For as long as there have been machines, there have been fears of machines taking your job. One of the latest incarnations of this phenomenon is the fast-food ordering kiosk. No longer will you have some teenager asking you if you want fries with that. These days, you are more likely going to find the question on a touch screen. So, are those poor kids out of an entry-level job? Apparently not, according to a recent CNN story.
According to McDonald’s, a business that embraces the kiosks, the new technology increases sales and creates more jobs, albeit more jobs further behind the counter. Part of the reason is that while “Do you want fries with that” is a cliche, it is also a sound business practice. Cashiers should try to upsell but don’t always do so. The kiosk always remembers to offer you an apple pie or whatever else they want to move today.
Of course, there are other new jobs. A decade ago, very few restaurants would deliver food to your car while you were parked. Now, that’s practically a norm, and it requires humans for now. Of course, there are other studies that show people at kiosks with a line behind them tend to order less or have more trouble entering their order. But the consensus seems to be that it is generally a good thing and is leading to more jobs in the sector instead of less.
We like tech, of course. We can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a case where the computer isn’t great, but it is better than what you are likely to get in real life. If you are feeling smug with your job at the grill, don’t worry. The robots are coming for you next. What do you think? Are robots, AI, and tech taking jobs or making them?
doesnt make much sense to me.
Are McDonalds expanding their kitchens to accommodate additional workers?
There are only so many spots and positions to work in a kitchen.
There are only so many windows to pass food through.
You dont need more staff to clean up the same dining room.
If kiosks eliminate counter positions, then what new positions are they creating?
The entire article is a bunch of double speak. The kiosks increase orders, wait no they cause confusion and require guide workers, no wait they upsell, no wait they dont.
And finally, last but not least. NOT A HACK!
The short answer is yes kitchens have expanded.
The kiosk and app also encourage logging in (QR code in UK), and subsequently upsell you expertly.
It is telling however that Greggs which offers mostly a counter service has dethroned McDonald’s etc in breakfast and lunch service.
Greggs has a loyalty app and in their you can order on the app. But the main service is a good old queue.
Nandos has a very clean app (limited upsells, smooth process) and is dethroning McDonald’s in dinner service.
Weatherspoons has a brilliant app, very quick to use no upselling. Recently updated their app to be even nicer to use.
All this to say I suspect McDonald’s expecting failed, I hate their clunky app even though it has a reorder option you spend ages clicking and swiping to complete that order. The kiosk is dizzying even when you know what you want with lame upselling.
kitchens have not expanded in the US. In fact if anything, with the implementation of automatic french fry machines, and automatic drink machines, and drive thru operators in call centers, the number of positions in back have decreased.
I’m incompatible with most touchscreens.
They just dont work with my fingers.
Either hand. Regardless of what work I’ve been doing or how clean/dirty my hands may be.
The future isn’t looking too rosy for me.
Counter service is great but things where there used to be buttons and touchscreens are replacing is a problem.
I often have to ask passers by for help.
Does that qualify as a disability?
At least in my area, fast food restraunts are chronically understaffed, so eliminating a position just means a worker who isn’t splitting their focus between two tasks. For cashier, it’s usually both taking orders to drive through customers that have pull forward from the window and cleaning the dining room, leading to delays where they have to get back to the register to take lobby orders.
“According to McDonald’s”. That’s all you need to read from this.
The whole thing is an obvious and transparent PR stunt. Why is this here in a first place?
And according to me, if I want a cheeseburger, at almost the same distance from a McDonalds, there’s a a pub with ten beers on tap that makes great burgers and sandwiches.
There are displays but there’s normally a football match, sometimes even a basketball or a volley match, and the audio you can listen is the commenter, not the McD adverts.
Yup this entire article is bullshit.
In the UK.
If I’m desperately hungry an there is no other alternative at all, I’d still avoid McDonalds and keep driving.
I’d go to Wimpy before McDonalds.
There are so many places better than McDonalds. I struggle to understand my fellow humans.
What ever the case, my wife and wonder … when a cashier is behind the counter, yet people come in an’ line up behind a kiosk… Makes no sense to me … or order on their cell, yet clerk is ‘right there’. As you probably can tell we prefer for the counter guy/gal to take our order and our cash. Makes sense to us. Then go sit down and have it set before you, and eat it there. Has part of our humanity lost touch with this lack of human interaction? Makes me wonder if the epidemic didn’t foul up some brains as this seems to be an after-the-fact oddity…. The fast food restaurants used to be ‘full’ of people eating and interacting… Kids playing in the play area, etc. I think it is getting better, but most get it to ‘go’ and either drive through, or order at a Kiosk…. I don’t understand the new mentality I guess….
