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It enters an ITSU branch, the Asian fast -service restaurant chain, and one faces one for a self -service kiosks. Customers enter their orders on the screens and pay brilliantly, before pushing their sushi and bento boxes or collect the rice bowls from the kitchen counter.
This avant -garde service automation parade will soon be amended. “I think we have adopted technology too fast,” says Julian Metcalfe, founder of ITSU. ITSU has only had one staff even in each of its 83 points of sale, along with self -service kiosks. The chain is now adding two more staff as part of Your plans For expansion.
It is a contradictory decision, given the line of retail and hospitality chains that announces that they will automate more. The growing labor cost in the United Kingdom, uploaded by the increases in the minimum wage and the contributions of the national insurance of the employer established by Foreign Minister Rachel Reeves in its October budget, is causing changes.
J Sainsbury is court 3,000 jobs, partly closing 61 coffees in its supermarkets. Clothing retailers as Next are initial self -service payment tests in stores, which have lagging supermarkets. The retail sector has yielded 225,000 jobs in five years and the British retail consortium says that the cost of £ 5 billion for the sector of changes to minimum wages and contributions of nor accelerate the shake.
Metcalfe’s heart change is significant for what it says about the difficulties and opportunities for automation. It is a pioneer of the use of technology to reduce costs, not only with self -service tillage but also three robots that prepare sushi in each ITSU kitchen. It also describes the restaurant industry as “surprisingly inefficient” in the way it is organized and its use of working time.
“If childbirth is becoming more expensive, that’s probably good,” he reflects. He believes in the automation behind the scene: “If a machine can peel the potatoes faster than three people, then it is.” But although the support of self -service is a second nature for some lunch of the Z generation, many clients still prefer human assistance.
It’s hard to blame them. A lot of retail technology in the front of the house requires that the customer make an effort, a tradition that goes back to buyers who have to put products on their own baskets when supermarkets were invented. “They are really not automating: they are only making us do the job for them,” says Greg Thwaites, research director of the Resolution Foundation.
Metcalfe is not just to reconsider self -service. Morrisons, the supermarket chain, has eliminated some self -regions after discovering that they were cumbersome for buyers with many items. It makes no sense to reduce costs if customers buy less or buy elsewhere: one study He discovered that people ordered less of self -service restaurants if there was a line behind them.
But cost pressures are promoting non-food retailers to follow chains such as Uniqlo to introduce self-paid. Harvir Dhillon, economist of the British retail consortium, says that although supermarkets are “reaching the point of reducing returns” with self -service, there is a “great change” towards the use of technology in the store in other places.
There are also less to inhibit investment in technology and the replacement of low salary workforce, where customers are not directly affected. That includes Kitchen Robots in ITSU and greater automation in warehouses and logistics centers for retailers. An effect can be to force an increase in productivity in some sectors of low wages.
Thwaites says it will be more difficult for employers to absorb employment costs than when a previous Labor Government increased national employer insurance rates in the early 2000s, as the United Kingdom’s economy grew faster. This movement will result in a combination of higher prices, increased productivity and a reduced retail sector, which “is slowly hungry for poorly paid workers.”
The load will be heavier for small businesses, including stores and coffees, which cannot compensate for increases in labor costs with automation. But, as the dilemma faced by ITSU shows, even those who use technology in a sophisticated way will face difficult decisions. Robots can perform some tasks faster than people, without stopping, but lack the human touch.
“Human beings are immensely sophisticated, so we must treat them well,” says Metcalfe. That is true, but it is more difficult to put into practice in retail trade and hospitality than industries with better margins and payment (the initial ITSU rate is £ 12.75 per hour, including bonus). It will soon be more difficult.