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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

Good news for blue collar workers, tough for investors. The bean-counting dream of LLM's and Robotics remains, but until ChatGPT is placing your order at Mcdonalds drive-thrus and Amazon is laying off warehouse associates en masse, i'd say that last 5% is still taking 95% of the time.

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McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.

I love it when people invent things to force everyone perform self service and call it 'progress'.

I like it, I order on my phone before I get to the place and just pick it up.

Any reason to like the old way is just nostalgia in my head.

There are pros, but ultimately we’re all still apes, we need human interaction and contact. It can’t be completely replaced with technology.

Is ordering a burger really human interaction and contact?

> we need human interaction and contact

Indeed, but not at McDonalds.

Do you really need a human to ask whether you want fries with that?

I usually see people preferring to use the self service in McDonalds or supermarkets when given the option of either, so the consumer must find some benefit to it.

I always choose self service because that's where the volume is. I can wait in one of any Costco lines with 4 carts and 1 person checking them through, or I can wait in the line with 4 carts and 6 self service checkouts.

Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.

Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.

I have a mental list of who the fast/slow checkout people are at my store, would be curious to see numbers but I think the fast people are more than 2x as fast as the slower ones.

I really appreciate the ability at Costco to scan with my phone as we pick up items. Check out becomes a breeze. But I absolutely hate self-checkout grocery stores unless I just have a few items. The idea that I'll run a cart full of groceries through self-checkout is insane. Not only do they routinely not have accurate bar codes requiring some sort of lookup from an attendant. I'll have things which require human clerks to "approve" anyway like wine. In addition, my self-checkout lines don't have the full conveyors like the human checkout lines. So everything has to be moved from cart directly to bag and there isn't enough bag space so you have to start putting bags into the cart which still has groceries. The whole thing is a mess and I hate it.

I don't know what they are thinking, the kiosks are not cheap to install or maintain, they are buggy, and they've put me off from going into McDs anymore. The In-N-Out nearby is cheaper, friendlier with plenty of employees working, (and better quality), so not sure what McD's end game is here.

I don’t like them either. The UX is annoying and it’s way too large. The benefit is that I get to see more options than can fit on the screens and they have photos, but still in person just seems better.

But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.

Sure, but not the kitchen staff, which is where the robotics dream is supposed to take you.

I watched a show over 20 years ago that showed a fully automated robotic kitchen at McDonalds. I can only assumed they have continued to evolved it and perfect it as the technology has improved. I think it’s simply a question of when it hits the tipping point on cost.

There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.

I imagine kitchen robots are harder than they might sound. Kitchens are rough environments for machines. They are hot, greasy, and steamy. And everything that comes in contact with food needs to be able to be taken apart, washed, and sanitized at least daily.

True, that’s a good example of the commenter’s “last 5% is the 95%”

I hate those stupid things so much. They're really, as far as I can tell, just moving all labor to the kitchen and drive-thru, while considering the dining area an afterthought.

Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.

Even 30 years ago more than half the sales at a McDonalds were in the drive through. Some new McDonalds don’t have much of an inside dining room at all anymore, while having multiple drive through lanes.

Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.

McDonald’s is also pushing their app pretty hard with lots of incentives.

Taco Bell by us has AI order taking and it is amazing. Quick, always has been getting it correct, and easy to understand. Granted, it's probably very abusable, but for someone just wanting to put in a quick order it is way better than a person.

I've had very bad luck with Taco Bell's AI. It is not good at all with modifications in my experience. I actually order on the app now just to minimize my interaction with the chatbot. It is very good at processing "mobile order for <my name>" at least.

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