Pepper has been picking up retail work all over Asia, including a high profile gig working at Pizza Huts in Japan, but Softbank’s humanoid robot hasn’t had too much luck finding work here in the States. But now that the company is working toward a US release timed for later this year (following its first overseas launch in Taiwan), we’re likely to see it start popping up more and more stateside.

In fact, next week, Pepper will be getting some temp work at b8ta, a tech retailer based in the Bay Area, marking the first time the robot’s stated mission to meet and greet the human race has been demoed this way in the US. b8ta’s Palo Alto flagship will employ Pepper for a week starting August 11th, putting the four-foot-tall robot’s services to use with a greeting gig. Certainly beats working the register at a fast food pizza joint.

Softbank will also be using the opportunity to offer up a developers workshop during the week, in order to help bring more programmers into the fold for their recently launched developers portal, which launched back at I/O in May.