Yes, but it’s not just because a few customers have special requests. It’s because of cash.
There are still a lot of people who use folded paper and coins. There are plenty of people who live almost off the grid as far as banking goes. I don’t know how,…but I see lots and lots of storefronts with bright yellow signs for “Payday Check Cashing Service”.
There are lots of machines that take paper and coins. I suppose it could end up being unacceptably expensive for fast food but it’s definitely not impossible.
There are ways around that. Machines can take coins and cash - the self-checkout aisle at my local grocers does that, and even takes coupons.
You can also just buy a cash card to use for swiping. No need for a bunch of personal info or setting up an account; just give AMEX/VISA/MC some money and they give you a card for the value. There’s typically a fee, but they are often waived for various promotions or sales, I guess because they still make money off the vendor.
Yeah, maybe - or actually, maybe automation is the solution as well as the challenge. How about a ‘build your own burger’ kiosk where you add one layer after another in any combination you want? It could be assembled layer by layer by a machine too.
WaWa convenience stores in Florida and probably wherever else they existed before coming to Florida. You can order a customized sub sandwich and various other foods and drinks via electronic terminal. The items I’ve had there have been very good.
Yeah that’s the problem I have had with Snopes on some issues. They put a false label on something because the narrow parameters of a certain rumor aren’t true but the bigger issue isn’t that simple. Certainly they didn’t start to use automated ordering screens because of the raise of minimum wage. It is clear that they were doing it before it came up in the U.S. But it is ridiculous to think that one of the main reasons for experimenting with it is to see if they could lower labor costs. Basically the same reason why you have to walk up to the counter instead of having a waiter.
Panera Bread also has these. If there is any line for the person working or even just one other person currently being helped, I use them. If there was NO line though, I’d feel kind of rude not just going to the person. Or if the person working happens to be a cute girl, then I’ll definitely forego the machine.
Quite wrong. The machines do accommodate any number of substitutions and special requests. If there’s not a designated button for what you want, you can just type a note/comment. Ability to use words = all bases covered. A marvelous thing, the ability to write and read.
Restaurant interfaces (that the servers use to put orders into the kitchen) have been set up that way for many, many years. When I worked in one as a server, I pretty much never talked to the kitchen staff directly, no matter how complex any orders were. It’s not a difficult concept.
Not exactly the same thing, but airlines have pretty much all converted to the “use the kiosk to check in unless you have a serious problem” model and people haven’t stopped flying.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. In fact, it’s good enough that it would almost certainly work really well and people would have fun with it.
I should have thought about it more before I said “it can’t be automated”.
I think people are almost always wrong when they point to existing things that can’t be replaced with an automated system as proof that the automated system won’t take over. Because that’s not how technological disruption works. It doesn’t have to completely replace the existing system; it just has to have enough benefits that it’s better overall.
Are you talking about the self-service kiosks, because that’s what I was talking about, and they don’t accommodate any substitutions at all.
I’m not saying they can’t do that (and I made this clear in the post you quoted and declared wrong).
Well, almost all the major supermarkets and hardware chains have self-checkout now, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see fast food chains go the same way.
Yeah, but the OP was driven by a fierce disgust at the ingratitude of minions wanting a living wage and thus financially crippling the industries who provide them with work, and therefore being justly punished by being replaced with machines.
It’s doubtful that was a motivation for the supermarkets.
No, but it sure looks like many traditional minimum wage jobs (like cashiers) have been disappearing gradually for a long time. Home Depot has been automating for a long time, and they weren’t motivated by potential hikes in the minimum wage.
Such automation was almost certainly coming in the fast food industry even if there hadn’t been calls for a living wage.
Yes, self-service kiosks. I don’t know which ones you’ve used that don’t accommodate special requests, but the ones I’m familiar with are mainly at Panera Bread, and they do. You also said that there will always be a need for human workers because of unusual requests, and that a system to accommodate them would be impossibly unwieldy. Which is what I said was wrong and is frankly an utterly ridiculous notion, since all you need is the ability to add a comment. It’s actually very simple.
