JUNE 22, WEDNESDAY

SCANNING THE MENU

Twice today I had looked at the menu and ordered my food by scanning a code and bringing up a menu and then ordering and paying with a credit card. The first time was for breakfast at the Takoma Beverage Company where I sat out on the sidewalk under an awning and the second time is at Seoul Food DC about five blocks from my Airbnb where I am eating a scallion pancake. Each time it has been easy to scan and to pay. The first time I encountered scanning a menu and paying was in Paris and I failed. A waiter had to help me. But now that I’ve mastered the procedure I am beginning to wonder about it.

First of all, there is almost no human contact. No one comes out and says with a broad smile, “My name is Lulu and I will be taking care of you tonight.” And Lulu doesn’t appear three times and ask how I am doing and doesn’t bring me the bill at the end of the meal. I don’t even know Lulu’s name and the only time she appears is to bring me my food and to make sure, since this is so impersonal, that she has the right person. She has my name, “Are you Bill?” But I don’t have hers.

Tonight there is no one seated in the restaurant at Seoul Food DC, just four people standing behind the counter, one of them presumably the cook. But several people have stopped by to take take out in a brown paper bag. They presumably have have scanned in the menu at home and are coming by to pick it up.

So it seems pretty obvious to me that the waiter’s have been replaced, without anyone realizing it. On every bill there are several choices of tip, 15%, 18%, 20%, 25% to remind me to pay a tip, but what is the tip for? The carry out people are handed their bag. Is the tip for that? Lulu brought my meal and handed it to me. I’ve been trained to give 20%. But for what?

Presumably the tip is to pay underpaid restaurant workers. But the original idea of a tip, I always thought, was to reward a wait person for good service. I have half way believed this even when I continued to leave 20% even when the service was lousy, rationalizing this by saying that it was really to make up for the wait person’s poor pay. But there is nothing to reward for here. All that Lulu has done is to hand me my meal. And now that there is almost no human contact this is obvious.

Why have restaurants shifted over? At Seoul Food DC I went inside and the pleasant wait person, a young man, was right there. But there were no menus. I was instructed to scan in and order even though he was right in front of me. So maybe the restaurant is saving money by not printing a menu. Maybe this allows the restaurant to add or subtract items from the menu as the evening goes on allowing them to be more flexible. Or maybe this scanning in and ordering is aimed at call in customers as a way of giving them a menu and letting them order on line. Or maybe this scanning in is done simply because other restaurants are doing it and the restaurant wants to keep up. Or maybe the restaurant does it for no reason at all except that is possible to do.

But whatever the reason. It won’t be long until it sinks in, to me and anyone else, that there is no reason to leave a tip at all and certainly not an 18% and up tip. I’ll move to the European system of no tip, or maybe 10% if the service is really good (if there is any, which there won’t be) and friendly. And when this happens, the restaurant will have to abandon the tip and to either pay a decent wage or lose the server completely, which will certainly be an advantage to the restaurant because the server is already unnecessary. At Tacoma Beverage Company I had to clear my own table. There was nothing left for Lulu to do.

I had always thought that restaurant servers were one of the jobs that technology wouldn’t replace along with nurses and barbers. Certainly these jobs couldn’t be exported to Bangladesh. But I’ve stopped going to the barber and now waiters are unnecessary. Travel agents are almost gone. Secretaries are gone with their ability to record dictation. Receptionists are being replaced by telephone answering systems with their inability to answer questions until they give up and direct you to a person, probably sitting in the Philippines or at home somewhere in the USA. Even highly paid investors are being replaced by the computer. The same will be true of doctors, and probably already is, when a computer being fed the patient’s symptoms will come up with as accurate a diagnosis as the doctor can give. And certainly a great number of mind numbing manufacturing tasks on an assembly line have been taken over by computerized machines, even in China. In the village of Winsen, Germany farmers are selling their eggs and other products directly to the buyer in stands along the sidewalk, skipping the grocery store, through Horn and Hardart glassed windows that open when you pay by credit card and choose your product. Big Box stores have almost no one working in them with the buyer figuring things out for himself. And Amazon is almost completely automated and soon will be fully automated.

Restaurants in Asheville are having staffing problems. Soon they won’t need any staff. I like my Trader Joe frozen Indian and Japanese meals. Maybe restaurants will soon replace cooks with excellent frozen meals that will served in fancy dishes and when ready will appear on a tray that you will carry to your table yourself. That is where scanning the menu and being handed your meal seems to be headed. The only job left will be the person who loads the dishwasher.