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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

I think people fail to recognize how much of everything now is an internet connected computer. This was true at McDonald’s 15 years ago. A bunch of Windows XP embedded machines at various stations(Fries, Salads, Sandwiches, Desserts) getting routed their individual components.

In more recent years it’s gone WAY WAY past that level of complexity. Dual lane drive thrus? They have cameras and track which car is which to try and keep orders straight. All of this data feeds into a system so management has a clearer and clearer idea of what’s actually happening in the stores.

In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.

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> In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.

Not really. During dinner rushes, a store averaging ~100 pizzas/hr (+ sides) can't bump an order off if they didn't prepare it yet. You simply can't remember all of that information, and once you mark it as complete you have to pull it off the order history or refer to receipts. Trying to do that would be insanely hard.

Most often, stores will bump things off as they're prepared. With good employees on line, things will be prepared much quicker than they go through the oven. Continuing to bump them off although they aren't put in the oven yet, that can contribute to inaccurate times since the system assumes that the moment it's bumped it's put in the oven.

I'm actually honestly surprised how FEW errors McDonalds has with those dual order drive throughs feeding into a single line.

In my experience, it's extremely common for the operator to select the wrong lane when they're talking to me over the speaker, because I can see my order pop up on the other speaker while my screen stays blank. It seems that the speaker system is totally independent of the screens, probably for redundancy so that they can still take orders if the screens malfunction.

Sometimes the person talking to you isn't in the store, they're at a call center for lack of a better word.

I heard they were testing it at high volume locations and I assume they rolled it out somewhere by now.

This was in Canada, and it definitely wasn't high volume or taken from a call centre. If I'm going to McDonald's, it's usually at midnight when there's nothing else open, and there's only one drive-through lane open anyway. And the person on the speaker is the same one who hands me my food.

Not sure about McDonalds but we have a local car wash with a dual lane system. The operator has to select an image taken of the front of the car right before it enters the wash (it's not very high tech)

I wonder how many people wouldn’t even notice if they got the “wrong wash”.

True but the high $$ wash has rainbow foam that rains down ;)

The cars are mostly in the same order as the food orders, and the cashier can easily swap orders around in the queue if they are out of sequence.

Check out the stories that have been shared here about Chick-fil-a too.

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