Dear Feastlings,
I know that as much as there’s a common thread among the sort of people who eat at Feast, those of you who receive the weekly email come from a broad spectrum of industries and backgrounds. So I have no idea what each of your inboxes looks like apart from the fact that there’s an occasional email from me hoping you’ll drop in and pay us a visit.
My own email box is an amalgam of messages from people who want to lend me money, which is, I reckon, a mixed blessing: my credit is good enough that they’re willing, but they know my industry is one in which we frequently find ourselves just eking by, and just as frequently in need of a loan. It’s also stuffed with messages from people who want to rework our website, and people or bots offering artificial intelligence solutions to problems we didn’t know we had. I get messages from realtors who want to convince me that another location is what I need, and from swindlers who suggest that they’ll pay me on a credit card to wire money to the band they hire, to imaginary representatives of the Tucson Electric Power Company, who suggest I pay my theoretically overdue electric bill by purchasing gift cards at Circle K and reading them the number over the phone.
My new favorite emails, though, are coming from the future, by way of the present: people want to sell me their robots. In the summer, it sounds pretty appealing- someone getting something done without needing more hours, without calling in sick, without being difficult with coworkers or guests. In the greater scheme of things, it looks to me like another contusion on the already bludgeoned hospitality industry.
The first couple of emails I got were amusing. I showed them to my coworkers and we chuckled at the idea of a roomba with a bus tub strapped to its back making its way around the dining room. A few bike rides through campus, though, had me giving a wide berth to the food delivery robots making their way from the Student Union to the dorms and back, and the drones and Waymos in news stories started populating my newsfeed at a faster clip.
But the longer I go through the summer, the more I can see some desperate restaurateur- mercifully not yet me- looking at this website,
https://www.bearrobotics.ai/servi-q
then looking at their staff thumbing through their phones, and thinking to themselves that a one-time investment in three shelves that roll around their dining room might not be such a bad plan after all. True, they may have no personality on the floor, but that means they’d also have no personalities in the back either.
I can see the future, and it is featureless and devoid of personality, which I think a number of people would be happy to adopt, both as owners who’d have fewer staff to pay, and as guests who’d have fewer staff to tip.
Whatever the case, while I won’t be bringing in any more machinery into my own little outfit, I’m already practicing a certain amount of accommodation to our future robot overlords.
In the meantime, I’m hoping to make ends meet not by cutting labor costs with an army of droids, but by encouraging you all to come in and take advantage of some of our summertime specials, be they affordability-driven like our summer wine deals
and our summer lunchtime deals,
or the other special things we’re doing, like changing the menu each month,
https://www.eatatfeast.com/dining/menus/lunch-dinner/
having a wine tasting each Saturday,
Or making all sorts of specialty foods and offering discounts on French wines for Bastille Day.
I, meanwhile, will practice for the dystopic future by purchasing a roomba.
See you soon, I hope.
Love,
Doug