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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

Went into a McDonalds recently that was all touch-screen ordering. Could maybe get someone at the counter with enough patience.

It made me feel so unimportant. It took a REALLY long time for orders to be fulfilled, and it was just me and a crowd of other customers standing around awkwardly hoping the touch screen listened to any of us.

Awful experience, avoiding McDonalds for a while.

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When the touchscreens first came out, it was a relatively decent experience. You just chose what you wanted, maybe made a few simple modifications, and then you were done.

I went more recently and the touchscreens have adopted the same adversarial behavior that plagues much of the internet. Every other screen is begging you to add something else to your order that you have to click to close, or pushing an item that you didn't want. Dark patterns galore.

I just want to upgrade my egg McMuffin meal to a large OJ, but the kiosk won't let me.

Their kiosk UI is unusually poorly designed. It takes more than a dozen clicks to buy what used to be "I'd like a number two with a Coke" at the counter.

Their old number 1/number 2/etc was incredibly efficient and swept through the entire fast food industry.

Has anyone seen a report or analysis or similar on why they abandoned that incredibly fast and effective system and replaced it with a purchase UX (both kiosk and at the counter signage) which looks pretty incompetent to the casual observer.

Can't answer your immediate question, but in my experience, the enshitification of UI is usually a result of layers and layers on top of the user <> product connection. It's everywhere

It's a certainty that they A/B tested the UI and anything that added a cent or two got the green light. You are seeing the end result of that evolution.

I don't eat fast food much, but In n Out is where I last experienced that kind of simplicity.

That's been in the UK for ages. Like 5 years. Everything works fine, have been to a McD's dozens of times over the last few years and never seen a problem, apart from sometimes the printer is low ink.

The reason it takes longer has nothing to do with the touch screens. It's because the stores that are touch screen are now cooking to order, no picking stuff cooked already off warming shelves.

It is annoying when you want to grab something quick. But on the other hand, no more floppy, soggy, burgers. Everything is freshly cooked. Less waste.

They just have coupled the two changes, touch screens + cook to order, together. So when a store gets one, they get the other. And if you look behind the serving counter you should be able to see the difference, no warming shelves, but a slide that fresh food is coming down, which gets immediately bagged and then put straight into your hand.

Interesting. In the USA McDonald's has been made to order for decades now in general.

I don't understand why a touchscreen is necessary to make food to order?

It's not. McDonald's chose to roll the two out at the same time. They would have benefitted from an advertising campaign raising awareness that the restaurants with kiosks are now cooked to order. Maybe their franchise rules prohibited them?

At the McDonald's local to me, I use the kiosk because it's quicker and I don't have to repeat myself 12 times because the person at the counter can't keep up or is having trouble hearing me or is barely paying attention.

Wild you blame it all on the employee

I did not. Not being able to keep up could be me or them. Not being able to hear me well is likely because of background noise. Barely paying attention could be because of a lot going on around them. Wild that you only read it one way.

I used to be that employee. I understand the issues and it's easier for me as a customer to skip the issues.

there's a process-control failure here - the reason the traditional drive-through works is that the cars stay in order and if it gets crowded then they can't reach the order speaker so it's rate-limited. The touchscreens don't do this at all, it's failure mode is the crowd just gets bigger and bigger. And since the workers don't _have_ to interact with the customers, they mostly don't, so exceptions don't get noticed or handled. I'm sure GrubHub and Uber Eats deal with similar issues to some degree, but at least in those cases the customer isn't stuck standing there, plus the apps can keep tabs on order progress and you can escalate issues. the McDonald's model is just fire and forget. And it's not just McDonalds! Taco Bell has the _exact_ same design with the exact same failure mode

McDonald’s “food” has not been in my diet since at least my high school and early college years. Have been avoiding them for at least a decade, long before the AI testing

I know when I go to McDonalds, I go because the person behind the counter makes me feel powerful and important. It's the best. I'm flying high for a week after :).

Naw, but I get that if it took a REALLY long time for orders to be fulfilled, I'd be disappointed.

You're adding words I never said. I value the person across the counter from me as well, because in human-to-human interactions there is empathy and connection that transcends the business exchange. There is a person there that I care about way more than I care about fries, and usually that person cares more about me than they do the McDonalds Corporation.

So if they mess up my order- no big deal, you're a person after all. Or if I need to run back to get my wallet I left in my car- no big deal, I'm a person after all.

Humans generally care more about the people local to them than they do the faceless business operating in the background.

But in the human-to-AI scenario, that connection is vaporized, and now it's just me and a machine whose only loyalties lie solely to McDonalds Corporation. It makes you feel unimportant in a very cold way.

More than once, I’ve gone through the touchscreen fast food checkout only to be shown a message at the end that the credit card reader doesn’t work. You have to print out the list of what you ordered and hand it over to the clerk after standing in line.

Similar but the touchscreen is fine

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