So McDonald’s is going to try customer touch-screen ordering in Europe. For several years now I’ve been wondering why restaurants don’t do this. Walk in, sit down, pull out your smartphone and enter your order online. An in-store kiosk/station could be provided for those who don’t have a smartphone/tablet/etc. No need to wait for the busy waitress to come over and transcribe what you want. The cooks get your order instantly and start preparing it. Better yet, enter your order before you leave home and when you get to the restaurant, it’s ready. I guess you would need to prepay to prevent bogus/unclaimed orders, just like you would with any other merchandise ordered online. Also have a waitress-alerting function for drink refills or special requests. Waitstaff could still take orders for those who prefer. Is it just that proprietors in the food industry aren’t very tech-savvy? That still doesn’t explain why the large corporate chains aren’t doing it. What gives?
Fundamentally, it’s a pretty big change for the food industry, so I could see some nervousness. That said, I think the cost savings will be considerable, so I think it’ll catch on quickly.
I hate handling the tip process and so automation in food service will be a boon to me. And for fast food, I think the cost reductions will help keep prices down, which is a pretty high priority for me if I’m just grabbing something to fill me up.
I don’t know about it for fine dining, however. The wait staff provide a valuable service that is part of the ‘experience’ so I hope it doesn’t move too far up the value chain.
The one niggling thought I have is, didn’t we essentially have this process in automats in the 50s? And they all disappeared. I wonder what drove their demise and what fast food places can do to prevent a similar fate.
FYI, here is another thread on this subject from about a month ago.
I’ve been wondering about this myself, especially for sit-down restaurants (not so much McDonalds, which is fast food anyway.) It would be ideal for parents of young children. Parent #1 drives the car while parent #2 places the order from the passenger seat and pre-pays. When they arrive, the food is ready immediately, and they can leave as soon as they’re done. The kids would have a much easier time behaving if they don’t have to wait for their food.
It would really speed things up for everyone, not just families with kids. The only wrinkle I can think of is that it could get confusing if you have to split checks–different people would submit different orders but they’d all have to arrive at the same table and be ready at the same time. But that’s probably not too much of a sticking point.
Phreesh has a good point about the whole tip thing.
Wasn’t the food pretty terrible? I don’t know, my parents were just kids at the time.
I can see restaurants being nervous about scam orders and other problems. Besides there are the number of people who can’t handle self-checkout at grocery stores - ordering food with custom options might be way beyond them. OTOH, well, look at online ordering for pizza. As much as I don’t like McDonalds, if anybody can afford to get it to work, they would be it.
People have enough trouble working grocery self-checkouts; I would be wary of this.
That being said, other restaurants are already doing this to some extent. Chipotle, Jimmy Johns, and surely others have smartphone apps. Wow Bao (small Chicago chain) locations have had touchscreens for at least a year, right next to their counters or outside the restaurant letting you enter your own order and customize your food. This is news because a huge chain is now testing in-store touchscreens.
I wouldn’t be fond of this at a nicer restaurant. If I want details on how the food is prepared, it can be more interesting to hear it from a person, and a good server can sense what might be an issue and offer suggestions. And it’s a lot more charming when a waiter brings you an after-dinner drink on the house than when a computer tells you you’ve randomly won something extra. 
I like the automation when picking food up. I even find myself resenting that a local take-and-bake pizza chain doesn’t have an app and I have to navigate their not so portable-friendly website on my smartphone.
If the self-ordering system could avoid the lines, it would be a big improvement. At my local Mickey D’s, the wait in line for someone to take your order exceeds the time it takes to prepare and deliver it.
Better yet, how about sitting down at a table, ordering from there, and having it delivered to the table? Culver’s already has the last half of that process working well.
And another thing. You know how at airports these days, you can handle ticketing electronically at the kiosks? In fact, even when you’re in the terminal, there are kiosks scattered around so you can muck around with your flight if you have to. It’s great. If it works for airports, why not for restaurants?
Have you ever been behind an older person that can’t do a debit transaction? Having your idea as an option for a few people is fine. Expecting going to it as the only option, would never fly. I personally like to interact with the waitstaff.
It might work for fast food restaurants, but I could see it causing problems. The ones I go to are often patronized by people that appear, at least to me, to not be very literate. And I doubt that all of them have debit/credit cards.
For higher end restaurants, I like interfacing with the waitstaff. Using a machine would depersonalize the experience for me.
Regarding automats…
From what I’ve read, it was…a necessary consequence of the food having to sit in the automat until someone ordered it. Even at the greasiest diner, at least you were getting your food freshly cooked. Plus, after the costs of delivering food to the automats and maintenance of the machines, they weren’t much cheaper than diner meals, which was probably why automats lost their business to diners.
Plus, automats got a bad rep for being places you would only go to if you were, well, down on your luck. Take a look at Edward Hopper’s painting “Automat” and tell me whether that depicts the kind of place you’d love to go to for rounding out your Friday night. Even people who liked automats realized they were about as low on the restaurant totem pole as you could get without going to a soup kitchen.
If I had to guess, I’d say that one of the things people want from a restaurant experience, whether they realize it or not, is human interaction. Self-service might work in an airport or a library because there eating food is secondary to traveling or reading. That’s not so in a restaurant, where it’s all about the meal.
Thanks. I did a “mcdonalds” search and looked at 2 pages of results…it was on the 3rd page. Doh!
There’s a joint in Cambridge called Four Burger (might be a chain, not sure) that does the online system, and it’s totally awesome. The online interface is intuitive and comprehensive, you can pay with a debit card, print out the order confirmation, and by the time you get to the restaurant the burgers are good to go!
They are also quite delicious, I might add. If you’re ever in the area, you have to try their salmon burgers.
I might have to try that the next time I buy shoes.
There’s finally a Five Guys in Framingham. It’s pretty awesome!
I think this is an idea that is far overdue in this age of self checkout and self check-in.
There’s a small chain of restaurants in Utah called The Training Table where you sit down by yourself and order over a phone located at the table. They buzz your table when it’s ready and you go up and pay and bring the food back to your table by yourself. Excellent burgers there too.
The have a touch screen at the local Jack in the Box where you can order your food and insert cash or card. Hardly anyone uses it. Why? Probably because the stupid thing talks back at you at 3 times the volume of the person at the counter. I guess it would be great if you don’t mind having every single button you push end up with the damn device screaming your order across the entire restaurant. I have not used it but have seen someone use it – it is incredibly annoying.
What’s wrong with feedback on the screen? I don’t need the stupid machine to talk to me or “be friendly”.
Let the people who can’t work a self-checkout do it this way, but let the rest of us automate it a bit…
I’m just envisioning being stuck waiting behind people punching randomly at the touch screen, signing their name with a real pen on the screen when it’s time to pay, etc. Just recently at a home improvement store, I saw a woman with a bunch of heavy bags of lawn care stuff in a cart who expected to be able to use self-checkout but make a cashier do the scanning and other work of ringing it up (which would involve struggling through the stack of stuff in her cart to find all the UPC codes) - fortunately she asked a question first that ended up revealing her expectation, and they pulled her out of the self-check line and put her in a regular checkout line.
Maybe lots of kiosk touchscreens would help.
There was a restaurant doing this years ago called uWink. I loved the place.
It failed abysmally.
They use those touch-screen terminals for ordering food in the food court of Terminal 5 (the JetBlue terminal) of JFK Airport. It works pretty well.