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Comment by waterside81 | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that McDonald's wait times have actually gone up since they moved to kiosk ordering, mobile app ordering, Uber eats etc. They've increased their ability to take orders, but haven't been able to keep up on the supply side. The old way was almost better in that it introduced a natural bottleneck so while it took longer to place your order, once you did, the queue in front of you was shorter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-spending-millions-...

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This is intentional. In fact, I've seen many McDonald'ses that were redecorated such that you can't see the screen with the queued/ready orders from where the kiosks are. This way, you're not discouraged from ordering if you feel like the wait will be too long.

This is also why McDonald's introduced table service, which is only in restaurants that have a layout where it's impossible to hide how many people are waiting. It costs manpower to deliver food to tables, but the additional orders are worth it.

McD's don't mind if you have to wait, they mind if you leave before you order. "Busy-looking queue" is a much more frequent problem than "totally-packed-restaurant".

Source: I like hamburgers + I geek out over stuff like this. I.e., Just Guessing.

Yet we are willing to wait for chipotle, five guys, shake shack for 20 min m

Chipotle is about as fast as it gets

Not when the person in front of you is getting 6 different orders.

Do you not have tastebuds?

Do you? Those are some of the best dirty burgers you can have on this planet.

They've gotten horrendously expensive in the fast few years, though. That's my only real issue. My order has gone from $10 to $17 since they opened in my town, so I just don't go anymore.

I was talking about this just last night. Five Guys is absolutely the worst of the mid-priced hamburger chains, and even their fries are almost as bad as In-N-Out's, which is like making a car whose steering wheel flies off while you're driving.

I think my tastebuds must be off because I feel the same way. There's always a huge line at Five Guys and people rave about it but whenever I eat there I feel like I need a straw for my fries because they're just drowning in grease.

I get that people like it and I'm certainly not going to discourage anyone from doing what they enjoy, but I also feel like social media has turned certain fast food chains into memes where you can't merely just be satisfied with something, you either need to looooovveeeee iiiitttt or demand it be "canceled". There's no middle ground.

The fries are fairly mediocre, but their burgers are pretty fantastic, espesicslky if you’re a fan of animal style.

Saying Five Guys is the worst in a thread that features McDonalds... Five Guys is gourmet compared to McDonalds.

That's why I distinguished McD's out of the comparison with "mid-priced."

In-n-out fries must be eaten while they're hot. In that state they are delicious. The precipitous decline in quality upon cooling occurs because they are made by frying potato pieces rather than by assembling various starches in a laboratory.

Well someone tell McDonald's some people are not going there anymore. The few I do I use McDrive because the wait is predictable and shorter.

If I had the money I'd spent it to open a good old McDonald's I'm sure more people would come.

I wonder how much of the delay is due to their recent decision to offer breakfast items all day. Many franchisees were complaining at the time about how doing so would reduce throughput, as it expanded greatly the list of possible items a customer could order and necessitated pulling people away to staff tasks that were only required for breakfast, like cooking eggs.

A lot of these measures have come to markets where breakfast is still not served all day (e.g. UK, last I checked).

My reasoning is that they are just trying as hard as they can to decouple order-taking from order-preparing and distributing, taking their clue from Starbucks. Volume of this or that is not really an issue: with the exception of chips, these days they hardly prepare anything at all before it’s been ordered, so it doesn’t really matter whether they make a burger or a muffin.

It’s called backpressure and it’s one of the tradeoffs that should be considered when thinking about adopting async work queues. There is no natural backpressure mechanism so it takes a lot more work to ensure you either reject new work after hitting a limit, or scale your workers so you can keep up with the queue backlog. Queues seem great, until they’re not, and then you enter a much more complicated world.

It's so sadly true that you can realize it without even looking.

The kiosk system is human-less thinking, we're not machines operating with pure logistics in mind. We like to have responsibilities in a way. When I'm talking to a cashier, he/she feels a duty to do something from A to B. With decoupled ordering.. nobody knows who I am, nobody really cares (McDonalds doesn't pay nor train for welcoming and service mindset). I'm just a thing carrying a ticket.

I've seen things so absurd, people walking around not knowing who to talk to, where to go, what to assume; both customers or employees. It was a surrealist comical situation.

Also my average time to serve for 1 hamburger with no other customer around is 7min. (5-15). Talk about fast food :)

Another point, I don't mean to make people work more, but I even prefer busy waiting lines with hectic kitchen action. That's what McDonalds were, high throughput grill. It felt something.. now it's all dull and clinic.

Oh and lastly .. the kiosk are fugly. They break the room space, break the flow of people, are way too big for their purpose (100$ a stupid tiny 80s monochrome terminal, would do better :p)

ps: This decoupling idea was tried at a company I worked for. Exact same principle (which I also gave some credit at first), split everything in small chunks so people can go faster.. it all went worse because nobody took responsibility for anything since a single task was now a dozen tiny bits done by a dozen people not really knowing what their bit was for. They just passed the products from hand to hand, not being able to track who or what was wrong until the last guy received all the shit because he's the one to show the result to the managers :)

social distancing may skew everything towards kiosks.

That is true. We might end up living in biohazard like cities from now one :)

If I’m worried about catching or spreading the virus, wouldn’t the kiosks be worse? Dozens of people touching the same surface with their bare hands seems more dangerous to me than telling my order to someone over a short distance, especially if masks are involved.

A full answer might depend on whether you are a customer or a cashier.

That may be true for you, but I like the flow of the kiosks, where I can take my time and not be rushed, and I don't have to interact with someone just to take an order. I'm not sure why it has to be a process that requires a human at all, just to be a cashier.

I feel even more rushed when people are in line behind me waiting for me to figure out the ui a cashier knows by heart. I’m not sure why it has to a process that requires a kiosk at all, just to be a cashier.

They also work extremely well in busy tourist hotspots and big cities, where people might struggle to communicate and slow down operations pretty dramatically.

That seems to be looking at "speaker to order window" instead of "arrival to order window" times. This seems odd to me, as personally I would want to minimize the latter not the former.

I can't speak to the apps, but there's a foodcourt in my building with a kiosked McDonalds. Based on my observations, ordering with it is a slow, time consuming process. It's way faster to just say "I'll have a 5 with a coke". Most people in a hurry opt to stand in line with a cashier, which has a line that moves much faster.

Totally agree, I loathe the kiosks, it is an incredibly slow way to order food. Perhaps they need to implement a voice assistant so you can just ask for a 5 with a coke.

That seems like a good problem cause before they had issues with demand. I think based on McDonald history of optimization they feel like they can solve that supply side issue more easily than the demand side one they were contending with

Could it be that the reduced stress on the buyers result in reduced speed on the staff?

Moreover, one could just look at the shelf of already prepared burgers and buy one of them. So quick!

Wouldn’t that be working as intended? More revenue

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