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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

Full automation certainly is. But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7.

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.

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Instead of a McDonald's order taking about 20s at some cashier it is now multiple minutes at a kiosk.

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'.

That time would probably have been spent queuing before.

Maybe. But is hard to compare since the cashier also picked together your meal.

The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.

Maybe an opportunity for LLM-powered AI agent with voice recognition on the automated kiosks. Can even ask it how its day has been.

Your AI will interact with the stores api eventually, solving the problem

Accelerando was a cautionary tale.

Why use a slower, lossy, error-prone input method rather than tap a screen a few times to make precise choices? This has been solved for over a decade.

there are queues at the kiosk now too. because people take much longer perusing the interactive menu then they would when there’s the pressure of a cashier in front of them

I prefer kiosks because I can take my time and browse all the options, instead of being forced to quickly answer the cashier.

Id prefer kiosks if there were one button that would take me to "show all" screen, where I could click what I want without navigating trough layers of menus.

Kiosks are designed to maximize their sales, not satisfy your preference.

They're not paying for the time the customers spend keying in their orders. To the contrary, they might be earning more by customers getting more than they initially wanted and prompted by visual cues more effective than "would you like fries with that?".

Why does there even need to be a kiosk? Just have a QR code you scan and it installs the app on your phone. The app could then use location services to figure out which restaurant you're standing in and then you can order from the comfort of your own phone. People are used to this now with Uber Eats and Doordash.

I just want to buy a mcmuffin and not have to download some spyware on my phone

You people are actually going to turn me into a ludditic hermit with this shit. I do not want to install random corpo spyware to do literally everything in my life!

Ever heard of sandboxing? App Clips?

Or are you concerned that the app is not compatible with the Android 9-based custom ROM you are rocking?

Eat a carrot, instead.

don't worry, McDonald's already profiled you via camera and whatever radio emissions your phone and car are making from the moment you entered their parking lot, so you don't need to install their app for them to spy on you.

This could actually work if they used a website and the UX was better.

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.

i don't visit McDonald, (and I've never used uber eat type services, at least so far) often enough to have thair app on my phone. Not to mention all the other fast food resteraunts in my town. when I travel I often will try a regional chain that isn't in my area, again I don't want their app.

if you eat fast food foremost meals then the apps might make sense. However that isn't healthy.

> Just have a QR code you scan and it installs the app on your phone.

Those at wordt thatll never enter my mind. At all. Why do people surrender their hardware so easily?

A QR code is just a bit of text encoded in an easy-to-read scheme (for machines). It lets you link to the app download page on the App Store / Play Store. QR codes cannot run arbitrary code on your phone.

Apps can, though.

They're obviously talking about the app the QR code points to. The one you suggest should be a requirement for ordering.

Convenience.

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.

But is it convenient? Really? I've tried this stuff and it's been without exception a subpar and slow experience. I can see how it could be a great experience, it's just that it's always contracted out, framework upon framework shovelware. ad infested if you're lucky.

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.

That's more or less how it works in China, not only at McDonald's but at almost every restaurant. It's usually not an app but a WeChat mini-program which essentially loads like a website. You can also pay through WeChat so you don't have to type out credit card information or create some user account. I personally really like the user experience.

That sounds great. Part of the draw for app installs is loyalty programs and push notifications, are those available through WeChat as well?

McDonald’s have like 4 to 6 kiosks And one to two cashiers. I’d rather spend more time tapping buttons than waiting in line

> But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7.

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)

The complexity is that to save money, you have to automate enough that you can reduce the staffing level. Go from say, 5 people to 4.

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.

That isn't as hard as it sonds becaus demand is veariable all day. if they need the same staf, during the lunch rush but can get rid of someone in the less busy mid afternoon that is more saved than one less for the lunch rush. Lunch rush is the cheapest labor because there are a lot of customers and teamwork means you specialize to work faster. Midday you lose time walking between stations.

> patients fill out forms on an iPad

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?

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