PCC employees highlight the Gateway restaurant’s innovative use of robots
The purpose of using robots at the Gateway Buffet is to enhance guest experience and help students develop skills working with technology, said Greg Maples, vice president of Culinary Services at the Polynesian Cultural Center.“ There was a 13 percent increase in customer survey scores since the arrival of the robots. Our mission is all about labor,” he explained.
Making the job easy
According to the Yelp website, Gateway Buffet is one of the largest restaurants in Oahu. The buffet is known for its space and flat surface floors perfect for the robots to roam on, said Maples. “I visit the restaurant daily and one of the things I noticed is our servers spending a lot of time putting the food waste on the tubs and onto the cart and pushing the cart back,” he added.
Maples expressed how the task takes a long time to do. “I wanted our student employees to spend more time with our guests. The students love the robots because [we’ve] taken out a job of unloading those heavy tubs, taking a lot of work on their part,” he added.
There are currently five robots in operation, said Maples. “We got the robots from a local company here in Hawaii called ‘Shakabots.’ We worked with them and they made a promotional video with us,” he continued.
Shakabots
According to the Shakabots website, the company is the only Hawaiian robotics company in the Hawaiian Islands. “The robots operate on GPS and Wi-Fi, and it guides itself through the restaurant. Another feature is at 3 p.m., they come off of their charging stations and go to the place where we’ve designated them to be,” he added.
The robots end their day at 8 p.m., placing themselves in their charging stations and getting ready for the next day, said Maples.
Two professors research titled, “Robots and Jobs,” MIT Professor Daron Acemoglu and Boston University Professor Pascual Restrepo, reports for every robot added per 1,000 workers in the United States, wages declined by .042 percent and employment-to-population ratio goes down by 0.2 percent. “This means the loss of about 400,000 jobs,” says Brown.
But PCC’s experience using robots hasn’t brought about a reduction in employees, said Maples.
“We have become so efficient with their help so we decided to make our serving areas smaller and add more servers instead of reducing,” he added.
In a YouTube video made by Shakabots and the PCC, Caden Hansen, a server and BYUH student from Idaho said he liked the efficiency of the robots in the workplace.
“They can carry more than I can carry. I think I have loaded more than 55 pounds in one robot and it has been fine,” he added.
Lendon Mediado, a server and BYUH student from the Philippines said having the robots helps them connect with their guests more. “We can serve and attend to their needs better because all of our time is given to them,” he added.
Moving forward
Misty Keanu, director of Dining Services at PCC, said she first saw the robots in an exposition. Keanu said, “This is the world we are moving in now. The student workers just have to push the buttons. Nobody felt like they were going to lose their jobs.”
Keanu said incorporating the robots into their staff training was easy. “The company was easy to work with, and we could contact them at any time. They trained one of our full-time workers, Leni, and we call him our robot expert,” she added.
Maples said there are other technologies PCC is looking forward to using. “We have ovens in our kitchen that are run from an app.
They can cook three different products at three different temperatures at three different times. Putting those ovens in our kitchen was a game changer to how we do buffet cooking. The robots are just the beginning,” he added.