This human interaction was lost when the minimum wage people at the counter are making no longer lets them survive and have any savings. When you are barely scraping by and hate your job, interacting with random people is the last thing you want to do. Same applies to other people around. Pandemic further transferred money from people that need them the most to people that don’t need them at all.
And people that are thinking about “good old times” are likely older and probably more financially secure. Those people rarely get that younger generations are screwed.
And as usual, this “automation” makes the real people poorer and CEOs and shareholders richer.
When I was growing up (and even my kids generation)…. The fast food cashiers were considered jobs for the high school kids. Make a little extra cash. Not a career choice.
Yes, but then economy (both world and local) got messed up so much that for a lot of people working fast food became one of the very few available options. Fast food and other low wage jobs are no longer to make extra cash.
We automated a lot of jobs and continue to do so with garbage that is described in the article. Yet we did not actually create a lot of replacement positions. And everything that can go overseas in any way, goes overseas.
Treating fast food as a “real job” and demanding enough pay to retire on serving burgers is exactly what’s wrong with the economy: it’s not a productive job that creates new value for people to consume, it’s a service job that merely facilitates more consumption.
When the masses go for the most obvious option and simply try to sell to each other without contributing to what is being sold they’re causing inflation and destroying the purchasing power of their own wages.
@Alex Taradov
“… that for a lot of people working fast food became one of the very few available jobs. ….”
OK, I’ll be the one to call bullshirt on this statement. it’s a lie.
These people can get an education like everyone else who’s successful. There is PLENTY of free education to be had today. They are lazy drains on society if they expect a fast food frontend or backend job to be a career. There, someone has to speak the truth.
Also, this is not a hack!
@Dude If it’s so easy that it’s not worth paying “real” wages, it must not “really” matter if it gets done. You can cook your own food and serve it to yourself during school hours then, right? After all, the reason someone is in that job is because they’re a kid whose room and board is covered, right? Everyone else needs enough to live on, and has to take a “real” job if they can. But don’t worry, service jobs don’t produce value, so your life won’t be any worse or shorter if you order your medical supplies direct from the factory and do your own brain surgery instead of paying someone to do it since there is no such thing in your world as a valuable service. Oh, and I’m sure nobody needs to pay for the service of bringing supplies to a place of production and bringing the results to consumers. Boy, it sounds like outside of factory lines, there’s nothing but ungrateful lazy avocado toast eaters who ought to be grateful they’re not on minimum wage. Hmm, and those factories, they sure seem to budget a lot for supporting services like IT and maintenance. And if you really think about it, these machines are what’s really doing the production, not the guys standing there pushing buttons. So really, nobody is doing a “real” job at all! Let’s take all those wages we just saved and jet off to tahiti, boys – separate jets of course, we’re not peasants after all.
What’s the point of working if you can’t live off what you’re making from that work?
Our economy is structured on being paid for one’s work, and that money is needed to afford shelter, clothing, food, …
That whole ‘jobs for high school kids’ is complete bull – if it’s a job which society needs done, then it’s a job worth paying a living wage for.
When people say that, they’re talking about experience, not wages.
Just saying…. It was the way it worked here in our area (as said above … my experience) . My kids worked in fast food last years of high school, then went military, two got degrees on the GI bill, and youngest one went to the Naval Academy and is now flying for the Navy. So it goes. That was our experience. Growing up in the 70s the kids were always working the counter it seemed like. And they were happy about it. I never did as didn’t appeal to me. I worked one summer as a furniture delivery person in high school, then worked part time while going to college at local power company doing things like folding transmission maps, filing drawings, backing up computers into the wee hours of Friday nights , odd jobs, while other kids were out on the town…
@Oxdeadbeef
Exactly when did “society” NEED a fast food cashier job? Just because McDonalds created one? Your argument makes absolutely no sense…
If society didn’t want fast food, the demand we see today wouldn’t be there.
If the fast food corporations didn’t someone to take orders and handle payment, they wouldn’t have had cashiers.
Yes, the article is about cashiers being replaced by machines, and how it’s creating more jobs – but the person I’m arguing with is claiming fast food jobs ‘are for high schoolers’.
