Quite the opposite - a positive for restaurant managers and business owners:

"The software is intentionally set so that a restaurant manager gets only an electronic theft alert in cases that seem to clearly be misconduct. Otherwise, a manager might be mired in time-consuming detective work instead of running the restaurant."

Equals: "managers: persuade your boss to buy our product and you will have more free time"

"The impact, the researchers say, came not from firing workers engaged in theft, but mostly from their changed behavior. Knowing they were being monitored, the servers not only pulled back on any unethical practices, but also channeled their efforts into, say, prompting customers to have that dessert or a second beer, raising revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves."

Equals: "restaurant owners: we will improve your bottom line, and nebulously your staff may end up working harder for tips, so it's all good, here's an argument you can use if anyone complains"

Interesting that customers are arguably pressured into consuming more by the new configuration as well.

In fact, it's conceivable that this may be a PR piece commissioned by NCR - the author is a freelance writer/photographer, and I know from experience that PR staff/agencies do contact writers to craft positive articles for newspapers.

Could be wrong - either way, this kind of stuff does happen unfortunately (a huge network of incentives which generally have negative impacts on the uninformed/powerless).

And if I was being even more cynical, I might theorize that they chose the subject of surveillance (even though this is far removed from ubiquitous monitoring, even if the implications can be similar) because they know it's a hot topic for social media discussion and SEO value at the moment.

I suspect you are right.