I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.
Full automation certainly is. But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7.
Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities.
In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving.
We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
Instead of a McDonald's order taking about 20s at some cashier it is now multiple minutes at a kiosk.
The work is offloaded to the customer.
It is quite sad since the initial kiosk app was like as fast as the cashier since it didn't try to uppsell you 15 times.
I guess it is a power problem. The employer does not have enough power over the staff to enforce BS procedures that makes them and the customers waste time while programmers happely complies since they are not the 'victims'.
Why use a slower, lossy, error-prone input method rather than tap a screen a few times to make precise choices? This has been solved for over a decade.
there are queues at the kiosk now too. because people take
much longer perusing the interactive menu then they would when there’s the pressure of a cashier in front of them
Id prefer kiosks if there were one button that would take me to "show all" screen, where I could click what I want without navigating trough layers of menus.
They're not paying for the time the customers spend keying in their orders.
To the contrary, they might be earning more by customers getting more than they initially wanted and prompted by visual cues more effective than "would you like fries with that?".
Why does there even need to be a kiosk? Just have a QR code you scan and it installs the app on your phone. The app could then use location services to figure out which restaurant you're standing in and then you can order from the comfort of your own phone. People are used to this now with Uber Eats and Doordash.
You people are actually going to turn me into a ludditic hermit with this shit. I do not want to install random corpo spyware to do literally everything in my life!
don't worry, McDonald's already profiled you via camera and whatever radio emissions your phone and car are making from the moment you entered their parking lot, so you don't need to install their app for them to spy on you.
This could actually work if they used a website and the UX was better.
Instead they're forcing you to choose a strong password, enter your credit card number, specify your age and sex and sign up for spam before letting you choose your appetizer.
The most irritating part is that these UX issues aren't that hard to fix.
i don't visit McDonald, (and I've never used uber eat type services, at least so far) often enough to have thair app on my phone. Not to mention all the other fast food resteraunts in my town. when I travel I often will try a regional chain that isn't in my area, again I don't want their app.
if you eat fast food foremost meals then the apps might make sense. However that isn't healthy.
A QR code is just a bit of text encoded in an easy-to-read scheme (for machines). It lets you link to the app download page on the App Store / Play Store. QR codes cannot run arbitrary code on your phone.
But is it convenient? Really? I've tried this stuff and it's been without exception a subpar and slow experience. I can see how it could be a great experience, it's just that it's always contracted out, framework upon framework shovelware. ad infested if you're lucky.
The only upside I can find, and it correlates with what crowd is positive, that it suits those that really want to avoid human interaction.
That's more or less how it works in China, not only at McDonald's but at almost every restaurant. It's usually not an app but a WeChat mini-program which essentially loads like a website. You can also pay through WeChat so you don't have to type out credit card information or create some user account. I personally really like the user experience.
The complexity is that to save money, you have to automate enough that you can reduce the staffing level. Go from say, 5 people to 4.
When I worked at a radiology firm, they thought having patients fill out forms on an iPad would cost them money. They did it anyways to seem more modern.
That isn't as hard as it sonds becaus demand is veariable all day. if they need the same staf, during the lunch rush but can get rid of someone in the less busy mid afternoon that is more saved than one less for the lunch rush. Lunch rush is the cheapest labor because there are a lot of customers and teamwork means you specialize to work faster. Midday you lose time walking between stations.
My favorite part of this is that most of these setups still ask for the same pieces of information over and over again. Sometimes even on the same page.
> But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7.
Even then, the economics of such terminal isn't clear: for start you need multiple times more such machines than cashiers since everything is much slower on it (for self cash out machines in supermarket the ratio is up to 1 to 6 !) and the kiosks are also insanely expensive (6 figures). And as a result at the end of the day it has not gained that much traction over the past ten years (if you compare it to the deployment of things that were massive successes like credit card, you'll see that the success is much more limited here)
The main reason why it's expensive is that it's almost always outsourced, which drive the cost up a lot. For instance IIRC a self cash-out machine costs around $50k, for something that should cost less than $3k to manufacture with a trivial software stack. And many things are like that.
Are you saying the _cost_ of manufacturing is 17x (50/3) what it should be, or are you saying that the selling price is 17x the manufacture cost and the market isn't operating to reduce the price?
Are you referring to a McDo ordering machine, or a generic [supermarket] self-checkout machine?
Here I'm referring to a supermarket self check-out machine.
And what I'm saying is that the cost for supermarket is 17x higher than it would be should they internalize the manufacturing and software development process. Outsourcing incurs a lot of additional costs in addition to the actual production costs in addition to the manufacturer's margin.
As long as big companies don't understand that technology is a key component of their business, whatever it is, they won't be able to leverage it to even a fraction of its potential (not holding my breath though…).
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[ 27.7 ms ] story [ 1225 ms ] threadI got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.
Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities.
In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving.
We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
The work is offloaded to the customer.
It is quite sad since the initial kiosk app was like as fast as the cashier since it didn't try to uppsell you 15 times.
I guess it is a power problem. The employer does not have enough power over the staff to enforce BS procedures that makes them and the customers waste time while programmers happely complies since they are not the 'victims'.
The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.
Or are you concerned that the app is not compatible with the Android 9-based custom ROM you are rocking?
Instead they're forcing you to choose a strong password, enter your credit card number, specify your age and sex and sign up for spam before letting you choose your appetizer.
The most irritating part is that these UX issues aren't that hard to fix.
if you eat fast food foremost meals then the apps might make sense. However that isn't healthy.
Those at wordt thatll never enter my mind. At all. Why do people surrender their hardware so easily?
Order food on my phone and they walk it out to my car while I'm listening to ads on the radio. Win, win for everyone.
And I have the McD's app so locked down I'm surprised they actually let me order food.
The only upside I can find, and it correlates with what crowd is positive, that it suits those that really want to avoid human interaction.
When I worked at a radiology firm, they thought having patients fill out forms on an iPad would cost them money. They did it anyways to seem more modern.
My favorite part of this is that most of these setups still ask for the same pieces of information over and over again. Sometimes even on the same page.
Or stuff like "todays date". Really?
Even then, the economics of such terminal isn't clear: for start you need multiple times more such machines than cashiers since everything is much slower on it (for self cash out machines in supermarket the ratio is up to 1 to 6 !) and the kiosks are also insanely expensive (6 figures). And as a result at the end of the day it has not gained that much traction over the past ten years (if you compare it to the deployment of things that were massive successes like credit card, you'll see that the success is much more limited here)
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-differ...
Are you referring to a McDo ordering machine, or a generic [supermarket] self-checkout machine?
And what I'm saying is that the cost for supermarket is 17x higher than it would be should they internalize the manufacturing and software development process. Outsourcing incurs a lot of additional costs in addition to the actual production costs in addition to the manufacturer's margin.
As long as big companies don't understand that technology is a key component of their business, whatever it is, they won't be able to leverage it to even a fraction of its potential (not holding my breath though…).