MakiMaki's automatic rice forming machine can make sushi faster.

Throughout the summer, when guests arrive at Arlo Roof Top, the waiters perform many typical duties: greet the group, answer their questions about drinks and food, and recommend a second margarita at the end of the first round.

But in the sunny rooftop bar of the Arlo SoHo hotel, the waiter did not accept customer orders. Instead, they help customers order through their smartphones, and their choices are directly entered into the point of sale system behind the bar or in the kitchen.

At the beginning of 2020, nearly half a million New Yorkers worked in the city's sprawling leisure and hospitality industry, which included restaurants, bars, hotels, tourist attractions, and art institutions.

According to an analysis of data from the State Department of Labor, nearly two years later, one-third (137,500) of jobs are still missing, and Barbara Denham of the Oxford Economics Institute is the pre-pandemic. The six-month average. Many other industries, including software publishing and investment banking, either lost much less positions or recovered quickly.

Instead of workers are reduced-scale services and countless forms of customer self-service. Many of the latter are supported by technology: tablets and QR code-enabled menus, automated kitchen preparation robots, and pre-recorded audio guides.

This made the city’s hotel companies choose to do more with less money in the long run — and even forever — which indelibly changed the face of the New York City industry.

"In the future, hospitality may not be me looking into your eyes and giving you a meal," said restaurant consultant Steve Zagor. "It may be a great website, or it may be a great gift I found in a takeaway bag when I got home. We must expand our relationship with the hotel industry to make up for the current world."

When Covid-19 preventive measures appeared to be temporary, business owners deployed technology to protect the safety of customers and employees. But with the story of labor shortages evolving and growing for several years, these changes have become deeply ingrained. Although New York City has everything ready for the recovery of the hotel industry — restaurants need proof of vaccination, outdoor dining is becoming permanent, and international tourists can now visit — the city’s recovery still lags behind the country. The huge hospitality employment gap between the beginning of 2020 and now seems to be larger than expected, partly because many operators have found that technology tools and automation bring more revenue while reducing salary costs.

Zagor pointed out that in surveys such as the US Customer Satisfaction Index, consumers’ favorite company is a company that produces glass and titanium alloy products: Apple.

"They are hospitable," Zagor argued.

When you walk into Shake Shack, McDonald’s, Starbucks or some Sweetgreen locations, if you have not placed an order online, you can put your finger on the tablet mounted on the central table. For fast-food casual restaurants that place orders at the counter cashier anyway, the transition to technology is the fastest.

Starbucks customers who use its reward program (optimized in its ordering app) account for half of its US sales.

This is one way the company expects to return its profit margins to pre-pandemic levels next year, even if it pushes the average salary of its retail employees to nearly $17 by the summer. Starbucks President and CEO Kevin Johnson stated on the fourth-quarter earnings call that the investment in efficient espresso machines and artificial intelligence platforms is one of the store’s “training improvements designed to replace complexity.”

Chief Financial Officer Katie Fogerty said that at Shake Shack, headquartered in New York, there are more orders placed through apps or in-store kiosks than through cashiers. 

Prior to the pandemic, a shift without manual ordering led by large companies such as McDonald's was underway. The company installed self-service kiosks in some urban locations as early as 2015.

In restaurants that provide table service, replacing servers with tablets is not so fast, although the service has been reduced and customers say they missed it.

"The attention and care of the staff makes me feel special," Grace Ann Sweeney said. Sweeney is 30 years old and works in customer service for a technology company. Before the pandemic, he would eat out with customers several times a week.

"I will definitely ask a lot of questions because I value the opinions of employees," she said. "If you don't spend time talking to someone, you will lose part of the experience."

But Steve Simoni, CEO of restaurant technology company Bbot, said that certain leisure venues are permanently adopting technology that supports QR code ordering and payment-which is popular in crowded places in bars. In these places, dozens of people used to wave to no avail in front of busy bartenders. , It may take them half an hour to turn to them.

Simeone said that before the pandemic, the owners of these bars tried Bbot's products to reduce the pressure on their employees. He said the problem is that the staff do not want to complete both face-to-face and application orders at the same time.

He said that the server's concerns about its own security during the pandemic changed its attitude.

"The staff want to be safer," he said, "so they say yes." The acceptance of guests has followed, and the owners have flourished because they are now able to sell more things than before.

He said that Bbot now has approximately 300 customers in New York City.

Arlo SoHo is one of them. Its food and beverage director Gary Gordon Wallach has used Bbot to reduce the number of employees to increase revenue. He said that his 70 employees are now the right size. Before the pandemic, he employed about 90 employees.

