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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

A fast food restaurant in Canada called Freshi used overseas workers to take orders. Customers would walk into the store and a screen would show a live worker in another country. It resulted in quite a bit of backlash since they were outsourcing already low cost jobs to countries with very cheap labour. I wonder if an AI order taker will get the same treatment.

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IMHO I think Chick-Fil-A has the best drive through system in the business right now, you could pull up with cars wrapping the building and still leave with food ~10 min later, anywhere else with a line like that would take a half hour at least. The reason they are so successful is they have employees take your order as you are waiting, so there are never any bottlenecks around order taking and order receiving.

Granted there's a tradeoff, CFA made the calculation that the extra labor costs for the drive through would be worth the throughput (they usually only do it during "rush hours"). On the other hand looks like Wendy's is taking the opposite approach, throughput matters even less because there are no associated labor costs.

It could just be that I'm an antisocial jerk, but the modern Chick-Fil-A drive through experience is awful to me. I preferred the faceless interaction ordering at the speaker box. I don't want an employee walking up to my car fumbling with printed menus and payment processing devices. I don't want to tell them I've already ordered because the several order-takers running up and down the line don't know who has/hasn't ordered.

At one point the nearest location to me set it up such that I had to interact face to face with 3 people before I would get my food - one to take my order, one to take my payment, one to give me a receipt. Then I'd actually get to the window and be handed my food by a fourth person. This slowed things down substantially because the pattern was so far outside what customers expected. Employees frequently had to chase down people because they didn't stop for their receipt...because where the hell did the idea of a receipt pickup station come from anyway?

The end result is I only go to C-F-A anymore if ordering online ahead of time is convenient. At least then I'm back to the single face-to-face interaction at the point of food delivery. I have zero desire to interact with their employees more than that.

Or you know you could enjoy having a brief conversation about sports, or the weather, or their kids, or the latest celebrity gossip while waiting.

At the places I go to frequently I'm on a first name basis and I see the photos of their kids and share about what's going on in my life.

Face-to-face interactions are much more social than nameless, faceless, speaker boxes.

Think of it as a chance to make 4 people smile, briefly laugh, and get your food. Hopefully those 4 people can make you smile, laugh, and have a tasty meal!

Except I will not enjoy that. That is not a pattern of interaction I enjoy. I find small talk with people I don't know exhausting. I don't want to impose on an employee who would rather not share their personal life with me. I can't possibly know if that employee legitimately wants to share with me or is doing so because they feel they must because I am a customer.

I eat less C-F-A nowadays because they have chosen to make the experience different than other drive through restaurants, and it's not an experience I care for.

I'm curious, what generation are you?

> The reason they are so successful is they have employees take your order as you are waiting, so there are never any bottlenecks around order taking and order receiving.

In-N-Out does this at the busier drive-thru locations (which is all of them). It's still a bit more than ten minutes when it's at max capacity, but much less than if they had the traditional one order at a time at the end of the line.

Portillo's has this system too, and have been doing it longer than CFA, or at least longer than my CFA has been doing this (I'm sure Portillo's is not the first to do this, though).

Portillo's gets so busy there'd easily be 30+ cars in the drive-through during rush hour, but you'd still get through it in about 10-15 minutes even then.

I have never been to Chick-Fil-A and received food in less than 30 minutes, ever. Always takes forever, in the same category with In-N-Out. At least In-N-Out is more reasonably priced. Doesn't matter how many order takers you have standing around, the kitchen can only make so much food at a time.

This is so far outside normal experience that I have to wonder what you are doing wrong. Are you normally only going at restaurant grand opening or something?

The only way this would be possible is going there 30 minutes before opening.

Poster 2 above: Name the location, and one of us can test it for you to let you know if it's safe to go back.

Interesting, mind sharing the general geographic location? I've never had that experience in ~20 years up and down the east coast

buddy in southern california the drive through lines are like 50 cars long.

So Cal.

How many times have you been to Chick-Fil-A?

My kids ask for it weekly. There are two locations I go to, both have crazy lines. One of them spills out into the street and causes traffic problems. Always feels like a poor way to spend my time. Maybe its because I go at meal times, dunno. Saw the Chick-Fil-A line spilling into the street at 2:30pm one day, its like that a lot. Good for them, makes it not my first choice.

There's a new one that opened up that has two lanes at the pickup area. There's a sliding door that opens, and an attendant walks out to bring the food to cars in either lane. I can see why they thought this was smart, but wow is that a ticking time bomb of a lawsuit waiting to happen. You have an attendant crossing a lane of traffic hundreds of times a day and trusting customers who are driving while on their phone not to run them over.

This is common at most CFAs. We have one of the busiest (in the US) CFAs in Carroll County, GA and they have 3 lanes that people deliver orders across. The closest one to the delivery door is the "App Orders Lane". CFA has done a great job of order taking using digital pads and taking payment in line. Cash is about the only slowdown they have when delivering orders.

If drivers are on their phones and hit an attendant, than that'd be a nice payout from the driver's insurance \ negligence.

It's funny cause there wasn't nearly the backlash when mcdonalds implemented the self-order digital kiosk, which completely eliminated jobs

Because at least then then you don't have to deal with upselling, inefficiently speaking, etc. Some people like self-checkout. However, I don't see any advantage to a computer listening to my order and arguing with me (upselling) instead of clicking buttons in 1/10 the time.

I'd rather be able to say what I want than spending 5 minutes navigating the menu on McDonald's screens (which also try to upsell).

I think having both would be the best option.

Seems to be a no-brainer that these terminals will integrate voice controlled chat options, if they become socially acceptable.

I'd argue that the necessary tech has been around for a while now and they probably concluded it's not a good fit.

They just can't help themselves on the upsell.

Every drive-thru that has the monitor where you get to check your order for accuracy eventually starts displaying ads instead -- lowering accuracy and offering something you don't want.

One of the McDonald's near me has been using the order taking software in one of the drive thru lanes for a while now. It's such a better experience compared to probably 90% of the employees that have been taking orders there.

It doesn't have someone whisper/shout through the speaker because they don't know how loud they need to speak to be heard outside. It speaks clearly and can be understood which is not always the case with the bored and disinterested high school workers the store tends to hire. And my personal favorite is that I'm not greeted with "McDonalds! Thank you! Order please!" which seems to be the standard greeting they're training employees with at that location.

I've only had it get an order wrong once (though the food does still get made incorrectly about 10% of the time) at which point it quickly switched over to an actual person to complete the order. You can tell it's more efficient too because at busier times, the non-human order taker lane moves cars through at a two or even three to one ratio.

Overall, I'm surprised that more locations haven't switched to the software already and especially that other drive thru businesses haven't begun testing the software out here.

I thought this too, but so far every mcdonalds I have been too (admittedly not many) seems just as staffed as before.

I’ve noticed they’re mostly staffed in the back cooking though, which is arguably a much better task for a human than recording basic information into a computer system. I trust a LLM to get my order right more often than someone who’s soul has been completely crushed by the banality of their task in life. At least making the food is actually doing something.

When you hire another unemployed human for cheaper that’s exploitation. When you hire no humans due to automation that’s progress.

They do it at Tim Hortons Drive Throughs too already, not sure if overseas but definitely someone in a call center taking the order. I'm torn about it, why resist technology and progress. But yeah, I guess root cause is they can't find enough staff on site because they pay too low.

As much as people are going to fight it, UBI is pretty much the only way to maintain a somewhat functioning society when every low-wage job has disappeared. The people that were doing those jobs before haven't gone anywhere. And there will likely be even more of them. But now any opportunity for work that they had before is no longer available.

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