The Zoom meeting info and password is written on a note facing customers.
www.404media.co
NYC Chicken Shop Replaces Cashier With Woman in Philippines On Zoom
·APR 9, 2024 AT 9:36 AM
The Zoom meeting info and password is written on a note facing customers.
THE ZOOM CASHIER AT SANSAN CHICKEN EAST VILLAGE. IMAGE: JULES ROSCOE
A photo of a cashier Zooming into work at a fried chicken shop in New York City from the Philippines
went viral on X this weekend. The cashier sits on a computer monitor on top of an empty cashier desk and a virtual background of the store’s logo. Brett Goldstein, who posted the photo, wrote that this was “insane” and said it “only takes a short hop to imagine the near future where this is an AI avatar.”
The Zoom cashier is real. She works at Sansan Chicken, a small Japanese fried chicken shop nestled next to New York University’s campus in the East Village. The store has a touchscreen ordering kiosk similar to those that are common at McDonald’s. But it
also has a separate setup with the Zoom worker, who also takes orders from customers.
The iPad that would normally serve as a payment terminal reads “WELCOME TO MY STORE” in Comic Sans. When the cashier leaves to take a break, she switches her background to say “The cashier will be back
.” On a piece of paper, taped to the cash register and facing customers, is the handwritten Zoom meeting ID and password, presumably so a human employee at the restaurant can dial in the remote worker.
THE CASHIER DESK. IMAGE: JULES ROSCOE
“An everyday experience you’d think would have to be in person—to have that mediated through a screen is pretty weird,” Alex Tey, an NYU student who visited the shop a couple months ago told 404 Media. “It’s a lot to ask of your customers, I think. It’s even a little alienating.”
Tey said that when she had been last, there was both an in-person and a Zoom cashier. After she ordered, Tey went to speak to the physical cashier, who directed her to speak to the virtual one instead.
“They were both human, but the person who rang up my owner was on a screen, so it didn’t feel like I was talking to a person,” Tey said. “The choppy part was talking to somebody with lag. Checking out in person with lag is not something that we’re used to.”
INSIDE SANSAN CHICKEN EAST VILLAGE. IMAGE: JULES ROSCOE
When I walked into the store Monday, the cashier (who was a different woman than in Goldstein’s photo) greeted me by saying, “Hi, welcome to Sansan Chicken!” Her voice was slightly laggy and emanated from an Insignia speaker sitting on the desk, next to two fake plants. She greeted everybody who walked through the door like this, though nobody seemed to be paying much attention to her. When one man was taken aback by being greeted by a computer screen, she offered to take his order.
In the red and white wall behind the ordering kiosk, there is a 2-foot-wide rectangular window, through which the two or three in-person staff members pass orders from the kitchen. I asked a few questions through this window.
THE ORDERING KIOSK AND KITCHEN WINDOW. IMAGE: JULES ROSCOE
“When you do the business, you want to control the cost,” a manager who did not give her name told me through the window. “In New York City, the regular income is very high, so you don’t want to pay attention to think about this kind of question,” she continued, gesturing toward the cashier as if to indicate that she did not want to have to worry about another employee. “As a business owner, you’ve got to think about this. It’s very useful.”
She said that the cashiers work through a different company based in the Philippines, which has a 12-hour time difference to New York, and usually change shifts at around 3 p.m. The cashier confirmed that she was in the Philippines, where she said that it was 1:11 a.m.
When I asked what company she worked for, she said that she was sorry, but could not answer any more questions. Goldstein wrote in his X thread that the company in question was called “Happy Cashier” and that they had no website, though they were operating in five Asian food stores throughout the city. 404 Media was unable to verify which company the remote worker actually worked for, and could find no job listings or information for “Happy Cashier” on the internet. The setup at Sansan Chicken appears to be more or less a DIY remote work solution, because they are literally using Zoom, a webcam, and a separate pair of speakers for the job.
Do you know anything else about automated worker systems? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 508 241 7705. Otherwise, send me an email at jules@404media.co.
Sansan Chicken also has a location in Long Island City, though it is unclear whether this store has a Zoom cashier.
“It totally makes sense to me if this is some dumb start-up outsourcing cashier labor, which is already underpaid, to the Global South for cheap,” Tey said. “It’s something that’s usually invisible to Western consumers, but this time it’s visible. They’re not even claiming it’s an AI or algorithm before outsourcing it to the Philippines.”
Outsourcing work to the Global South has been a recent topic of discussion after Amazon
shuttered its famous Just Walk Out checkout system at Amazon Fresh stores last week, which relied on remote workers in India to train its AI systems and to do
manual troubleshooting if anything went wrong.
Sansan did not respond to requests for comment through their website or through an Instagram DM. However, on Monday afternoon the restaurant shared a post by New York City meme page @newyorkers to their Instagram story of Goldstein’s original photo, with the caption “Thanks for the repost.”
Tey told 404 Media that the chicken she ate was “okay.”
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www.investopedia.com
if youre over the age of 24 and the best you can do is a cashier ( and youre not mentally challenged/ physically challenged/ a felon etc) you lost.
