Yahoo Finance

Trying hard to stay afloat in a restaurant industry spending 36% of its cash on labor and with minimum wage creeping to $16, a cadre of local New York City chains have found a shrewd way to save: enlisting the help of cashiers video calling in from the Philippines and paying them way less.

At Sansan Chicken, a fried-chicken joint in the East Village and Long Island City, cashiers on a large screen greet customers and answer questions they may have about the menu or their self-service kiosk. They take UberEats orders over the phone to take the pressure off each location's handful of in-person employees. And for their efforts, they get paid about just a handful of dollars every hour.

The staffing firm behind this technology is Happy Cashier, a New York-based company that is testing its product on a handful of local businesses. The company, led by founder and partner Chi Zhang, wants to “empower small businesses by providing exceptional virtual cashier services, as well as operational assistance,” Zhang told Fortune.

Zhang’s company draws most of its labor from a massive well of 1.3 million Filipino workers employed through the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, which is the largest in the world and generated $35.4 billion in revenue in 2023.

The business, which has been operating in Sansan Chicken since last October, is also in its pilot stages at Sansan Ramen and a couple Yaso Kitchen locations, as well as in another local chain that Zhang did not disclose the name of. Zhang, who actually used to own a Yaso Kitchen operation, identified worker productivity as a part of business that could use a tune-up.

The impetus for the business came from Zhang’s own retail experience. After opening a restaurant in downtown Brooklyn in 2015, he ended up closing the location during the pandemic in part because of how difficult it was to hire workers. Indeed, Zhang’s story is a common one for restaurateurs: COVID-era fast-food labor shortages are what pushed chains like Chipotle and Sweetgreen to turn toward implementing automation in stores. But the use of technology can be more than just a saving grace for struggling businesses, Zhang argued.

Happy Cashiers speak “perfect English” and have helped take the pressure off in-person workers—whose jobs have not been eliminated since the introduction of the video-calling service—by picking up UberEats calls and answering customers’ questions while employees physically in the store prepare orders. The help from Happy Cashier has successfully “increased operational efficiencies,” Zhang said.