The demand exist, because it’s cheap and fast food, thanks to low wages and other optimizations. If it was proper restaurant quality food served by well-paid workers, you wouldn’t be able to afford it.
There are some jobs that only make sense if they’re essentially worked by high school kids in need of some pocket money. If you try to make grown up money on them, your labor becomes too expensive for the business to exist and either the job disappears or you’re replaced by a robot.
What’s the point in our societies funding there being a choice ?
It’s just waste.
If your growing up was in the 80’s or later you’re lying to yourself and just don’t realize how people live. If your growing up was earlier than that the US had more non-starter jobs to get, and a lot of the high school related jobs were requiring a relatively high level of education compared to the many that you didn’t need even that. Factory jobs were the norm in cities and farming or resource gathering (logging, fishing, mining) jobs were the norm outside of that. We now do very little of any of those and prefer to import all products and export most labor.
In 1992. I was working as a grill cook at a steak house making $6.50/hr. My girlfriend was taking orders at McDs making minimum wage, $4.25/hr, bringing home a whopping $110 week. 5 of us shared an $800/mo 2 bedroom apartment.
The only people our age that had their own apartments were being subsidized by rich parents, stripping or waiting tables at fine dining restaurants. The rest of us banded together and scraped by.
I dont think its so much that we had it easier, as much as we had different, more reasonable, expectations of our lives.
I spent my 30s and most of my 40s as a single father.. Im 50 and have never really been financially secure but I still think of those “good old times” fondly.
Who says working at McDonalds, one of the least skilled jobs on earth, should provide a livable wage by itself? It shouldn’t … I worked at a similar job part time during high school.
I say so. Any job with full-time hours should provide a livable wage. Otherwise you’re saying “I want this job to be done, but the person doing it does not deserve to live.” If the market can’t bear that, then the job shouldn’t exist at all.
Also, if fast food is exclusively a job for high schoolers, who makes the burgers at noon and midnight? Somebody’s gotta be there.
Define livable wage.
These days people seem to think its enough money to live alone, eat out regularly, have a dozen entertainment subscriptions, a car, insurance, and ALL the things.
If you want all that, I suggest you move on from your entry level minimum wage position as soon as you are able to build enough skills and experience to qualify for something better. These sorts of jobs are not meant to be careers. They are stepping stones.
Replying to the parent because I accidentally reported the last comment and it no longer lets me reply to it.
Livable wage should at the very least cover rent in the cheapest available apartment in the city where the job is located. Yes, one apartment for a single person, no that 5 roommates BS.
If you are one of the 1.2% of american workers who earn minimum wage or below you NEED roommates. You SHOULD need roommates. AGAIN these jobs are not supposed to be life long careers. They are stepping stones. Get to stepping.
In my complex, a studio costs $X. A 1BR costs 1.12X. A 2br costs 1.25X. A 3br costs 1.38X. SO if you have 3 roommates in a 3br youre paying less than half what a studio would cost you. If 3 couples share the place your only paying 22% of what you would to live in a studio, so you and your SO are looking at saving more than half what you would pay to live together in the studio.
Get an education. Get job skills. Get a better job. OR get roommates. Your call. Stop expecting to WIN life just by playing.
You should look into the history of the minimum wage here in the US, then.
Roosevelt proposed it as part of the New Deal, and he had this to say about the minimum wage:
— http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html
You’ll note he says nothing about ‘stepping stones’, but he quite clearly says that workers should make ‘more than a bare subsistence level’ worth of wages.
‘Stepping stones’. ‘Jobs for high schoolers’. These ideas have infiltrated our notion of the economy, likely from those who Roosevelt would label as running a business which has no right to continue in this country.
The issue isn’t that the jobs are low-skilled, but that the only reason people would want to work them is to earn enough money to live. There’s no excuse to pay workers anything less than what’s needed to survive, but yet, those excuses abound.
People always deserve a living wage, regardless of whether their role is skilled or unskilled. You’re paying for their time and effort, and “unskilled workers” tend to work far harder than you or I do in our cushy well paid office jobs.
Do you yell at them when there’s a problem with your order, too?
Unskilled, zero knowledge labor is paid according to the knowledge and skill required to do the job.
Fast food is thus paid minimum wage…. while welders/plumbers/electricians make really good money. Also those jobs I mentioned take on apprentices, which these fast food workers could do while being paid to do it.
