An Ethnography of Restaurant Robots in Japan::Promises, Perceptions, and Impacts

Robots are increasingly being used in restaurants to assist with service and increase efficiency. Yet, their impact on the daily work of restaurant workers, customers' perceptions, and robots' limitations are poorly understood - and so is the gap between these and official marketing narratives. In this paper we conduct an investigation of the impact of restaurant robots in a set of restaurant chains in Japan, through a combination of in-person ethnography and analysis of online customer reviews and news articles. We show how robots are used in practice, how they structure work, and their impact on workers and customers. In particular, while we find robots to be well integrated and 'invisible', and majorly well received by customers and management, we also find they lead to a customer-perceived loss of human contact, a restructuring of work, an incentive for shortstaffing, deskilling of workers, and several technical challenges that are collectively addressed by workers and customers in work-like tasks. We compare these findings with marketing and management-led narratives, identifying gaps consistent with labor and power-centered critical studies.