All the McD*nalds in my area have been upgraded with order kiosks. Regardless of all the controversy around self-checkout, and minimum wage, and automation taking our jobs, I personally love them. I can take my sweet time composing my order, I can see the full selection (such as it is), I can see pictures and prices clearly without having to strain my eyes to read 12pt font on the tableau, and I don’t have to shout at the cashier to be understood or struggle to hear back. I really believe this is the right way forward.
My only complaint so far has been that the order kiosks only accept card. There is actually a way to pay by cash that the machine never lets you know about - you have to press “cancel” on the keypad when it asks to insert card, and then the screen gives you an order number to give to the human cashier (each store still has one register open) so you can pay in cash. So I still have to wait on line, but at least my order selection is locked in, I can have exact change ready, and there isn’t usually a line anyway anymore.
I know all yall Europeans are proud about your nearly total transition to cashless economy or whatever, and you like to boast how not a single euro banknote has graced the inside of your wallet in months. However I personally like cash, and I genuinely believe that a cash payment system is a necessary element of a liberal democracy and secure society. So at least understand my pleasant surprise when I saw these reverse-ATM cashboxes at this restaurant. They work and were being actively used too! (It spat out my dollar coins though, those bastards!) I hope they find their way into more places.
In a just society these would be allowed to relieve all cashiers from their positions to pursue their passions.
But we must slave away to justify our existence because a few rich fucks don’t want to share and established that mindset as the cornerstone of society.
I just wanted to wail into the void about automation and how our loves could be so much better if people would just lose the chains already.
Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don’t have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can’t afford the product they used to make.
They tell us “Replacing jobs is OK! We’ll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!” but the new jobs are mostly “telemarketer”, and “tech support scammer”, and “ornamental hermit” at factory owner’s mansion.
But all that still doesn’t convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!
I miss the early days of the internet when I was dreaming of gay luxury space communism.
I’m thinking of printing some calling cards with the title of Ornamental Hermit.
Or does one just put up a sign?
Enjoy!
https://www.delish.com/food-news/a25337533/mcdonalds-touchscreen-fecal-bacteria/
Test Finds McDonald’s Touchscreens Are Covered in Fecal Bacteria
https://www.fatherly.com/news/study-fecal-bacteria-mcdonalds-touchscreen
Etc
Welcome to pretty much every public surface.
Now let me tell you how many of the guys at your business meeting today washed their hands between their last toilet use and shaking your hand.
So underpaid and overworked entry level laborers aren’t cleaning them to sterile perfection. Oh no. Shocker
Counter point: if the screen is covered, what makes you think the door handle those same hands are touching is sanitary? What about the table and chair you’re sitting at? Other people sit there too, do you really think those tables are getting wiped down after every single patron leaves?
This is why we wash our hands before we eat.
Your mom is covered in fecal bacteria.
I occasionally deliberately put a capsule filled with fecal bacteria in my mouth and swallow it and it makes my pooping better.
You’re going to eat McDonalds food.
Out of all the positions at fast food restaurants, cashier seems to most appealing to me.
12 pt font on the tableau
Just putting it out there fast food everywhere that have overhead menu screens seem to LOVE to keep swapping the displayed items, or cover up half the screen with random seasonal product ads which makes this problem 10x worse.
I like the order kiosks when they run fast and are no bullshit steps to order. A Costco hotdog I can order in 2 quick taps and one more with my card. Others are more annoying for one reason or another, some to the point where I’d rather someone do the cashier work for me.
Yeah, the Costco food kiosks are the gold standard. One screen with all items, big buttons, responsive, and obvious checkout process. I can literally order for the family in under thirty seconds with the receipt in hand. It’s like magic.
Yeah, I’m in the drive thru and about to order when suddenly the list of items is replaced by a fucking ad. I’m already here and ordering, calm down with the fucking marketing.
I’m living in Europe now and would like to share my experience with this:
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When you proceed to pay, the machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine. So I’m quite surprised that your machines work differently
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Quite a few European countries actually still rely heavily on cash to the point of cash-only for a lot of shops, for example in Germany and Italy
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Besides your list, one other advantage I found was being able to order overseas when the locals didn’t speak English at all and I couldn’t read the menu. In Norway, there’s an option to select English or Norsk. In Poland where I went, there wasn’t a choice but it didn’t matter because the menu is mostly universal so the pictures were sufficient
machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine
Good to know, thanks! It used to be this way here too, but they stopped displaying the “cash at counter” option on the screen entirely after one of the interface redesigns. What they really want to force you to do is use the app all the time, so they can have better tracking and would have no need for cashiers OR kiosks.
