I can’t help you with a general rule, but the thrust of my snark was that discussing the (potentially negative) impact of technological changes on society does not equate to “let’s freeze everything and go back to horses and buggies, Jebediah!”
Do the Amish use contractions?
It works for me. The majority of the time, I have to repeat the order at least once because the cashier doesn’t speak English worth a damn. And they still get it wrong.
Automation is expensive. It requires maintenance .If it is replacing low priced labor, how long would it have to be in place before it paid for itself?
Food isn’t Sheetz’ main line. They’re a gas station first, a convenience store second, and a carryout third. Most of their customers don’t get anything from the food-prep counter and don’t use the touchscreens. Most of the time, the number of touchscreens available is greater than the number of people coming in for food.
I’m pretty sure McDonalds understands ROI.
Fake Amish do.
Oh dear gods yes I want this. Because I can actually think about more than one thing at a time, I know what I’m going to order when I get to the store, but instead I’m stuck behind a family who don’t even start to think about what they want until they’re up at the counter. You’ve been in line 5 minutes! Surely little Suzy and tiny Brian can figure out if they want cheeseburgers or chicken nuggets with their Happy Meals and you’ll know if you’re hungry enough to get it Super Sized.
Get the fuck out of the way, I have an order to make, bitches! I list off my order quickly and clearly but the cashier always has to ask me again, because they’re used to waiting 2 minutes for an order to make and ‘Big Mac meal, Super Sized, with a Coke, to go, on debit’ confuses them.
I would like to see a discount from the businesses that want me to do the work. Why should I do the work and pay the same price as someone who is getting the store’s labor for free? I’m not talking a crazy discount - but if my grocery store offered a 2-5% discount, I would totally ditch the lines with checkers and scan and bag it myself.
I use Home Depot’s auto system (which accepts cash just fine) but that is mostly because I generally find myself in one of two situations: either no checkers are visible anywhere, so I go with the self checkout, or all the checkers have several people in line and I don’t feel like waiting.
I’m sure *somebody *does. Not me, though. This is one important way we create wealth: find better and more cost-effective ways to do stuff we’re already doing.
Having perused the comments, I’d say there’s a couple of important differences between this system and the self-scan aisle at the grocery store or Home Depot. First is that at the latter, you’ve got to scan stuff. And that can be a pain if it’s hard to find the bar code, or if there turns out not to be one. Second is that at the grocery store or Home Depot, they expect you to bag stuff or put it on the belt as you scan it, and it you don’t do it their way, the machines rebel and won’t serve you. (At Giant Food, a DC-area grocery chain, the belts reverse direction and start shoving stuff back at you if you don’t bag stuff when they want you to, and even making you re-scan those items they’ve shoved back at you, even if there’s plenty of free room still on the belt. Whoever designed their system should be shot.)
At MickeyD’s, you’d just be using this system for ordering. This button for a Big Mac, that button for a Quarter-Pounder, another button if you want fries with that. No scanning necessary, no belt throwing stuff back in your face. You’d still get a clerk handing your completed order to you.
I’ll be delighted when we get them here.
You’re absolutely right. If I want a money order, I go to a bank teller. If I want $60 quick cash from my bank card, I go to an ATM. If I’m a frequent flyer, with no luggage I go the automatic check in counter at the airline. If I’m flying overseas with an airline I’ve never used before, I’ll see an agent.
So… If I am a regular, and want my usual big mac, fries and drink, I’ll go to the kiosk, and pray there is not a family of 5 who have no idea what they want ahead of me.
I was just in a McDonald’s in Erstein France that had the ordering kiosks. They were trying hard to get anyone to use them. As even the handful of people in line were overwhelming the single cashier on hand.
I can’t say if the system is easy to use or not. I only got as far as seeing that it only worked with credit or debit cards. I’m cash only over here, so that wasn’t going to work for me.
On a related note, back in St. Paul Minnesota, my former Credit Union got rid of all their tellers and replaced them with walk up kiosks sort of like this. It is just like the drive up. And you are serviced by the same 3 drive up tellers that now have to cover drive up and walk up. I tried it twice and closed my account.
RTFirefly, in addition to everything you listed, there is also a significant security component to a grocery self checkout. They have cameras, scales and other devices to make sure you don’t bag up a 10lb filet of beef while scanning a can of creamed corn. Grocery self checkout is something that allows you to process a whole transaction without ever working with an employee.
These are more like automated movie/train ticket machines, you tell it what you want from a set list of options, it takes your money, and prints you a ticket/receipt so you can now get the product you paid for, from the person who checks the tickets/receipts. No matter what you do with the machine, there’s still an employee to check that everything is kosher.
I think if you did that, it wouldn’t work. I think all the people that have so many problems with the self check out system for various reasons would end up wanting to use it for the discount. This would mean you’d have to have more people staffing it to handle all the extra problems created by the people that always seem to have problems with it and that would eat up the discount.
I’m happy the way it is. My discount is that I can get out of the store faster. I don’t have to deal with a confused cashier when I hand her $22 and the total is $11.17.
The way I see it, if it ends up working to the stores advantage, you’ll see discounts in the way of better pricing, more sales, a slower increase in costs to the store and therefore prices in the store. If all that stays the same, I’ll be happy just getting out faster.
I was shopping with a friend one day, jumped into the self checkout line as he looked at me in horror and said “gah, these things always give me problems, I never use them” I told him I never have issues. So I’m scanning my groceries, everything is working fine and I noticed all he had was a 20oz soda so I told him to scan it and toss it in my bag and I’d pay for it so we can get going. Well, he drank half of it while we were walking around and the scales caught it, so now we had to wait for the cashier to come over and clear the error. I’m guessing he probably still won’t use them.
I agree. Have you seen the idiots at the self-scan grocery lines? They’re cretinous, despite having had 30 some-odd years of seeing the cashiers scan items and hunt down the codes for produce on the stickers or in the little book.
I can imagine McDonalds’ ordering to be way worse, especially if there’s no live-person line for someone to wait in who doesn’t want to deal with the machine.
The Subway I drove through had a touch screen order - and it was wonderful. I could just click on all the sides, the cheese types, toasted or no. Up till that time, there were just too many options to make drive-through Subway decent.
I dunno , it would take a long time to recoup. They don’t pay benefits and barely pay minimum wage. Subtract maintenance ,and payoff would be long in the future.
What if they leased the kiosks? What if the maintenance costs were included in the lease price? What if the lease + Maintenance costs were lower than having 6 cashiers on-hand full time?