“Deserve”? Welcome to piracy and IP where there’s no lost income, and people will tell you they’re not obligated to support your “business” model.
The majority of people live beyond their means regardless of what they earn.
I’ve been a saver all my life in whatever job I’ve had.
People simply dont believe my finanicals. They are an order of magnitude beyond the comprehension of most people again earning at any level I’ve earned at.
It’s not complicated, it’s just choices and comprise. But people want a “keep up with the Jones’s” lifestyle more than ever thanks to socials.
why shouldn’t it? You’re sacrificing 8 hours or more of your life for the sake of feeding others, in not that great conditions. If you work full time, you should be able to rent a cheap apartment and have enough left to have food security and to invest in your future. Regardless of what the job actually is, the fact that you’re working for about 40 hours per week means you sacrifice enough of your life to deserve the right on a stable place to live and to have basic but healthy food on the table.
The problem is that it’s not worth the money to sell burgers to people. It’s a superfluous service that exists merely because the workers are paid little and the food is cheap crud that nobody should eat in the first place.
If you’re not getting paid enough, the message from the market is to quit working fast food and think of something else. Trying to force the case by minimum wages etc. is really trapping the people in.
If it’s so easy, then once everyone who can has gotten a better job and there’s no-one left to do it, you can do it yourself.
Minimum wage was never livable and shouldn’t be.
It is a zero skill, zero knowledge job. Those working them also qualify for food stamps and have multiple educational opportunities to gain knowledge and skill to leave said minimum wage job.
We should not be rewarding those who do the bare minimum
We should absolutely not be rewarding those thinking it’s okay to think that lowly of anyone working in a hot kitchen full time, and think those people are not deserving of a place where they can live and study (and afford to study) in piece.
Minimum wage does not equal minimum effort. Minimum wage jobs can be very high effort. I’ve done DIY retail for minimum wage, and that job required a whole bunch of knowledge about where to find any of 150.000 products in store, and all the weird shit people ask about diy’ing stuff. And of course heavy lifting, all day everyday.
Payment should reflect the amount of time and energy something costs. That is obviously not related to the amount of knowledge or skill it requires. A ton of people work cushy office jobs, that require little skill or particular knowledge, but concentrating on a computer screen with boring numbers for an entire day takes a lot of effort, to give an example. And so does working in a kitchen.
Just because it’s uncomfortable and takes a lot of effort doesn’t mean a job is actually valuable.
There are jobs that are net negative value for the society all things counted – and why should anyone pay a “living wage” for something like that? If you force the case, you destroy the economic signal created by supply and demand and your society loses track of what goods and services are actually needed.
You can ask, which brings more prosperity: more people flipping burgers, or more people raising cows for the burgers?
Maybe we should also pay those third wolders that make our socks enough that they can take 2 weeks vacation in Italy every year as well. Then we can all pay 50 dollars per pair and not have enough to eat out either.
Tbh the third wolders that make our socks probably deserve more than the rejects that flip our burgers…
UK here.
The human interaction was lost when the British born first language English people stopped working (felt it was beneath them, benefits life) and people who dont speak English well replaced them, mostly immigrants.
Interaction is not fun when the person behind the counter isn’t listening, isn’t understanding you and is frankly getting aggressive about it often due to cultural differences.
Kiosks take away the need to speak to people.
And since we also have a generation of kids that frankly dont even know how to communicate, no surprise that replacing people with kiosks is a way to de-escalate the problem.
The kitchen can speak whatever languages they want to each other if they are not customer facing, which leads to cohesive team work there.
So remove the problem. Problem solved.
Bet you a nickel those kids can communicate with each other just fine, you just can’t understand them.
My only goal when going to a fast food restaurant is to get food and possibly even eat it. There is not a thought in my head to socially interact with anyone around me, and I can confidently say that most people around me think the same (I’m Finnish).
My only option of reaching said goal of procuring food back in the good old days was to speak to the clerk. Now I have the additional option of NOT speaking to the clerk, which I greatly appreciate and utilize at every opportunity.
My point being: I don’t think mentality has changed much, we are still the same messed up group of mostly grumpy anti-social seeking individuals as we always were. The only change is that we now have additional options to be even more grumpy and anti-social, which is a great step forward in the human experience.
Oh and as an addition to being Finnish I am also an engineer, double the risk of being introvert…
The “hack” happens after you eat the food.
