I became aware of virtual cashiers in 2022 when I strolled into a Freshii store in downtown Minneapolis. I heard a voice greeting me. I couldn’t tell from where. I saw actual human beings behind a counter preparing meals. But they had their heads down. Then I heard it again. “Hello, how can I help you?” I spun around. Who is talking to me? Then I took note of the three unmanned checkout stations to my left. Each included a tablet. Each included a face on them. One was addressing me, with a non-English speaker’s accent. I stepped forward. “Uh, hello?” And that was how I ordered a Buddha Satay Bowl and entered the confusing world of virtual cashiers.
Chi Zhang, CEO of Happy Cashier
New York-based Happy Cashier is in this business. Chi Zhang started it last year, after spending nearly a decade running soup-dumpling restaurants. He understands the pressures on operators to hit margins in the face of rising labor costs.
“Most restaurant owners work more than 100 hours per week,” he said in an interview. “After a whole day of operations they have to do the hiring, the marketing, the accounting. The mission of Happy Cashier is to help small business owners focus on their operations.”
The online skirmish
The idea is simple: train overseas workers to handle the customer service over Zoom. The wages these workers are paid are substantially less than what New York minimum wage laws require, often in the range of $3 an hour. Zhang started contracting with area restaurants in 2023 and almost immediately stepped into an Internet backlash after someone posted on X that “This is insane. Cashier is literally zooming into NYC from the Philippines.”
A debate ignited about outsourcing American jobs overseas for cheap labor. It was smoke that Zhang didn’t anticipate but doesn’t worry about.
“I don’t see it as an issue. Most people who do are not in the restaurant industry. Happy Cashier is a supplementary service,” he said.
Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future
But there are skeptics. Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future has been one. He has expressed concern about job outsourcing. Yet he has noticed something in the data that would indicate less cause for alarm.
“There has never been more people employed in the restaurant sector in New York City than right now,” he said in an interview. “In July of this year, 285,700 people were employed. That’s compared to 265,400 jobs in July of 2023. That’s 20,000 new jobs year over year. And this is compared to 280,600 jobs in July of 2019. The sector is growing despite the outsourcing of jobs. That doesn’t mean entry-level jobs aren’t fewer. They may be. But it means restaurants are investing in solutions to reduce costs so they can grow.”
Happy Cashier currently contracts with around 100 NYC restaurants, growth that accelerated last May when Zhang displayed the tech at the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago.
Working with third-party delivery providers
Zhang says his company trains workers to handle a variety of things that can enhance profits. One is upselling customers. Another is mediating with a delivery provider when an order is disputed by a consumer.
“We help restaurants with Uber, DoorDash, and GrubHub, with wrong orders. During rush hour if a driver takes the wrong order, it can take 20 minutes for a restaurant manager to call the delivery provider and make it right. We take on this responsibility to make sure the customer is compensated for wrong orders,” he said.
The next step involves a curious app
Despite the unwanted online attention he received in the spring, Zhang is gunning for 500 restaurants. Then he’s going to take a big swing. “We’re going to go for series A funding to focus on technology development, data, and the customer experience,” he said.
He has an interesting idea for an app. It won’t be patterned after anything he’s seen in the restaurant industry. But day care.
“We are working on an app that lets customers treat their restaurants as their kids,” he said. “Once you drop off kids to day care, they let you know what time your kids eat, change diapers, have lunch. The same will be with us. We will let customers know what is happening in their restaurants with a real-time push.”
The challenge for Zhang will be with kiosks. Will it be worth it to a consumer to speak to a human — albeit a human on a screen from across the globe — rather than punch in an order on a kiosk? Will the human element matter as we enter an era of increased automation?
Zhang thinks it will.
“I get that some restaurant owners will choose self-ordering kiosks,” he said. “What operators get with us is hospitality. Someone to explain the menu and the ordering. There’s value in making the store a happy place through human contact. Happy cashier, happy customer, happy owner.”