Due to the pandemic, one of Arlo's premises, the hotel lobby bar, is still closed; Wallach said that opening it will resume several shifts.

At the same time, the revenue generated by the newly placed QR codes has been transformed into more orders, with no additional investment other than a few sign holders.

Like Arlo, "Most food halls and bars, they won't go back," Simeone said. "This is great for their business."

He said that this does not mean that technology-enabled subscriptions will become permanent in high-end venues.

"I think this is very American, ordering from another person," Simeone said. "People like the experience of going out, maybe ordering food. There is a psychological factor-it is a power." He said that in a more casual environment, interaction is more transactional, which provides Bbot and its competitors power.

On the city’s tour buses, the pre-pandemic shift to technology heralds a reduction in labor, but—a tour bus company believes—provides a better hotel experience.

In 2016, TopView invested in a GPS-triggered audio system that supports 11 languages ​​to meet the needs of non-English visitors, said marketing director Jennifer Li. "We decided not to provide on-site tour guides. This is related to user preferences and our company's vision of product standardization so that all our customers can experience the best service," Li said. "The current labor shortage is a very big problem for a company of our size, and industry and automation are critical to being able to provide services and sustain livelihoods."

She said Governor Kathy Hochul's new plan is to compensate travel companies for bringing back workers before demand, which will enable TopView to re-employ bus drivers, dispatchers, and maintenance and customer service personnel. However, Li said that TopView does not plan to bring back a manual tour guide because the customer is very satisfied with the recording.

This month, an unemployed tour guide called The Brian Lehrer Show to complain about the trend of replacing tour guides with recordings. Mayor Representative Mitch Schwartz stated that his complaint prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to advance a bill submitted to the City Council in 2018 that required an employee Occupy the top floor of every double-decker bus.

In MakiMaki, a fast casual sushi restaurant with two locations and one on the way, owner Kevin Takarada uses four robots to achieve faster production in a small space with few employees.

"Our robots will not be replaced, they will help," Takarada said.

Takarada said that automating daily tasks, such as measuring, washing, cooking, and shaping rice for sushi rolls, changed the people he hired. As he said, instead of looking for sushi chefs that are difficult to find, he simply hires "good people with good personalities."

Because he adopted automation when it opened in 2017, he was able to complete a large number of orders that helped MakiMaki make a comeback. The Citadel hedge fund recently ordered 1,200 pieces of sushi, for example, to be delivered before 10:30 in the morning. With Mifan Automation and 9 workers, MakiMaki's team has free time.

"We can't do this without machines," Takarada said. 

He said that the sushi machine he ordered from Japan is now delayed for 6 months because of labor shortages, many mom-and-pop restaurants that previously avoided automation are trying to use it.

Baotian said that in the upcoming store, he will consider installing automatic kiosks instead of cashiers, because this may be the most difficult position to fill.

"This may lead to a negative experience," he admitted. "People want to interact with restaurants in traditional ways. But unfortunately, we have to research what else we can automate."

At Wild East Brewing in Gowanus, switching to tablet ordering for safety is a kind of "life-saving straw," but it will no longer be relied upon in the future, said co-owner Lindsay Steen. This experience eroded a key part of her vision: to promote beer to customers, especially the unique blends offered by Wild East, such as Prescience Pearl, a farmhouse blonde brewed with black tea, cassava, and taro.

Forcing customers to take out their mobile phones will reduce the interaction between people, which is what “drinking beer and going to the brewery means,” Steen said.

She said that she has not been able to recruit at the speed she wanted and has reduced shifts, but she retained all five of the original employees. Although their working hours have not increased, their responsibilities have changed.

"Everyone started as a bartender," Steen said, "but now one person manages the delivery and delivery. The other is interested in brewing, so she received training later, and is now full-time brewing and kicking. We have many workers to help on canning and bottling days, and a bartender is now a salesperson. Some people are making our private event space open."

Those in the hotel industry who are worried about the loss of services say that behind-the-scenes technology may provide a pleasant medium between humans and robots.

"What technology-related design can do is help support human interaction," said David Rockwell, who has designed dozens of hotel, restaurant and theater spaces in New York City for decades.

Rockwell has created rooms that are easier to maintain at the civilian hotel on West 48th Street, which means fewer housekeeping staff need to be hired. 

"There is no substitute for the need for interpersonal communication," he said. "But there is a way to make back-end support more efficient."

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