I fail to see how this constitutes a hack in even the broadest terms.
I’m okay with an article about the current times like this. I just wish they would stop with the opinion pieces like the one about elitism.
Why is “creating more jobs” a good thing? Isn’t that just inefficiency? Shouldn’t we optimize tasks to require fewer jobs?
Ever heard of ‘Unemployment’?
Ideally we should automate. But then the corporation should be taxed enough, to pay for the unemployment benefits of those who are made redundant due to automation, or to pay for the universal basic income.
That’s obviously never gonna happen, so the best we can do is make sure people can work for their money even if it could be automated.
So because our economic system is incompatible with mass automation, we instead dig holes and fill them back up again, just to pat ourselves on the back? I don’t support this at all.
It’s not just our economic system. It’s any economic system.
It’s always more costly to maintain both the people and the mass automation, as opposed to just having the people work for the same economic value – if possible. Automation is only needed if the workforce cannot meet the demand for particular goods.
In practice, it’s much more costly to delegate productive labor to machines, because the people end up doing unnecessary make-work in order to justify their own pay instead, and that work consumes extra resources for nothing. The only way to fix this is to ban people from working and pay them government rations to live, but you wouldn’t want that as a system either.
No we should not. First we need to put people to work, and if the people cannot meet demand, then we should automate.
The cost of the people doesn’t go away: when you automate productive jobs, the real social cost doesn’t go down. You have both the displaced laborer and the automated system to maintain, which costs more than merely having the people do the work.
Even if the machines were more efficient and displaced multiple workers, it’s the same deal: the many workers now occupy themselves in non-productive service jobs, or administrative jobs, or some other frivolous business that costs more than it produces in real terms, in order to earn their living – or they’re subsiding on unemployment and social aid – so the total cost just went up.
Maintaining both man and machine costs the upkeep of both man and machine, but since the demand depends on the man and not the machine, the total value produced depends on how much the man can afford to buy. Since the man is paid less because of the machine, the machine actually ends up producing less consumable value, not more, while the total cost to the society is greater. It turns out these “labor saving machines” merely end up reducing the living standards for most people.
The solution to your problem appears to be that we need less people.
Then you’ve solved what you call the “social cost” of automation.
Or.. We could reduce the population. Either via eugenics (kill the stupid) or just end mass migration or smth. Seem like simpler solutions than increase the population and tax everybody more so there can be more useless consumption..
I could have installed the kiosks, but I was busy installing the menu boards, and I made the mistake of installing the table tracker matrix once. So there’s jobs for doing that created, and it pays $50 hr or more. We used to make 1k installing the menu boards in 1 day. And we took about the same amount of care as they take with the food, “good enough for who it’s for” was our line. I’ll quote the Kiosk installing guy “it’s just a goddamn McDonalds”. They don’t shutdown while we do this, they still operate the drive thru, so all the contractors are skating on french fries, electricians, plumbers, kiosk guy, me, all working on top of each other while they cook food.
I won’t eat there, not even the coffee. The place is a shitshow through and through, up and down, in all ways.
If this were medieval times 90+% of us would be unfree agricultural serfs, with a thin veneer of nobles and priests on top.
Personally, I think that the serfs (not to mention outright slaves) “losing their jobs” was a positive thing. Likewise McDonalds jobs.
One apartment for each person has never been the norm, anywhere on earth, at any time in human history.
The mean U.S.. household size (i.e., the number of people living in a single dwelling unit) is 2.51. UK: 2.4. China: 2.6.
Covering just the apartment cost is a generic easy to measure metric. Ok, cover the apartment cost minus 1.5 roommates plus food plus utilities plus some amount of savings.
2.5 people is just a family with 0 or 1 kids. But before you form a family, you should be able to afford to live on your own. And a full time job should provide than no matter what the job is.
It is the mean number of people per occupied dwelling unit, regardless of their relationship.
For family households, it’s more than 3.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/hh-6.pdf
Do you realize times change? People live alone much more often, get married less, have fewer children. So now there’s a need for accomodation for single people.
In the Netherlands, it was very common for people to have their own apartment to themselves, the second they got out of student housing.
It’s only recently that the pieces of shit in charge have been suggesting that it’s a good idea to force multiple working adults to live in one apartment. Don’t let anyone manipulate you into thinking it’s either good or ‘the norm’ to squish a bunch of random adults into one house.
