I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.
That sounds nice but falls apart when customers have to actually pay for it.
The most workable solution we've found is for employers to compete for employees, and employees to work for a wage that's acceptable to them. If you pay more than that, a competitor who pays less will take all your business.
But that’s not really what happens either because the employees are fundamentally at a disadvantage and don’t have perfect information.
Employers will generally take whomever will accept the least, and when bills are coming due, employees will take any job for some wage, not the best wage.
Would you rather be a waiter in America or Brazil?
The average waiter in America makes $40K per year, compared to $9K per year for a Brazilian water (adjusted for PPP).
Brazil does not have any of the labor-saving tech that we're complaining about because they don't need it--labor is cheap.
Let's say a restaurant in America got rid of its tech and instead hired more waiters. Would each waiter get paid more or less? Obviously, each waiter would get paid less. The restaurant still makes the same amount of money, so the same amount of money is divided among more people. Mathematically, each waiter will make less money with less tech.
So if you really want waitstaff to be well-paid, you should want more automation, not less.
