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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories.

Except that most people are REALLY BAD at operating a kiosk. You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

The backend jobs will be the first to get automated.

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Actually, Sheetz (think fast food meets convenience store; based out of Ohio and only present in a few mid-Atlantic states) has been using kiosks for ordering food for years. Granted, payment is still at a register manned by an actual person, but it's not like that's uncharted territory, either -- Chili's allows you to pay at your table without needing to hand your credit card over to your waitress.

Right, but that's a captive market. No one goes to Sheetz for food; they stop there for gas and grab something to eat while they're stopped. So making the food ordering process a bit less pleasant is NBD.

McDonalds has to compete with other chains and prices are already bottom barrel. In McDonal's case, taking human interaction out of the equation seems like a losing proposition.

In western Pennsylvania, where I'm from, people definitely do go to Sheetz just for food.

Funny, Sheetz immediately comes to my mind too when I think about the topic of automation. It works a little too well!

We have a gas station that serves food that is cooked to order. It is a WaWa station. All orders are by kiosk and the kiosk is pretty well designed. My family and I don't have problems using it. We are however, all educated.

It uses pictures and text. I will have to watch next time I'm in there to get coffee and see how well people use it.

Ah, Wawa's adopted that model, too? That must be relatively new. Guess PA likes kiosks for ordering food.

These have been at Wawa at least since 2010.

can confirm ... same at wawas here in Orlando, FL

So we instead rely on the equally bad, minimally trained person behind the counter to input the order instead?

My success rate for getting my order correctly at fast food restaurants is somewhere south of 50%.

> You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

Even if that's the case, you could still plausibly turn three to four people manning a register into four kiosks and one person to assist.

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