Shake Shack touch screens are a robo-flop
Ihope they don’t decide to get rid of the cooks, too!
The new Shake Shack at 51 Astor Place (Third Avenue at East Ninth Street), which opened three weeks ago, does without employees taking your order. Instead, the no-cash system makes you select your meal on an easy-to-use, intuitive, iPadlike touch screen mounted onto a kiosk.
“Shack to the future!” proclaims Shake Shack’s Web site. The idea is to speed up the process and “give our teams new ways and tools to provide hospitality to our guests,” a company rep said.
But, so far I’m not sure that the New Way really speeds things up much, if at all.
Sure, inserting my American Express card into the slot was a snap. A friendly staffer stood by to help computer-shy customers navigate the screen.
It took just 10 minutes from the midafternoon moment when I began tapping in my order for a ShackBurger and fries until my name was called to tell me lunch was ready.
But my order and pickup took barely one minute longer around the same time of day at Shake Shacks on East 86th Street and on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn — where humans still take orders before you wait on a second line to pick up your burger, flat-top dog or frozen custard.
Both locations might even beat Astor Place on days when rain-soaked customers didn’t swell their lines, which happened on my visits. (There’s no point comparing Astor Place with the Madison Square Park flagship, where a much longer, two-line wait adds to the leafy setting’s camaraderie.)
Shake Shack’s human-free ordering looks like the wave of the future — and not just for fast food. Guests at the new Public Hotel on Chrystie Street check in on touch screens without facing an employee, a labor-saving business model that will surely spread to other inns. So far, it hasn’t chased away guests who fill the Public, with standard queen rooms priced up to $445 a night.
Fortunately, the Astor Place Shake Shack has not entirely eliminated real people outside the kitchen.
A small army of workers toiled away at the pickup counter, putting food on trays or bagging it. Their smiles made up for faceless kiosks.
Maybe the good cheer was because Shake Shack at Astor Place pays all workers at least $15 an hour, compared with an average “somewhere north of $12 an hour” at other Shacks, a rep said. It’s part of a strategy to prepare the whole chain for statewide minimum-wage hikes that will lift today’s $11 an hour for nontipped employees to $15 an hour by the end of 2018.
Hot dog!