Skip to main content

Servicing Out

I took my best friend out for dinner as a birthday treat a few weeks ago. One of the first times I have sat indoors in a restaurant with everyone including the wait-staff being mask-less. It felt awkward and uncomfortable. Everyone around seemed to be trying too hard to make things appear normal. This was far from a dinner time scene pre-Covid times. We were all making an effort that is for sure. 

Our waiter was a young kid who aimed to be nice and friendly but was not sure if he was getting too close to us for comfort. So he lurched back anytime he felt he might be less than six feet away from our table. It was an acrobatic effort for him to land all the food and drinks safely on the far edge of the table while staying away from us. Times have clearly changed and in some cases there is not path to return to "normalcy". The robotic service option may grow more wide-spread with more spill-over effects:

..suppose you’re a business, and labor suddenly becomes really expensive, so you decide to install an automated ordering system for the customers. Then you think “Hmm, wait a second, could I also use an automated system for the wait staff, hosts, and chefs to communicate instead of having to walk over and talk to each other?” So they go around looking for more communication tools to buy. Software companies realize this is a big market, and start making more and better restaurant productivity tools. Along the way they develop cool new methods of remote communication that other software companies adapt for completely different markets, like factories or big-box retailers. Innovation leads to more innovation.

The way this cycle of innovation would go would be to remove people from the service business which can be a good thing if these folks can move into jobs that are better paying and more interesting. It is unclear that would be the case though.

but lots of people who stop being waiters in restaurants will end up doing things that it’s hard for us to predict. The thing is, humankind has had many waves of technological innovation before, and somehow there is still plenty of work for everyone to do

This logic does not account for the fact that in many cases these employees are not wait-staff despite having ample choice of employment and creating new jobs are are require skills far higher than what they have or are likely to gain will not make their employment prospects that much better. The spill-over will end up being at the lower-end creating opportunities of  Lime Juicer ilk. 



Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more