Or, like Hertz, have employees at a call center somewhere in the country that do nothing but answer kiosk calls from any location anywhere. They can be trained to deal with unwieldy systems very efficiently, and the face-to-face is somewhat nice.
I recall I was vacationing in Naples, Florida and they had one at the Arby’s there. And this was in 1993. I thought it was so cool back then.
This has been a long time coming and, frankly, it can’t happen fast enough. Even without considering a hike in minimum wage, it’s generally cheaper to have automated cashiers, and the main reason places aren’t pushing it faster is because of the high initial cost of infrastructure to support it. If minimum wage goes up significantly, I think it will only serve as greater incentive for businesses that aren’t currently implementing this technology to start.
And, really, I wouldn’t be too worried about it turning people away. Whenever I go into my local grocery store, if there’s enough people for there to be lines, they’re always longer at the self-checkout. Frankly, I don’t understand that, since I still usually get through faster when another person does it who can more quickly figure out where the bar codes are and all, though I will use them if they’re empty and I have only a few items.
And as others said, there’s a ton of neat things that automation does for us. As it is, in theory, if I want pizza for dinner tonight, I can go into the app on my phone, choose a saved favorite order, and time it to be delivered shortly after I expect to be home. It takes about 20s to do this; hell, it takes more time to answer the door and actually get the pizza from the delivery guy. Why couldn’t McDonald’s work similarly? I could put in what I want on my phone as I leave work, and it’s ready by the time I get there. Imagine how fast drive thru could be if everyone in it just drove up, gave an order number, and got handed a bag? You could probably get faster responses with fewer employees if people could pre-order their food.
All of this also improves order accuracy too. I understand that English isn’t the first language for a lot of people working these sorts of jobs, but they do get my orders wrong sometimes. I don’t even care generally if it’s something else I’m okay eating or even asking it to be corrected. But I do know that the owners of the restaurants care about wasted food and then the time to correct it, because it eats into their profit. If it’s automated, you just check it against the ticket, and if it’s right, its my own damn fault and I shouldn’t expect them to fix it for free.
And all of these systems work with cash too, it just obviously requires more handling, so it’s going to be discouraged. At least around here, it’s so rare that anyone pays for anything with cash that it always just strikes me as odd. Even vending machines are taking credit cards now. I don’t even bother to carry ANY cash on me unless someone gives it to me for some reason, in which case I usually just try to spend it as quickly as possible.
And all of this said, I’m a huge proponent of automation in every way possible. I do plenty of it in my job in IT/programming, because it just seems like a huge waste of resources to have people doing stuff manually that can be done as well or better, cheaper and faster, by an automated system. It frustrates me even more when I see people’s entire jobs being something that can be automated. At my last job, I automated away about a hundred tedious jobs with just one project, and even the people whose jobs I replaced were happier because they realigned most of those resources into doing more interesting work, though some of them I imagine did get let go.
And the same even goes for the minimum wage types of jobs. Yes, automation is going to probably hit those jobs the hardest, but is someone needing a job a good reason to pay a person to do something that a computer can do better, faster, and cheaper? Frankly, I’d rather automate those people out of a job and rededicate a portion of the money saved to providing people being displaced by automation with support and training new job skills. Everyone is better off. There does seem to be increasing fear of this happening, not just to minimum wage jobs, but a lot of more skilled jobs too. Hell, I could probably automate 90-95% of the work the IT support does where I work, if they gave me the time, resources, and approval, and these are people with marketable skills making well above minimum wage. But there’s resistance because it means the contracting companies lose billets and the agency loses budget, so the incentive to save money just isn’t there.
Note that this isn’t quite true. If the interface is bad and it leads to a higher error rate (which could easily be the case), then the cost of those errors is not borne entirely by the customer. Even if they self-assign all the blame for the mistake, they’re not going to have a good experience, which might make them less likely to come back. So, you probably have to fix incorrect orders regardless of the cause, and because humans are emotional, you might also the downside of the customer’s frustration and self-criticism making a bad association.
This is why human computer interfaces are very difficult to design, and any system like this should be rolled out slowly and carefully studied.