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GM! Brett, here! It’s been about a year since I shut down launch house in LA and moved to NYC and did a bit of reflecting on twitter if you want to check it out.

🏠 TREND

Zooming In

Last week, I posted a Twitter thread about a fascinating and controversial trend – Asian restaurants in NYC staffed by cashiers remotely working via video from the Philippines.

The startup behind it is Happy Cashier, a stealth NYC company putting these "virtual cashiers" in chains like Sansan Chicken and Yaso Kitchen. Their value prop is straightforward - with NYC minimum wage at $16/hr, why have on-site staff for roles like cashiers when you can hire remote workers making ~$3/hr from Philippines?

A potential 80%+ labor cost savings.

Happy Cashier’s founder sees this as an opportunity to empower small businesses and increase their operational efficiencies. He argues using remote Filipino workers as cashiers can help struggling restaurants cut costs and stay afloat amidst challenges like high labor costs and labor shortages.

The more you dig, the more instances like the above you'll find.

• There are now remote security guards in South America:

• Dentists have remote Philippine receptionists:

But it also feels dystopian. We're monetizing human interaction by having customers tip workers making the equivalent of $3/hr across the world just for taking an order. It displaces local jobs and feels like outdated labor arbitrage run amok in the digital age.

The trend traces back earlier than you'd think. In 2005, Resource Group, a call-center company in Washington DC put remote "receptionists" via video in US offices.

In 2022, Freshii got blowback for using $3.75/hr Nicaraguan "Percy" cashiers to sidestep Ontario's minimum wage.

Today, this is a Filipino woman behind a screen, controlling a POS system — but it’s not crazy to believe that probably in the next six to twelve months, this could be an AI avatar doing all the same things.

Startups like Presto are already making moves in this space, but recently we got to know that there’s more to the story…

But this raises the question - how do we ensure this unfolds ethically?

Done right, it opens economic opportunity globally. Done poorly, it's exploitation and displacement.

We may need new guardrails - portable minimum wages, worker protections, and incentives to create domestic jobs too. A holistic approach that captures the upsides of labor arbitrage without shallow exploitation and displacement.

It's an uncharted frontier we're navigating in real time. The economic incentives are powerful for cost-cutting, but so are the societal impacts - they create job opportunities in other parts of the world while leaving local communities without those same jobs.

Love it or hate it, virtual work exemplifies the future unfolding today -automation's advance colliding with geo-economic realities, powered by ever evolving telepresence tech.

An endlessly complex labor case study to analyze and obsess over.

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