Fast food kiosks are garbage. I’ve been to two places that refuse to take my order at the counter. Their register POS is faster and they (should) have muscle memory for where items are on the register. The kiosk is a horrible user experience (it and self-checkouts are infuriatingly slow).
I’ve walked out because the UI is so bad. The two places that insisted on my entering my order on their kiosk? I haven’t been back since walking out on the guy trying to “show me how” to enter my order on the kiosk.
This post is garbage (about garbage) and shouldn’t be on Hack-A-Day
^This
Touch screens so customers can order food on restaurant kiosks SPREAD DISEASE!
Kiosks are fun. Double tapping the corners or holding down one finger and double tapping with another sometimes gives you a prompt. I’ve seen it work at grocery stores and department store kiosks.
Anyone else have a fun kiosk tip?
I’m not a fan of self-checkout kiosks, mostly as they don’t work really well for me. If you place a simple order, it’s usually fine, but this still takes up to 20 clicks to get through all the menus. I’d rather click the item I want, pay, and move on. There are a few places with these kiosks I’m actively avoiding, as when I’m there I just want food.
Do these machines have real time analytics similar to web stores? I also suspect they have cameras, perform AB testing, and train their AI models to increase their sales.
My use of McD, BK etc has gone up with the kiosks. No useless discussions about “no onions” and “no ice” and if they mess up I just return and wait for a corrected order, because the order was recorded without typos.
Plus one can see what is in a product.
Plus table service, so the jobs are still there.
I remember a few years back reading about a national chain (KFC maybe?) that due to an internet outage, lost all of their drive through ordering nation wide because their order kiosks were actually sending orders through a national central ordering system (so they could know where supplies & food needed to be distributed without the local stores having to take action) When you drove up to the kiosk, you were not interacting with the local store, but with some remotely located system that remotely passed your order on to the local store.
COVID forced a lot of changes.
I like McD’s. But mind you, we know the franchise owner and most of the staff at our local one, and get treated very well. The owner and manager run a tight ship. And that location is by far the cheapest McD in the area. I don’t care for the kiosk, but their app is excellent, or at least far far better than the apps for their competing fast food joints.
“A decade ago, very few restaurants would deliver food to your car while you were parked.”
I don’t understand this sentence. It makes me feel less than.
il make my own damn burger thank you.
I get more exceptions at a kiosk. I don’t feel the risk of a screwed up order because of a miscommunication. It’s still possible for an order to be wrong, but that’s because they misread the order, where as by taking an order aurally they risk hearing it wrong, keying it wrong and reading it wrong.
Unless you sanitize these touchscreens yourself before use, they are a vector for disease. Fecal matter and ball-sweat. Do YOU trust the random Joe Public in front of you to have washed his hands in the last 5 minutes?
Sure, you could say that the staff at the counter are not much better… but at least we have some basic failsafe in the form of a shift manager and at worst, a public health inspector.
Fully agree. In a world where today’s wildly improbable politics exist, I do not trust Random Joe Public. Period.
A TinyHack™ that will reduce the issue to some limited extent: use a knuckle instead of a fingertip when kiosking. And, of course, wash your hands before diving into that gristleburger.
Wash your hands regularly and stop picking your nose in public.
It’s a dirty world. Adapt to it.
Waged employees have little incentive for consistency or quality, and rightly so. I want to support them, but I refuse to give more money to poorly managed restaraunt investment groups. I want to see their bosses and owners out of business and gone from my community, more than I want to pity tip min wage folks.
Who knew there were so many communists reading HD?
Maybe thats why they consider it an “elitist” blog….
Local Taco Bell took down their menu boards and went completely kiosk only. They have a single hidden cash register for those insisting on paying with cash, but otherwise you must order through the kiosk.
I was hesitant with kiosks at first, but so long as they continue to provide a way to order without having to provide a login/rewards numbers, I’m ok with it.
The main advantage is order customization. Too many times a cashier would misunderstand what I want, or lack knowledge of their product, or just outright punched in the wrong items. This can be problematic if you have certain dietary goals and/or restrictions. The kiosk clearly shows what modifications can be made and puts the onus on me and the kitchen to get the order right.
I much prefer using the kiosk or my phone to put in an order. Then at least I know my order has been input correctly vs someone only half paying attention to what i’m asking for. It SLIGHTLY increases my chances of receiving the correct order
Not a hack