McDonald’s New Big Mac ATM Requires Zero Human Interaction
eater.com
eater.com
“The burgers are cooked on-site at [a nearby] McDonald’s and then immediately loaded into the heated machine, which is refilled on an ongoing basis to ensure fresh quality,”
It's just spitting out preboxed items like any other vending machine. Humans are still involved.
And that's to say nothing of ongoing servicing, maintenance and development.
I'll stand by the premise that this is clickbait, centered around a marketing event from McDonald's, loosely gathered on paranoia about replacing fast-food workers with robots.
In this situation, the experience of a fast-food purchase is being removed of the small talk, the smiles, the "have a nice day!". And now there are people behind a curtain that you don't see or interact with.
I think I'm visiting different fast food restaurants. My experience typically involves a challenging conversation through a low quality speaker system and then paying for the order with someone who can barely stand to look at me, much less tell me to have a nice day!
My experience too in lots of places where there's "customer service" involved. I always blame management when I come across employees that obviously can't handle working with the public.
A looong time ago, I use to work retail and there was always a couple of people who would have a single bad experience with a customer and then spend the rest of the week taking it out on everyone else. They essentially created the hostility they faced everyday. Management always looked the other way as long as they had the positions filled.
The first automats opened in Germany in the late 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat