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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.

The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.

Custom orders are really slow to enter

You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.

I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.

The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.

I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.

Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu.

[EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.

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