There was always Ponderosa Steak House back in the 80s/90s where you went through a line like at any other fast food joint, ordered whichever entree you wanted, and then the salad bar [or just the salad bar] and which beverage you wanted. Then you sat down, and a server brought over your entree and beverage, and if you ordered the salad bar you went to the salad bar. Very user friendly.
I used it in Paris a few years ago; works just fine.
(Oh, and please don’t think I eat at McDonalds while in Paris. This was a “special” occasion.)
Well at the local Jack in the Box I frequent, they recently pulled out their automated order machine. It always seemed to not work or confuse patrons, so I’m not surprised.
I haven’t seen this in any “real” fast food restaurants, but Sheetz and Wawa (both are gas and convenience chains that have pretty decent food service as well) both have this. Though you don’t pay with your card at the kiosk; it prints a slip, which you then take to the register to pay, and by the time you’re done, the food is ready.
I wish they had the option to pay with your card at the touchscreen, but I guess they figured this would mean you wouldn’t buy as much of the prepackaged stuff, bottled drinks, munchies etc. if you didn’t have to see a cashier.
Several sit-down chains near us have an electronic gizmo where you can order drinks / appetizers from your table (a Chili’s near us for example) but I don’t think you can order an entree that way. I seem to recall you can pay via the same device.
A friend of mine just returned from a vacation in Spain and she mentioned that the McDonalds there had touch screen ordering in multiple languages so that you could place your order in your language and the kitchen staff could read it in Spanish. Great use of technology in a tourist area.
(She assures me that she only went in to buy a coke, given her love of both good food and coke I believe her but I gave her a hard time anyway. McDonalds in Spain. Pfft)
They had one of these at Carl’s Jr for a while. Watching people try to figure out how to use a touchscreen was both frustrating and hilarious. The kiosk has since been removed.
The one downside is that it was essentially impossible to customize your order using the machine (no mayo, extra pickles, blah blah)
Here are a few Dutch Automats. They have been florishing since three decades. It helps that the Dutch like deep-fried meaty fast foods, and those keep rather well in an automat.
What we see more and more here in busy large places where the staff can’t see all the tables, is half-self-service. You go to the counter, order and pay. The server then sets a timer for the time it will take to prepare your order, and you take the timer with you back to your table. When the timer is ready, you return to the counter to get your food in exchange for the timer.
Minneapolis Airport has 1000s of iPads at tables close to the gates. You can order from a dozen or so restaurants and have it delivered straight to your table
A lot of places in the US (like Panera) have that to; though in practice single diners just stand near the counter waiting for their pager to go off.
In 1969/70 I worked at a restaurant that had a phone at each table. Patrons would use the phone to call the kitchen and place their order, which was then brought to the table by the wait staff.
(for the Nebraska people: Kings Food Host on 29th and Farnam)
Mama Zappa has already mentioned Wawa; it seems to work just fine for them. Of course a convenience store and a fast-food chain aren’t exactly the same thing. Wawa is more akin to Subway than to McDonald’s.
I only read about half the thread or so, but for those with literacy problems, that’s an easy fix: Picture menu touchscreens.
Having said that, I’m not really in favor of a mass rollout of touchscreens in fast food restaurants. It’ll cost people jobs.
I really don’t see fast food joints going to touchscreens any time soon, at least not on a large scale. There is a learning curve and it may not be worth it to have someone show the customer how to use it. The technology isn’t cheap to install or maintain, and many franchisees may not want to put out the investment. It’s also not much of a time-saver; I order at Sheetz all the time and it takes the same amount of time to enter my order at the kiosk as it does to actually order the same sandwich from a human at Subway. Unless you really don’t like people all that much, there is no reason to order from a touchscreen.
