Fast food is already automated
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities.
In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving.
We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
The work is offloaded to the customer.
It is quite sad since the initial kiosk app was like as fast as the cashier since it didn't try to uppsell you 15 times.
I guess it is a power problem. The employer does not have enough power over the staff to enforce BS procedures that makes them and the customers waste time while programmers happely complies since they are not the 'victims'.
The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.
Instead they're forcing you to choose a strong password, enter your credit card number, specify your age and sex and sign up for spam before letting you choose your appetizer.
The most irritating part is that these UX issues aren't that hard to fix.
Those at wordt thatll never enter my mind. At all. Why do people surrender their hardware so easily?
Order food on my phone and they walk it out to my car while I'm listening to ads on the radio. Win, win for everyone.
And I have the McD's app so locked down I'm surprised they actually let me order food.
The only upside I can find, and it correlates with what crowd is positive, that it suits those that really want to avoid human interaction.
if you eat fast food foremost meals then the apps might make sense. However that isn't healthy.
Or are you concerned that the app is not compatible with the Android 9-based custom ROM you are rocking?
Even then, the economics of such terminal isn't clear: for start you need multiple times more such machines than cashiers since everything is much slower on it (for self cash out machines in supermarket the ratio is up to 1 to 6 !) and the kiosks are also insanely expensive (6 figures). And as a result at the end of the day it has not gained that much traction over the past ten years (if you compare it to the deployment of things that were massive successes like credit card, you'll see that the success is much more limited here)
When I worked at a radiology firm, they thought having patients fill out forms on an iPad would cost them money. They did it anyways to seem more modern.
My favorite part of this is that most of these setups still ask for the same pieces of information over and over again. Sometimes even on the same page.
Or stuff like "todays date". Really?
Are you referring to a McDo ordering machine, or a generic [supermarket] self-checkout machine?
And what I'm saying is that the cost for supermarket is 17x higher than it would be should they internalize the manufacturing and software development process. Outsourcing incurs a lot of additional costs in addition to the actual production costs in addition to the manufacturer's margin.
As long as big companies don't understand that technology is a key component of their business, whatever it is, they won't be able to leverage it to even a fraction of its potential (not holding my breath though…).
I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.