I’ve known these for about… 4 or 5 years? I guess. Not much of a fast food client.
But these work. These really work. Less hands on the front, less confusion to deal with, the order goes from the customer hands to the kitchen: if something goes wrong with it, you fumbled it. And with less hands on the front, more hands can be in the back, preparing the cholesterol bombs.
You’re making the bold (and wrong) assumption that the people making the order are completely infallible…i still have to go back and get them to make my actual order quite often. As soon as you deviate from default, there’s a huge risk they mess up.
They’re next. Soon enough you’ll walk into a fast food restaurant and the only employees will be a maintenance man and a janitor. Everything else will be automated.
I’ve been ordering deviations of the standard menu since I was introduced to McD in my teens and ever since I started paying for my own food I don’t really order basic menus but instead mix and match to my wims for the moment. I’m weird.
Can not remember ever getting a wrong order but I’m also aware my local McD has less items on the menu than, per comparison, the one from the US market.
So, perhaps a combination of luck and good service on my part?
It really depends what you’re regularly ordering, how busy it is, what modifications you made, and location.
Like say, you wanted a quarter pounder but you wanted the dehydrated onions instead of slivered. Good chance that gets messed up. Ketchup no mustard (or vice versa), also a good chance it gets messed up (due to muscle memory).
Fresh onions, tomato and iceberg salad on almost every burger. Too much pickles, unfortunately.
But I would be a very poor host if I was to receive you in my country and treat you with McD. That is food you get to break the norm, not something you have daily, unless you are planning for a premature demise of your tasting buds.
I’ll bet this is why McDonald’s was fine with the $20 minimum wage increase in California. They’ll just use kiosks that smaller places can’t afford, to offset the new labor charges. But then smaller places won’t be able to appeal to employees, since they will be paying less than half of what the chains pay. The result will be fewer actual jobs available, more pressure on small burger joints to shut down, and few people actually benefitting from the new wages.
They’ve been the most vocal opponent to $15 minimum wage increase in New York, which I’ve always found odd, since they’d be the ones to most benefit from it via competitive advantage, as you said, due to economies of scale. They’ve been making threats the entire time “We’ll replace cashier with computers! If you raise the wage, we’ll totally do it, you’ll see!” and I’m like “Dude, if you had the capability to do it, you gonna do it either way anyway, why you extorting us?”
I guess the smaller competitor restaurants will need to get kiosks as well. They can’t develop their own in-house technology like the big chains do, but they can still purchase 3rd-party ready solutions, like all of them have already done with online ordering. Slightly more expensive to use 3rd party, but that’s economies of scale for ya.
We had a storm recently that caused power and Internet outages across our city for about a week. Many businesses opened up with no power and just accepted cash while writing down sales with a pen and paper. If you didn’t have cash on you, you were screwed. None of the ATMs worked. Nobody’s credit card machines worked. The banks didn’t have power, so they were closed. Going cashless leaves you in a heap of trouble in an emergency.
Only in a society that requires cash. They could have just handed people a meal when the walked up and asked for one. there would be no difference except a few executives don’t get their cut.
I always carry cash, probably around $100. Not enough that it would be a problem if I got mugged but plenty if I hit a point where I need something essential (food/fuel) to get home or something. I also keep a $20 in the car for fuel if I somehow forget my wallet and run low.
Granted, I only ever use it in a pinch, might as well get the rewards on my credit card instead. But I do on occasion hit a restaurant/store where their internet is down and it’s cash-only.
In Canada less just over a year ago one major telecom provider’s network went down completely for a couple days… a bunch of businesses couldn’t accept debit or credit, ATMs stopped working, at some places but others running on competitor networks were working. It was still a big annoyance and people got nothing except for sorry! and maybe 20 dollars from carrier at fault (Rogers)
Just putting it out there fast food everywhere that have overhead menu screens seem to LOVE to keep swapping the displayed items, or cover up half the screen with random seasonal product ads which makes this problem 10x worse.
I like the order kiosks when they run fast and are no bullshit steps to order. A Costco hotdog I can order in 2 quick taps and one more with my card. Others are more annoying for one reason or another, some to the point where I’d rather someone do the cashier work for me.
