This is Planet Money from NPR.

One Sunday morning in April, reporter Jacob Lawrence was sitting at his home in Toronto

when he looked down at his phone.

I got a text from my friend saying, hey, I saw something strange up freshy, you should

go check it out.

Freshy is a fast food chain that serves salads and burritos and smoothies with avocado blended

into them, if that's your thing.

And these restaurants, they're everywhere in Toronto.

Like you take five steps, another freshy, five more steps, freshy, two freshies.

Jacob says it's the kind of place people feel pretty warmly about.

There are a lot of people who will just randomly tweet pictures of their salad bowls from

freshy and they'll just caption it with things like, this is a great salad bowl.

So he decides he will go to this particular freshy that his friend texted him about.

And when he walks in, he immediately notices something a little odd.

So there's nobody there as in like, nobody there to take an order or anything.

And when I get to the counter, there's a little screen that is taped, I think, to the cash

register.

And it took me by surprise, but it suddenly lit up and there is a face on the other side

of the screen.

It is a real live human face from the shoulders up on a tablet sized screen.

And that person says something like, hello, welcome to freshy, can I take your order?

And this catches me off guard because I'm waiting for somebody to walk out from the back of

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