National Post (National Edition)
The outrage over Freshii's `Percy'
Idon't know if you saw the news stories this week about “Percy,” the “virtual cashier” service that the Canadian restaurant chain Freshii has introduced to howls of outrage. The enterprising Toronto Star found a few southern Ontario Freshii locations in which local clerks have been replaced, essentially, by Zoom or some variant thereof; two of the virtual cashiers taking people's salad orders were Nicaraguans who say they are making US$3.75 (C$4.80) an hour in a country where the mean monthly wage is about US$500. This amount is, needless to say, well below Ontario's minimum wage; it may also be needless to say that the Ontario minimum wage doesn't have much to do with anything.
This led to denunciations by labour unions, social-media virtue signallers and even by Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton, who called the outsourcing of cashier work “outrageous.”
(He also said he thought customers should “vote with their feet,” which hints at exactly how much any government is capable of doing about it.) The company providing the workers and the software took to Twitter to offer a defence of its business model, which, now that I think about it, is the kind of thing that in the long run will take away good Canadian opinion-writing jobs in predatory capitalist right-wing newspapers.
Percy's mouthpiece points out, as I would, that lots of fast-food chains and other retail businesses are on the verge of getting rid of cashiers of any kind; the nice Nicaraguans are probably working lots of hours to make the most of the six months before they're replaced by a touchscreen. Outfits like Freshii are also competing with “ghost kitchens” that distribute restaurant overhead across multiple brands, have no servers and outsource their deliveries to freelancers who aren't protected very well by a minimum wage.
I don't want Percy to handle all of my columnist duties, so I will point out that he is pulling your leg when he says “It's not about replacing people or jobs.” It's about replacing both with automation. Freshii, which makes money by gathering the product of low-wage agricultural workers in places like Nicaragua and putting it in front of you in a bowl, seems to have felt that Canadians who have been scanning their own groceries for decades might see the “virtual cashier” as outsourcing with a human face.
Most of you probably weren't bothered, just as most of you likely aren't bothered by the federal government's overnight tripling of the quota of temporary foreign workers in sectors suffering from a “labour shortage,” which include, and let me make sure I've got this right, “manufacturing, retail, hotels and food services.” This is explicit, intentional wage suppression in enumerated fields Canadians supposedly don't want to work in, except when they do.
The guest workers may make the local minimum wage, but they certainly won't get the wage that a Canadian would make in the same job. And in exchange for being airlifted to Canada to serve in Marx's reserve army of the unemployed, they'll work under the continuous, inherent threat of being bundled off home.
Where, who knows, some nasty software-as-a-service company might pay them $3.75 an hour and point a camera at them. I'll make an irresponsible guess that a large fraction of the people who denounced Freshii voted Liberal last fall and will vote Liberal again at the next opportunity. Some of them might also be the people who won't shut up about inflation, and who wonder why so many of the cute little restaurants in their neighbourhood have plywood over their doors.
Advocating for food service to contract Baumol's cost disease is about as useful to humanity as advocating for sneezing on a salad bar. Alas, for a “Conservative” minister to do it is characteristic of our times — indeed, it is characteristic of McNaughton himself, whose annoying trend-surfing behaviour marks him out reliably as a rising political star.
I DON'T WANT PERCY TO HANDLE ALL OF MY COLUMNIST DUTIES.