Autonomous businesses – from Waymo to mattress stores – are on the rise

Have you ever walked into a business with no employees? You may soon; autonomous businesses are becoming more popular.

From big names like Waymo and Coco to your neighborhood mattress store, more and more locally owned businesses are doing everything from recreation to retail without a single on-site employee. They say it means more flexibility for customers, and lower prices.

With the tap of an app you can unlock the door to a 24/7 recreation facility like SPF Pickleball in Old Irving Park.

"Our mission is to really keep growing the game of pickleball, and one of the ways you do that is by giving people courts when, when it fits their schedule, said co-owner Rich Green.

That means there's a normal overnight and early morning without one employee in the building.

"It's a pretty rare day where we don't have pickleball being played at 2 a.m.," he said. "Sometimes we forget about, you know, all the people who work hard for our city that have alternative schedules, right?"

Green said midnight to 3 a.m. has surpassed the owners' expectations regarding how many people would come in to play. He said making this location autonomous just made sense.

"From a pure business perspective, like, it allows us to lower our cost to, to also, to the consumer, right?" he said.

Cameras roll 24 hours, seven days a week, not only monitoring what's happening but keeping a record of who's inside.

"If you had four guests here, and you brought a fifth, we know, right?" Green said.

So far, they have not had any issues regarding the lack of employees.

"It's a safe environment, where if there's, you know, a health thing or anything that happens, we have a team that's constantly monitoring the facility to, to let us know," Green said.

In Skokie, a mattress store is open to the public but the only employees are on the video playing on the television inside.

"What makes Hassleless Mattress so unique is that there are no employees in the store," said Weston Huth, owner.

There are more than 30 Hassleless Mattress stores across the Chicago and Milwaukee areas that operate this way. The front door unlocks on its open when they open, until it locks again at closing.

"We get sometimes people saying that they laid on a mattress for an hour, almost taking a nap, before confirming, 'Yep, this is the right one,'" he said.

Huth said they've never had a major issue in general. They are notified when someone walks in the door, and a camera and alert system covers the whole store. Those systems are monitored live.

The employees monitoring the store off-site also can intervene if they have to, for things like reminders to shoppers of the store's hours. In a worst-case scenario, they can call the police.

The lack of on-site staff means much lower overhead costs.

"We're really, really able to save a lot of cost, and we do it-- we're able to pass that along and save our customers money," Huth said.

CBS News Chicago Investigators reached out to a number of business groups and organizations about this trend, and many, like the Better Business Bureau, said it's too early to weigh in. They said they're monitoring the practice and "It's an interesting technology trend that we're seeing in very isolated cases and something we will have to wait and see how the public reacts."

In:

• Autonomous Vehicles
• Technology
• Illinois
• Consumer News