I’ve helped people order at various restaurants here in Japan before, and the kiosks definitely help in cases where people need to customize to avoid certain foods, etc. which are often hard when neither party speaks the same language.
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Haha, you eat at McDonalds!
Honestly, I feel like it gets an unfairly bad rap. Their fries are super good imo. I can get 20 chicken nuggets and a large fries, which feeds me for 2 meals, for $7. It’s really hard to beat that.
It’s not great food, but it’s cheap AF, it’s really fast, and I think it’s not as bad as people act like it is.
It’s certainly not as bad as people make it out to be, but give me Wendy’s any day over McDonald’s. This is obviously subjective but I like Wendy’s fries and chicken FAR better than McDonald’s. That said, there is something about McDonald’s breakfast (especially those hash browns).
A&W has pretty good breakfast, too. They don’t have the burritos but their sandwiches and hash browns are great. Good for dinner, too. I go back and forth between A&W and Wendy’s. Arby’s would be on that list, too, if it wasn’t so far.
This is America, pal. We don’t have your weird Canadian fast food restaurants. What’s next, telling us to fill up at the Esso station? Bah.
McDonalds was good, for is price, when they had a dollar menu meal. And value menu items were 2(ish) to 3(ish) dollars.
Shhh, don’t tell them!
McDonalds ketchup contains heroin.
I know all yall Europeans are proud about your nearly total transition to cashless economy or whatever, and you like to boast how not a single euro banknote has graced the inside of your wallet in months.
Tell me you’ve never been to Germany without telling me you’ve never been to Germany
Yeah, very odd assumption that one.
I’ve seen that on Lemmy many times. “I’m in Europe and we only have tap to pay and contactless pay and psychic powers to pay and it’s been that way for the last 700 years.”
We had a storm recently that caused power and Internet outages across our city for about a week. Many businesses opened up with no power and just accepted cash while writing down sales with a pen and paper. If you didn’t have cash on you, you were screwed. None of the ATMs worked. Nobody’s credit card machines worked. The banks didn’t have power, so they were closed. Going cashless leaves you in a heap of trouble in an emergency.
Only in a society that requires cash. They could have just handed people a meal when the walked up and asked for one. there would be no difference except a few executives don’t get their cut.
I always carry cash, probably around $100. Not enough that it would be a problem if I got mugged but plenty if I hit a point where I need something essential (food/fuel) to get home or something. I also keep a $20 in the car for fuel if I somehow forget my wallet and run low.
Granted, I only ever use it in a pinch, might as well get the rewards on my credit card instead. But I do on occasion hit a restaurant/store where their internet is down and it’s cash-only.
In Canada less just over a year ago one major telecom provider’s network went down completely for a couple days… a bunch of businesses couldn’t accept debit or credit, ATMs stopped working, at some places but others running on competitor networks were working. It was still a big annoyance and people got nothing except for sorry! and maybe 20 dollars from carrier at fault (Rogers)
I personally hate them for most of the same reasons that you like them.
First off they are slow to use. Part of that is because things are buried in menus, and part is from the annoying up-selling screens. Using them take 4-5 times longer in my experience. I don’t go there often enough to justify it.
Second, if you are paying cash, you still have to wait in line and see an actual human. Might as well just order with them.
Third, I am nearsighted but I have good glasses. The small font on the menu boards don’t bother me. I would rather see the entire thing while in line. Make my decision and order to a person.
All good points! When these kiosks started out, they were ridiculously laggy, way more than a simple GUI had any right to be, as if every tap and swipe had to be proxied through New Zealand. Thankfully the lag has been solved in one of the interface updates since.
