burger.
SMITH: Guacalicious - say it.
VANEK SMITH: My Guacalicious burger. I swipe my card. I take the little survey. I gave Tom all fives. And two seconds later, Ziosk prints out my receipt. It's so fast. It's so easy. And I just leave without saying goodbye.
We always love to hear what you think. Send us an email, planetmoney@npr.org. Or you can tweet at us, @planetmoney.
SMITH: And people have been fired up on Twitter about this race we did in a previous episode between a human reporter and a computer reporter. I'll have to say, it's been very lopsided. The vast majority of listeners said that Scott Horsley, our human reporter, won that race. Even though the computer was faster, as Mark Stevenson tweeted, he said, claiming the computer won the race is like saying a microwave burrito beats a dinner at a great restaurant.
VANEK SMITH: In fact, only one person tweeted in support of the robot reporter.
SMITH: One.
VANEK SMITH: His name was Jack Rometty (ph). And he wrote Horsley can't learn to write much faster, but the computer can learn to write better and faster. A special thanks to the Pizzeria Uno and to Manager Andy Sklar for letting me hang out for the day. Our show today was produced by Frances Harlow and Jess Jiang.
SMITH: And I wanted to promote one thing here before the show is over. It is an app that NPR has put out called NPR One. It's sort of like a Pandora for news. I think these days, a lot of people are saying, oh, radio or podcast, radio or podcast. The great thing about the NPR One app is it's radio and podcasts. It has a stream of news stories. You can choose which ones you want to listen to, you can skip the ones you don't. And PLANET MONEY and the other great podcasts are on there too. So I highly recommend putting this on your phone. It's the NPR One app from iTunes or Google Play. I'm Robert Smith.
VANEK SMITH: And I'm Stacy Vanek Smith. Thanks for listening.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LET ME DOWN GENTLY")
LA ROUX: (Singing) Let me down gently. That's what I think I need. But when you let me down gently, it still feels hard, hard. Turn me into someone new. That's what I really need.