McDonald's and other chains are giving their drive-thrus the Jetsons treatment
cnn.com
cnn.com
This seems pointless. In the time it takes you to pull up to the camera, stop the car, line up your face, wait for your face to be recognized, you could have paid with a NFC card/phone. NFC also doesn't require you to register for an account and deposit money ahead of time. The only advantage I can think of is for mcdonalds, which pays less credit card fees because they can bundle transactions together.
AI order taking also seems questionable to me. Voice ordering is bad enough (shitty audio quality, having to repeat/clarify yourself), I don't want to contend with a shitty chatbot on top. App based ordering seems better in every way. It also allows you to park your car and do your ordering/waiting in peace, as opposed to wasting gas while inching through the drive-through lane with half a dozen cars behind you.
The recognition will only get better/faster over time. And if you are a regular at a certain restaurant, it will probably save you quite a bit of time over the years. What if you forget your phone or wallet? You can still get a burger. But overall, yes, I think there is more benefit for the restaurant than the consumer. At the same time, any restaurant savings may result in lower food prices, more investment in cleaner restaurants, higher quality food, etc.
>In 2019 the average McDonald's drive-thru took six minutes and 18 seconds, but recently the company trimmed that to five minutes and 49 seconds in 2020,
I mean i guess if you're in accounting and your sole goal is to make sure you've saved every penny possible then yeah i suppose trimming drive thru time down by around 30-40 seconds must seem like the golden age...and i guess in the next 5 years, automation will save the mcdonalds corp another minute or two and increase their profits by a few million and their board will be happy.
When I'm on my way to work and a drive-through saves me 30-40 seconds compared to what it did last year, I appreciate that. I'm often rushed in the morning.
On the other hand this should work for McDonalds, where nobody's expecting friendliness or much of anything; it's basically a feed trough.
I suspect that this is largely pretend savings. Since locations are pressured to game this metric, for any order that they think might take too much longer than the median drive-thru time, they will (1) send customers from the drive-thru line to a parking spot then (2) bring their food out 5-10 minutes later. This can easily double customer wait time, and the food is often noticeably worse for the delay. It's a terrible customer experience.
So one day, i asked the dairlyand rep why...he told me someone figured out they could save 1¢ per bucket by removing the handle...this added up to millions of dollars a year....
Yes decisions like this are made on the basis of mere cents that add up to millions...
The legacy drive-thru interface with a two-way speaker is great for my parents' generation, for whom apps can be difficult to use (small print, fine motor control). As for me, a 90s kid, drive thrus give me nostalgia for being in the back seat as a child, reading off a large analog menu board with fine print. In some sense you could consider this a "compatibility layer" or the "adapter pattern".
In-person ordering (through the drive thru or at a register in-store) also has to handle weird edge cases that the apps don't handle, like a tourist visiting from another country. (McDonald's and Starbucks both have per-country apps, and if you leave the US with the US apps, you can't place mobile orders in other countries or even see local store locations. Contrast this with Uber, who will happily let you order an Uber in Tokyo or Zurich with an app downloaded in SF, but has an app size to match.)
I'm anxious to see what the next step is in our evolutionary process economically. Do the people who rely on these jobs starve and does society descend into Mad Max or do we actually create UBI?
What happens when 60% of most country's populations are just surplus? What happens when even elite college grads are mostly just surplus?
When only 30-40% of the adult population is employable how will the market compensate and how will the economy work?
There's obviously going to be painful years ahead as governments and industry catch up, but it could be an exciting shift if we actually get to a post-scarcity society that actually functions and has a way so everyone "fits" and can still find purpose.
What do we do when ai can do 100% of the jobs? How do we find purpose then?