Years back Burger King made a big deal about their new drive through system that had a screen that let you see the person taking your order. When it came out they hardly ever used it and it went away not long after. What happened?
Can’t say as though I’ve ever seen one. Would be cool to see, but I can’t imagine that it would ever turn out to be worth the expense. It was probably a trial, that turned out to be too expensive.
I’d like to see a link though, if you have one.
Thankfully, probably the same thing that happened to the automated system that said “Welcome to TastyBurgerXXX may I take your order?” automatically when you pulled up, only to have someone else interject with “can you hold on a minute” in a different voice when you actually tried to place your order.
But I still see order confirmation screens a bit. They’re useful.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen anything about it, but I did find an article from 1990 that said that they were testing a system for drive through video.
A Taco Bell near me uses these, and they’re infuriating! Obviously, the intent was to play the realistic recorded voice, have customer order while real person inside takes order, which I guess would save, what, the voice of the person inside?
But as you said, when the customer hears the real sounding voice, starts to order and halfway through the real person says hold on, or what, or repeat that, or whatever, then it defeats the whole purpose, whatever that purpose was.
Anyway, I really don’t see the need for the face to face intimacy with the pimply faced teen inside, anyway- I don’t think anyone goes to a fast food drive through for warm fuzzies like that.
But the screen where you can see is order is aces, though.
Taco Bell uses that system here. I think it’s probably because the average Taco Bell employee around here doesn’t have a very good command of proper English.
You hear an educated sound voice saying “Welcome to Taco Bell. Would you like to try our tasty Chicken Quesadillas? They’re 3 for $4.99. Order when you’re ready.” Then you place your order and the real person comes back with “Whatchoo said?”
When I worked for Burger King in the late 80’s, we had a monitor that would allow us to see the customers as they ordered. The only real function I think it served was to see guys pissing on the menu board.
SSG Schwartz
Oh to have a switch for an electric fence. 
What I have heard of is a system in which the order taker isn’t in the local restaurant, but instead is in a central call center.
You mean, like in Pakistan?
You’d think so, but perhaps not. It’s actually in the restaurant’s interest to have people taking orders who can be understood by the customers, which will allow the restaurant to handle more customers per hour. So the articles I found indicated that the restaurants trying this are hiring people specifically because they have good verbal skills.
This was covered in depth on a suppressed segment of Dateline titled “Hallowe’en 2006: Season of the King.”
The segment presented evidence that the King was using advanced video-display technology to alter viewers’ brainwaves, inserting bioelectric “packets” into people’s minds. Altered individuals then carried these packets around with them, unknowingly unless they underwent detailed EEG analysis. These packets were small, and contained no real information, but effectively acted as tracking markers, so the affected people could be located with near perfect accuracy over great distances. The King was therefore capable of projecting his presence into their minds from a central neurobroadcast center, causing a totally realistic three-dimensional representation of his floating visage to appear before the victim.
In this way, not only did the King eliminate the need for him to be physically present to torment somebody, but he was also able to send his signal to many minds at once, radically increasing the number of targets he could haunt each day. Even worse, on the rare occasion he narrowed his target to a single individual, he had total control of the subject’s perceptive field, and was not limited in how he could place himself in the victim’s environment. One unnamed target reported seeing the King’s plastic rictus overlaying the face of her beloved Weimeraner, on the roses in her garden, in the turn signals of surrounding cars, over the head of the crucified Jesus in her church, and, briefly, replacing the glans of her partner’s penis just as she was preparing to begin the act of fellatio.
It should be noted that none of this is confirmed, as the segment was pulled by the network less than a day before its scheduled airing, without explanation. Nevertheless, within two weeks of that decision, the video screens were quietly removed from the King’s outlets for comestible distribution, and the increasingly frequent reports of “King hauntings” died down. A tight lid has been clamped on the subject by all involved, and hard information has been difficult to come by.
Until more is known, strict vigilance on the part of the public is almost certainly warranted.