The PingPod on 37th Street looks like a lot of bougie exercise studios in Manhattan. It’s clean and brightly lit, with floor-to-ceiling windows. A ping-pong table sits in the center of each room, and a neon pink PingPod sign glows against a black accent wall. The morning I visit, two tall, muscled guys are playing in a street-level room, wearing athletic gear and sweatbands. I watch one serve—with that deliberate little slowdown in the air that marks a serious player—and the other return it beautifully. It’s like a real-world “fitspiration” reel.
But there’s one thing notably missing from the scene: employees.
There’s no front desk, no one to check you in, no one puttering around to stock shelves or gather rogue balls. You reserve an hourlong slot for $36 on PingPod’s mobile app, and when you arrive, you scan your phone at the door to unlock your “pod.” At the end of your reservation, the room starts beeping, and off you go. All the while, discreet cameras survey the scene.
Today, PingPod has 15 locations, mostly in the U.S., with four more opening by the end of the year. The company also recently purchased Sharks, an analogous autonomous concept for pool. And perhaps most compellingly, it’s started licensing its proprietary tech stack to other businesses that offer autonomous (i.e., employee-free) experiences. For these companies and many others, the autonomous model is a siren call that promises steeply diminished labor costs at a time when workers are expensive and can be hard to find. It enables them to offer their product at lower prices, at all hours
