Hello, can I take your order
from 6500 miles away? Percy is looking to outsource cashier services to developing countries and tap into the very prevalent labour arbitrage By Taimoor Hassan
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ou’d think it was a call-centre at first sight. Rows of cubicles occupied by a small army of young men and women wearing noise-cancelling headphones speaking to customers on the other side of the globe. Yet at this neatly placed little office in phase 5 of Lahore’s DHA, things work a little differently. Because these men and women are not on the phone as customer-care or telemarketers. No. They are taking orders from customers visiting restaurants nearly 6500 miles away. This is the boiler-room for the up-andcoming Canadian tech- startup Percy, which describes itself as a ‘virtual cashier startup’ — the first of its kind in the world. The concept is simple. Labour is expensive in the developed world, and in a country like Canada the minimum wage is CAD $15 an hour. Restaurants consistently face an issue of a workforce with a very high turnover rate that they have to pay minimum wage to. So what is the solution Percy is suggesting? Instead of hiring a person to do the job behind a counter, just slap a tablet with a stable internet connection onto the counter, outsource the job to a developing country like Pakistan, and have a virtual cashier at your service for as low as $3.75 an hour. The startup
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has wowed many by putting a person, sitting in another country, taking orders for the walk-in customers of a restaurant at a fraction of what it would cost to hire someone to do the work in-person. Launched only 10 months ago, Percy has garnered plenty of negative press over labour-rights issues in Canada. Union leaders have been outraged by the tech-driven outsourcing and in its short existence the startup has sparked fierce debates in the country’s retail sector. At the core of it, however, is a no-nonsense business model that has allowed them to make inroads into an industry that has developed cracks since the pandemic. The food-service industry has been reeling from a growing labour shortage in North America, and restaurateurs are unable to find workers even if they are offered salaries above the minimum wage. In Canada alone, the restaurant industry is facing a shortage of about 200,000 workers by December 2021, according to Statistics Canada, the Government of Canada commissioned agency to produce national statistics. This shortage is expected to continue through 2022 and 2023. The idea Percy is pitching is innovative, tech-driven, relevant, and most importantly timely. Yet as flashy and innovative as it may be, it is grounded in a very in-your-face model of capitalism. How did it come to be? The startup
has three founders, but the idea began with a young Pakistani that went to college in Canada.
Enter Ali Aqueel
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s far as education goes, Ali Aqueel has had a pretty privileged run at things. Born and raised in Lahore, he attended Aitchison College before going to McGill University in Canada. After graduating from there with 16-years of education, Ali had a straight-cut path ahead of him. He had a degree in finance, the opportunity to work in Canada, and if needed go back home where he had the right connections and pedigree to live a cushy life with a job in banking and finance. But life led him down a different path. During his post-graduation job hunt, Ali delved deep into the different options he had. “Cold calling, messages and meeting different people at cafeterias of different companies to get a job, I have been through all of it and that has worked,” he tells us in an interview. During the course of this process, he realised that the future was in tech not finance. “I connected with a director of Citibank over LinkedIn and met her for coffee. She told me there were two openings at the bank for finance graduates but 85 positions were open in tech roles. The conversation quickly turned into a realisation that tech was the future and my direction changed.” Soon, he landed his first job at a big-data
