Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru
aidarwinawards.org
aidarwinawards.org
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
I suppose the best thing about drive-thru is that there is plenty of parking now at these "restaurants" when I run in to eat.
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
Oh. That triggers one horrific memory.
I was buying some bread at a nice local bakery. I wanted a few items. While three or four of us were in line, someone called in. The in-store employee pulled the last loaf of one variety off the shelf to reserve it for them.
When I complained, the manager told me that that was the correct move and they supported the decision. I suggested that polling the people who were actually in the store - actual, not just potential customers - before giving away the last loaf is probably wiser.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
A lot of people say StarBucks coffee is bad, but it’s far better than the burnt motor oil sold at fast food places, gas stations, and donut shops. The upscale coffee competitors are even more expensive and never have a drive-thru.
Worse, donuts shops and gas stations never have real milk creamer — only the extremely artificial powdered stuff (not made from milk). Or they’ll sell a bad cappuccino for $5.
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
At least my bank won the chargeback.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
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It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
It is incredibly frustrating cause you have to wait while they fulfill online orders.
They should have priority queues to ensure that certain order types take priority
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
Oh, mine lets you order online and then pick up in the drive through.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".
That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
We need rules. Yet the infinite variety of reality creates infinite situations in which the rules are counterproductive.
Previously: the ground folks had a brain and bent/ignored certain rules in the interest of getting their job done.
The principle peril of creating a more end-to-end automated, lights-out business is that there is no longer a brain to grease the interface between c-level and reality.
And c-level is never going to admit their own mistakes.
Ergo, you're going to get a lot of command-heavy companies that plow themselves into the ground over the next 10-20 years, because the low-level people they're going to fire were performing an essential function.
(Note: the easiest escape, inasmuch as I can see one, in radically data-driven management, with frequent random shifts between analogous but independent metrics)
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
I think it's far more likely that they will, at best, be used to do whatever horrible and unpleasant things that temporarily juice sales numbers. Across our economy we'll see this play out in every customer service interaction. And a wave of perniciously persistent upselling attempts will wash over us all.
After a while, we won't stop noticing that the simple process of buying a soda requires saying no to 15 different requests to subscribe to a service, put our credit card on file, sign up for notifications, and consider buying cookies, a burger, and some fries. But our lives will be worse for it.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-becam...
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
Has anyone here tried it and know how it works ? If I order 6 large pizzas with a topping of rocks, will that come up on the screen ?
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
Using unreliable voice as an input, then not allowing you to cancel/correct, or not supporting it in a robust fashion, is a massive fail. If there is no person there, then I guess you just have to give up and drive away.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
i used to be a major headphone user but as i've gotten older, i really don't like to isolate myself like that when in public. i've started to enjoy just living in the moment a lot more than when i was younger, and i don't like to appear as antisocial as i often feel, because i actually feel a lot better about myself when i interact with the people around me instead of gliding through life trying to avoid notice.
This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is also a skill you have to practice or it becomes hard to do.
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
If I have a passenger that can use the phone - it will be infinitely easier to have them place an order via app. They can look at the map, set up navigation, read through the menu and handle getting the order in, etc.
The driver needs to know where the restaurant is. A lot of time when I'm getting fast food - I'm on the interstate, I don't really know where I am, I just know I saw a sign saying the next exit has a Taco Bell. If anything asks me to confirm the restaurant location as 123 Main Street or in some city - I have no idea if that's right or not.
Maybe if it integrates with Android Auto and Google Maps so I can place an order and get navigated, that could work.
Another big issue is knowing the menu. I definitely wouldn't want to sit and have a robot read me the whole menu. There are some places where I could order without seeing the menu but - if you don't go very often you probably need to see the menu. And if you're not going very often you probably don't have their app on your phone anyway.
The apps don't take how busy the restaurants are into account. If I get to a place and it's slammed, I'll look around a bit for something else less busy, because I want to get back on the road. So I'm not really all that committed to a particular place anyway.
I also tend to not trust the apps. I can't tell you how many times I've placed an order only to find out they're out of something when I get there. If I order at the speaker I get that feedback immediately and can pick something else (or somewhere else).
Basically you need to have all of the following be true:
* Have nobody else in the car that could operate the phone for you * Know the restaurant location * Know the menu * Have the app * Ready to commit to any wait * Trust the app is correct
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
I know because I didn’t know there was a McDonalds app until my brother got me something one time and he paid decently less than what was on the “offline” menu.
It’s a win-win for the companies. They get to extract more money from a majority of their occasional customers, while getting very accurate tracking and behaviour metrics of more dedicated customers.
get a grip lmao
Mobile ordering could mean an unexpected 20 minute wait or your food sitting there long before you arrive.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
This is 100% false. I do gift card reselling and buy 6 figures worth of gift cards per year. Sometimes places like Dollar General require ID, but CVS, Staples, Grocery Stores, etc. almost never ask for ID. When they do it is to match to the name on the credit card to prevent people buying gift cards with stolen credits cards, not to enter into any sort of tracking database. You can easily buy hundreds of dollars of gift cards in a single transaction with no ID check if using cash.
I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:
https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
Yes, I it happened to me and it wasn't pleasant.
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.
I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
Having had unhoused neighbors steal my order at Starbucks, I find the system they use in China reassuring.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.
"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".
Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065391 - Aug 2025 (186 comments)
It just seems very similar to the sort of articles that came out when online ordering or touchscreen ordering first appeared.
Like one of the big knocks on the Taco Bell AI ordering was that it let people ask for a 1000 waters on their order, which yeah is dumb, but it's the kind of thing the humans actually making the food are going to catch.
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
I wonder why those failed. Just too extensive for no benefit? Too much things getting stuck all the time?
That's a high score.
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!
Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.
But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).
Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.
What is that worth?
What is manufacturing.
1) i kinda like people.
2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.
3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.
3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.
4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.
5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.
we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.
anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”
people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.
The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial
just let me buy an order of fries without the fries having some creepy behind the scenes motivations. just let me order an oreo shake and i’ll give you $4.
the restaurant should focus on making their oreo shake better than the other restaurants, not the stack analyzing my order history.
The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.
It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.
I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
absolutely. the things you learn/absorb in that kind of atmosphere are entirely different than what we learned in school social activities. you learn how to deal with coworkers having a bad day, shitbag bosses, how to differentiate if a customer is a true unempathetic dbag or just a regular person having a bad day.
and one of the most valuable lessons you learn to the absolute core, you absorb this to be one of the great truths: one nice person can take one of the worst hellfilled days of your life, and with a single snap of their fingers your day turns around. from one quick interaction with a nice person. and it happens regularly because at the end of the day, an absolute fuckton of people are kinda awesome.
the things you pick up about the world and about other people are invaluable tools that a lot of people are lacking (and it shows.)
…apparently i just entirely and verbosely over analyzed why i like to order my fries in person?
“and that my dear fellows is why it’s important to always order your milkshake in person. i now cede back any remaining time.”