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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

The videos where people try to do the 10,000+ drinks are pretty funny but the ones where people are just straight up frustrated their order isn't getting interpreted correctly are also telling [1]. I've also heard of employees intentionally breaking these kiosks or AI things in this way just to make their own job easier because these things messing up all the time are just getting in the way of their burger flipping and making things complicated. I thought they kept beta testing of new flavours to a few locations in Orange County, you think they'd do the same for large software rollouts

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bsTFEgFAAjY

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I went through phone support hell yesterday with T-Mobile who is also using a bot now rather than a normal phone tree. It even dynamically generated "phone-tree-like" options later on in different orders and depth later on, all incorrect. It was pure wtf.

me: "I need to swap sims"

bot: "Ok, how do you want to apply your bill payment"?

me: "No, sims"

bot: "Ok your payment options on file are XXXXX"

me: "Are you fucking retarded"

bot: "I see you have a trade-in, do you want to help with your trade in?"

me: "......"

Yea, had to go to a store. I am porting out of shiT-Mobile to Google Fi in a few weeks.

Angrily request an operator and threaten to sue. That will elevate the priority if any sentiment analysis is in place and get you into the queue for a human.

There used to be some automated systems that would detect curse words and escalate you.

It seems to work less these days, but in the past I would get a robot voice on the other end and just calmly start going “piss shit fuck damn ass” and it would connect me to a human operator.

I used to build systems that did that and other things. When Nuance came out I was like a kid in a candy store just deploying ridiculous features to clients’ IVR systems.

I think this option is being phased out, it seems increasingly hard to ever find a way to talk to a real human on most corporate IVR systems. I've cursed and threatened many AI-based IVR systems and most of the time, the AI would just say "I don't understand. Goodbye" and disconnect me.

If you have a disability or just say you have one, most AI systems are required to have a reasonable accommodation and you will usually get a human quickly. Please don’t abuse this, as it’s like parking in a handicapped parking space. There are a limited number of human operators at any given time, after all.

https://www.tmonews.com/2025/08/t-mobile-cuts-employee-pay-o...

In case you are switching for better coverage, Google Fi now only uses T-Mobile towers. In my experience in a rural area, it's declining in coverage so badly that I'm switching carriers.

Why are you waiting a few weeks? just make the transfer

"live agent" usually works.

I never try to deal with phone or internet providers by phone or internet. Always go to the store.

Phone CSRs can do more than the folks at T-Mobile stores can these days. The stores mostly exist for retail sales. I presume this also applies to VZW and T.

Yeah, the store employees fundamentally don’t seem to have any more permissions in the system than a customer. They often can’t do more than call the help desk on your behalf.

My impression is that the stores hire ambitious but naive young people with promises of sales commissions, and in reality they’re mostly stuck sitting on hold for frustrated customers

Went to shiT-Mobile in store. Only two employees working, one preoccupied with a customer that apparently is months late on their bill and demanding to be let back in, and was presenting a expired ID. The second one was a couple which based on their conversations and look, were replacing the phone lines for their mafia crime family.

Had a 1 hour wait to basically do a 2 minute fucking ESIM swap. No, fuck that.

From your judgements against the other clients as well as the staff, might this be a case of "if you meet a bastard in the morning, you met a bastard. If you met nothing but bastards all day...?"

They are still bastards.

No, not really, the clients sound like they have some issues that are inhibiting their functioning and are actually in somewhat of a crisis moment. The staff seem under-resourced and are probably being underpaid.

I can tell you, my friendly neighborhood Verizon store isn't any better. I used to not mind the higher price when you got better customer service when you needed it. Now everything is a race to the bottom and nobody seems to try/care.

Worse is when insurance misclassified a billing response from the hospital/provider and trying to go back and forth to fix it was agony. Of course the skeptic in me feels it may have been by design. It wasn't until the second time I manage to get a hospital and insurance rep on the phone at the same time that things got resolved... hah, can't play phone tag now bitches, you're both here.

That's a shame, I have had much better luck.

Last time I had an issue with my internet I went into the Xfinity/Comcast store, they had reps with nothing to do and someone immediately helped me, they seem to have direct access to management systems that are not available to the customers on the website or via the app. Talking to a human to describe the problem is so much easier than dealing with a bot or voice-response system.

Welcome to the Age of AI

Last time I went to a T Mobile store for an account question they told me to call their number anyway

None of this even needs a phone call, they could have a highschooler spend a weekend writing an HTML form.

It's amazing just how inefficient large corporations are.

That man's rage and his buddy's laughter made my morning.

It is funny.

But the not funny part is the (shitty) use of dark-patterns.

Note the prompt-on-repeat is "and your drink?" instead of "would you like a drink with that?"

Someone here clearly wrote the prompt as "Be sure to end each order with an assume-yes drink upsell", not considering that some orders may already include a drink.

They're so hyper-focused on institutionalizing all the upsells that they don't consider the experience. I mean, I guess institutionalizing the upsells is the only way a system like this can pay for itself (easier to work out the kinks in a single AI system instead of training a million minimum-wage minimally-engaged humans), but these growing pains show how shitty it's all going to become.

> institutionalizing the upsells is the only way a system like this can pay for itself

The vendor that sold the system to Taco Bell probably has "increases average order amount by XX% through upsells" as a main marketing bullet point.

That's a bit too transparent.

More like "increases ROI by 9999% with the power of AI"

Are you sure he didn't just order a meal that came with a drink? If it's the same kind of point of sale system I used at my fast food job, a meal requires something to fill the "drink" slot (even if it's "exclude item")

And how much of a tip would you like to leave?

And would you like to round up your purchase to donate to charity? (A charity we own and less than 10% of the donation goes to the actual charitable thing)

I kind of like the approach that, I think it was Wendy's tried... which was having better trained, centralized order takers at computers to handle multiple drive-throughs at once. A well-versed, clear spoken, native language speaker with good menu/product knowledge taking orders for 3-4 locations as a sole task is imo a much better option.

Of course, the Wendy's nearest me seems to get something wrong with my order every single time. It's not the order taker either, the receipt is always what I ordered, just the person making it or otherwise getting it together just fails in one way or another.

On the plus side, between the disappointment and increased pricing, I now get fast food maybe once a month. The cost used to be roughly a wash between buying something at the store and making it myself... that's not nearly the case anymore. And while store pricing has gone up a lot, most of the most massive spikes in prices are junk foods I'm less inclined to keep in the house. win-win.

Is that even necessary? Is their menu so large that you can't just have a menu with a push-button next to each item?

Are fast food companies so mentally locked-in to replicating the old model of verbal order-taking that they can't see how cheap, fast, easy and accurate it would be to switch to photos and buttons?

We all manage to use a soda fountain, without needing a person (or AI) to take our drink order... and use vending machines.

Have you ever used a drive through? Yes, most fast food menus are too large for that to be a practical experience from inside a vehicle.

Orders are very complicated, far too complicated for buttons. Remember everything is customizable down to individual pieces or ingredients.

The reality is human are just very fast. A good fast food order taker can processes complex orders almost instantly. The muscle memory developed on the POS is very real.

> Is their menu so large that you can't just have a menu with a push-button next to each item?

Items can be modified, and there's not enough buttons for every combination.

To be fair, in my experience working food service: the humans have to do that too. The up selling isn't optional. Although we don't ask on repeat...

I hate the dark patterns. Wendys pissed me off and I stopped going for years after a cashier asked me, "medium or large?" making it sound like a choice you had to make instead of an upsell from small.

At some point later they (silently) made medium the default instead of small.

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