Yeah, the Costco food kiosks are the gold standard. One screen with all items, big buttons, responsive, and obvious checkout process. I can literally order for the family in under thirty seconds with the receipt in hand. It's like magic.
Yeah, I’m in the drive thru and about to order when suddenly the list of items is replaced by a fucking ad. I’m already here and ordering, calm down with the fucking marketing.
When I was traveling in South Korea they had these at some counter service and fast food restaurants. Since often people didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Korean they were immensely helpful. They had several languages and settings that made ordering so much easier. From an accessibility standpoint they are awesome.
I personally hate them for most of the same reasons that you like them.
First off they are slow to use. Part of that is because things are buried in menus, and part is from the annoying up-selling screens. Using them take 4-5 times longer in my experience. I don’t go there often enough to justify it.
Second, if you are paying cash, you still have to wait in line and see an actual human. Might as well just order with them.
Third, I am nearsighted but I have good glasses. The small font on the menu boards don’t bother me. I would rather see the entire thing while in line. Make my decision and order to a person.
All good points! When these kiosks started out, they were ridiculously laggy, way more than a simple GUI had any right to be, as if every tap and swipe had to be proxied through New Zealand. Thankfully the lag has been solved in one of the interface updates since.
The upsell spam is still annoying, but having used the interface a couple times I have become the Neo of offer dodging. Tap tap tap (No I don’t want to log in. Yes I am sure I don’t want to log in. No, I don’t want to make it a meal. No I don’t want to add a soda or side of nuggets. Checkout. Cancel payment. Done!) Would be better without, but currently manageable. As others have mentioned, they already managed to fuck up the tableau screens above the counter by having the images move around, so that if you want to know how much a medium fry would cost you have to wait through 30 seconds of slideshow first, and then not miss the 2 seconds that the price is actually on screen. The kiosk is actually the winner for me here.
The waiting in line to pay cash was my last problem, which is why I got excited to see these automatic cashboxes installed. Money goes in, food comes out.
Also, we need barriers related to quality, otherwise you get shit like Andrew Wakefield trying to sell his alternative vaccine, and in the process creating the modern antivax movement
I’m living in Europe now and would like to share my experience with this:
When you proceed to pay, the machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine. So I’m quite surprised that your machines work differently
Quite a few European countries actually still rely heavily on cash to the point of cash-only for a lot of shops, for example in Germany and Italy
Besides your list, one other advantage I found was being able to order overseas when the locals didn’t speak English at all and I couldn’t read the menu. In Norway, there’s an option to select English or Norsk. In Poland where I went, there wasn’t a choice but it didn’t matter because the menu is mostly universal so the pictures were sufficient
machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine
Good to know, thanks! It used to be this way here too, but they stopped displaying the “cash at counter” option on the screen entirely after one of the interface redesigns. What they really want to force you to do is use the app all the time, so they can have better tracking and would have no need for cashiers OR kiosks.
I've helped people order at various restaurants here in Japan before, and the kiosks definitely help in cases where people need to customize to avoid certain foods, etc. which are often hard when neither party speaks the same language.
Dude on the right is correct that perturbed gradient descent with threshold functions and backprop feedback was implemented before most of us were born.
The current boom is an embarrassingly parallel task meeting an architecture designed to run that kind of task.
I think the usage implies it’s so easy to parallelize that any competent programmer should be embarrassed if they weren’t running it in parallel. Whereas many classes of problems can be extremely complex or impossible to parallelize, and running them sequentially would be perfectly acceptable.
The current boom is an embarrassingly parallel task meeting an architecture designed to run that kind of task.
Plus organizations outside of the FAANGs having hit critical mass on data that's actually useful for mass comparison multiple correlation analyses, and data as a service platforms making things seem sexier to management in those organizations.
To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
They may be intelligent in their fields but that doesn’t mean they think thing through in every aspect of their lives. The status quo is the easiest thing to deal with they can devote more time to their careers/research
Unless their field is in social engineering, then yeah why are they going along with it?
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