The main reason it works at Sheetz and Wawa is because they’re not just fast-food restaurants, they’re convenience stores. Their restaurant operations tend to be limited to entrees and a relatively small number of deep fried sides. You put your order into the kiosk and while you wait, you have the opportunity to make impulse purchases like chips, drinks, candy, baked goods, and so forth. It’s a lot harder to do that at McDonald’s, where your entire purchase is finalized when you place your order.
The locations where I’ve seen touch screens succesfully implemented are ones where literacy is a problem and spoken languages would be an even-bigger one: the McD’s at Sagrada Familia, Sants railway station and similar locations.
At first, people weren’t used to touch screens and looked at those things like they might assault someone; now it’s as natural as getting money from an ATM. The menu for the card payment is in two dozen languages: how many tri-or-more-lingual cashiers would that need*? You can speak with a cashier (there’s the two usual lines for that) or you can poke in your own order, get a piece of paper with a number printed on it and wait until it comes up in the overhead sign. Hand your paper to the server, she checks it against the order’s both to verify the number and that the order has been filled correctly, you’re set.
- the location itself is bilingual and people have a serious chip about it, so even if the cashiers can’t speak both local languages they need to be able to understand both
Many many restaurants in Japan use this system with individual touch screens at each table. works well, saves time ordering, usually has pictures as well which helps when you can’t read the Kanji.
Sonic has just opened near here, within the last week. My son tells me they have touch screen ordering instead of a speaker system. I haven’t been there, but next time I feel like having tater-tots for dinner I will be sure and report back.
Sonic is a drive-in. You order from your parking space and a server brings your food out. (On roller skates in some locations.) I can’t even guess how many order screens one location would have. 18 -24 I’d imagine.
If I were a restaurant owner I’d worry about the potential problems of the system being “down”.
IIRC automats really never caught on anywhere in the United States except in NYC, and this is probably why most Americans have never even seen one IRL. Automats were anti-car-culture. Nobody’s going to get in their car and drive several miles to eat at an automat, even if the food is pretty good at that. But if you’re walking to or from the subway station and you pass by the automat, hey, why not? No doubt the heavy foot traffic brought many customers to the automat’s doors, in turn ensuring that the food always turned over quickly.
Only in NYC, IIRC. Besides what I said up thread, I think inflation was another factor. Although dollar bill acceptors were invented in the mid 1960s, I don’t think they became widespread until considerably later. And by the early 1970s it was getting pretty hard to buy a meal with coins, unless you wanted to tender a sackful of quarters.
Some people may confuse automats with vending machines. Unlike the latter, automats could provide you with a complete meal from soup to nuts, and in the early days, on real crockery yet.
By contrast, with vending machines inflation was less of an issue because at that time they only sold cheap snacks and drinks. (Even cigarettes were still relatively cheap then.)
I see two problems with self-ordering. One is that a lot of people don’t practice adequate hygiene, especially when it comes to washing their hands after using the restroom. Another is that some parents (not all, but some) think it’s absolutely adorable to let little Johnny or Suzy use the latest whatever. This is, of course, compounded by the first factor. So you’re going to have a lot of little kids mauling the ordering terminal and spreading germs.
I like the basic idea of self-ordering, but I think that it’s going to have a few problems in practice.
Lynn do you ever eat at sit-down places with actual menus? Because I bet the touchscreens get cleaned a lot more often then they do. Also I assume even in fast food places you either pay with cash or plastic. If it’s the latter you’re probably touching a keypad you’ll run into the same issues. If it’s the former do you really want to get into what’s on the average dollar bill?
The Max restaurant (Swedish hamburger/fast-food chain) in central Oslo has a system similar to what others have mentioned: you can order on a touch-screen and pay by card at the kiosk, then take your printed receipt to the counter to pick up your order when it’s ready. However, the kiosks can’t handle any sort of special order. I don’t think they can even add-cheese-for-five-kroner sort of thing. We’ve ordered from the kiosks several times and it works nicely, because I can pull the icky yucky tomato slice off my burger without dying, but there is still an obvious need for the cashiers.