Pondering AI job displacement at a South Durham Waffle House
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Two Australian teenagers and an 81-year-old Durham man walked into local Waffle Houses on Wednesday. The man, Clarence Lewis, is a former IBM test engineer. The Aussies recently finished work at a summer camp near New Bern.
Lewis eats at Waffle House once or twice weekly with his grandson Erikson. At a separate booth, Lucy Bates of Sydney said it was her first time.
“It’s like a very Southern thing,” she said, accurately. “So, I kind of wanted to try it.”
North Carolina trails only Georgia and Florida for the most Waffle Houses. The chain that’s famous for rarely closing and infamous for late-night chaos has at least 20 locations in the Triangle.
With National Waffle Day this weekend, I kept up my annual tradition of working one morning at a local Waffle House and talking to customers. This year, I was particularly interested to hear what economic issues were on people’s minds.
“Eggs are not as high as they were at one period, but still pretty high,” said Amber Daniel, a scientist in Durham who was at the location off Highway 55 with her two sons. “For something that used to be a really good source of protein and really low cost.”
Lewis too mentioned price creep, which he attributed to tariffs. Teresa Lopez, a cleaner at an apartment complex around Research Triangle Park, said the area’s growing population has kept her husband’s electrical business busy.
Retirees Jeff and Kim Brennan of Chatham County had a story fit for a Waffle House commercial — if Waffle House ever advertised. Each year, Jeff and his daughter would get his car inspected near Southpoint mall and then enjoy a meal together at the nearby Waffle House.
The daughter recently moved to Chicago, so Kim joined to continue the tradition. With neither one working, the Brennans said they pay particular attention to the stock market.
Wednesday was literally Deion Lemelle’s first as a Triangle resident, as he transplanted to Durham after working at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. Over waffles with N.C. Central University professor Dominique Hector, Lemelle described his new AI policy education company and the coming tech-driven jobs displacement he and others foresee.
“Within the next 24 months, a bunch of people are gonna start to be laid off,” he said. More than 70% of Americans in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll said they feared artificial intelligence driving permanent job loss.
Massive disruptions need creative solutions, Lemelle argued, including job guarantees and widespread worker retraining — particularly toward the caregiving sector.
A human waiter then brought them the check.
The great NC bank consolidation continues
North Carolina began this week with 33 state-chartered banks, down from 56 banks in 2015 and 88 banks in 2005.
Gone are Entegra Bank (acquired by Raleigh’s First Citizens Bank) and Yadkin Bank (bought by First National Bank). Park Sterling Bank in Charlotte is now part of Florida’s SouthState Bank, which previously was South Carolina’s CenterState Bank, and High Point Bank and Trust Co. was purchased in 2016 by fellow High Point institution BNC Bancorp, which then sold to Pinnacle Financial Partners the following year.
And so on.
North Carolina’s bank tally fell again Tuesday with the sale of Raleigh-based Dogwood State Bank to a Virginia competitor, and the state total is poised to dwindle further in the next few years, says Peter Gwaltney, CEO of the North Carolina Bankers Association.
“All organizations in business are seeking scale to spread the cost of operations across larger platforms,” he said in a phone interview. Higher regulatory costs of mobile banking eat into smaller institutions’ budgets, Gwaltney said, driving mergers.
To be clear, Dogwood was not struggling; the community bank multiplied its assets six-fold in the six years since recapitalizing under a new name and moving to Raleigh. Its buyer, TowneBank, says it wanted to expand on its existing footprint in the Carolinas.
Does it matter that North Carolina community banks keep disappearing? When I posed this question two years ago to Gerald Cohen of the UNC Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, he called small banking’s decline “deleterious to commercial and industrial loan activity.” Back then, North Carolina had four more chartered banks than it does now.
But Gwaltney said residents have more options today as larger chains like Chase and PNC open across the fast-growing state. “So, competition is not going down,” he said. “It’s not decreasing. It’s just consolidating.”
Clearing my cache
- Riddle: What college can go from 43,000 students to 189,000 in a dozen years without having to build new dorms? Based in Utah, the fully online Western Governors University plans to open an East Coast hub in Raleigh.
- Kriya Therapeutics, a gene therapy company with dual headquarters in Research Triangle Park and Palo Alto, has raised $313.3 million according to its SEC filing. The gene therapy market has slowed in the nearly five years since Bayer spent billions to buy the Triangle-based AskBio, but Kriya’s raise is a point for sector resurgence. And interesting political connection, Kriya CEO Shankar Ramaswamy is the brother of former GOP presidential candidate (and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate) Vivek Ramaswamy.
- State Sen. DeAndrea Salvador of Mecklenburg County has sued home appliance maker Whirlpool over an AI-manipulated Brazilian advertisement that Salvador claims “distorted” her 2018 TED Talk about energy affordability.
- Thermo Fisher opened a manufacturing plant in Mebane this week, while on Monday, the Roche-subsidiary Genentech will begin building its promised $700 million factory in Holly Springs (where all the pharmaceutical companies want to be).
- Wilmington’s branchless, fintech-focused Live Oak Bank has sold its startup division Apiture for between $20 million and $25 million, federal filings show. The Triangle Business Journal first spotted the news. Founded in 2017, Apiture helps legacy banks enhance their digital platforms. It’s selling to a Kentucky financial tech company called CSI.
- The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to eliminate $783 million in National Institutes of Health funding linked to diversity, equity and other topics, while giving recipients a path to challenge the cuts in a different court. This decision dashes local hopes of immediate reinstatements.
- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has accused Smithfield Fresh Meats Corp. of failing to provide a pregnant worker at the world’s largest pork processing facility in Tarheel, North Carolina, reasonable accommodations, and then firing her. A spokesperson for Smithfield told me the company doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
National Tech Happenings
- Home Depot says tariffs will cause “modest price movement” on certain imported items.
- Washington D.C. tourism and restaurant bookings have each fallen, metrics show, since President Donald Trump ordered federal troops to the city.
- In an unusual move, the U.S. government is exploring a deal to take a 10% stake in the struggling chip manufacturer Intel. Perhaps equally unusual, Sen. Bernie Sanders aligns with the Trump administration’s plan, arguing taxpayers should be rewarded for the government giving corporate incentives.
Thanks for reading!
This story was originally published August 22, 2025 at 10:12 AM with the headline "Pondering AI job displacement at a South Durham Waffle House."
