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Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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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