The upsell spam is still annoying, but having used the interface a couple times I have become the Neo of offer dodging. *Tap tap tap* (No I don’t want to log in. Yes I am sure I don’t want to log in. No, I don’t want to make it a meal. No I don’t want to add a soda or side of nuggets. Checkout. Cancel payment. Done!) Would be better without, but currently manageable. As others have mentioned, they already managed to fuck up the tableau screens above the counter by having the images move around, so that if you want to know how much a medium fry would cost you have to wait through 30 seconds of slideshow first, and then not miss the 2 seconds that the price is actually on screen. The kiosk is actually the winner for me here.
The waiting in line to pay cash was my last problem, which is why I got excited to see these automatic cashboxes installed. Money goes in, food comes out.
When I was traveling in South Korea they had these at some counter service and fast food restaurants. Since often people didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Korean they were immensely helpful. They had several languages and settings that made ordering so much easier. From an accessibility standpoint they are awesome.
I’ve known these for about… 4 or 5 years? I guess. Not much of a fast food client.
But these work. These really work. Less hands on the front, less confusion to deal with, the order goes from the customer hands to the kitchen: if something goes wrong with it, you fumbled it. And with less hands on the front, more hands can be in the back, preparing the cholesterol bombs.
if something goes wrong with it, you fumbled it
You’re making the bold (and wrong) assumption that the people making the order are completely infallible…i still have to go back and get them to make my actual order quite often. As soon as you deviate from default, there’s a huge risk they mess up.
I’ve been ordering deviations of the standard menu since I was introduced to McD in my teens and ever since I started paying for my own food I don’t really order basic menus but instead mix and match to my wims for the moment. I’m weird.
Can not remember ever getting a wrong order but I’m also aware my local McD has less items on the menu than, per comparison, the one from the US market.
So, perhaps a combination of luck and good service on my part?
It really depends what you’re regularly ordering, how busy it is, what modifications you made, and location.
Like say, you wanted a quarter pounder but you wanted the dehydrated onions instead of slivered. Good chance that gets messed up. Ketchup no mustard (or vice versa), also a good chance it gets messed up (due to muscle memory).
What?!
We don’t get that here. Ketchup comes on packets on the side and your sandwhich either comes with or without sauce. No mustard.
Dehydrated onions sound nice but not in a McD.
Less choice, better service, I’ll risk.
What country? The more you say the less it sounds like you’re talking about an American McDonald’s.
Portugal, my good friend
If you’ve regularly had great experience… never ever have McD’s in the USA.
Dehydrated onions are the onions they use (at least in the US) for like cheeseburgers, hamburgers, and Big Macs.
They’re next. Soon enough you’ll walk into a fast food restaurant and the only employees will be a maintenance man and a janitor. Everything else will be automated.
I’ll bet this is why McDonald’s was fine with the $20 minimum wage increase in California. They’ll just use kiosks that smaller places can’t afford, to offset the new labor charges. But then smaller places won’t be able to appeal to employees, since they will be paying less than half of what the chains pay. The result will be fewer actual jobs available, more pressure on small burger joints to shut down, and few people actually benefitting from the new wages.
They’ve been the most vocal opponent to $15 minimum wage increase in New York, which I’ve always found odd, since they’d be the ones to most benefit from it via competitive advantage, as you said, due to economies of scale. They’ve been making threats the entire time “We’ll replace cashier with computers! If you raise the wage, we’ll totally do it, you’ll see!” and I’m like “Dude, if you had the capability to do it, you gonna do it either way anyway, why you extorting us?”
I guess the smaller competitor restaurants will need to get kiosks as well. They can’t develop their own in-house technology like the big chains do, but they can still purchase 3rd-party ready solutions, like all of them have already done with online ordering. Slightly more expensive to use 3rd party, but that’s economies of scale for ya.
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I actually am on the opposite end of the spectrum, I think cash is pointless, it’s less secure, less authentic and prone to issues. Just make the swap to digital or cards, most checking or savings accounts are 100% free, there’s better protections involved, you don’t need to worry about breaking large bills, don’t need to worry about the shop not having change, easy to track as it’s super easy to just look at your transaction history. Balance is super simple, instead of needing to count the cash I can just pull up the account.
It’s just easier. I think cash should be optional for establishments, it’s better for everyone involved both consumer and business.
This is going to sound like corporate shilling but the mcdonalds app is even better, it’s like your own personal ordering tablet that doesn’t have other people’s germs on it and you can even pre order and check in so they start preparing your food before you enter the building.
The rewards points are really generous too…
This is from a UK pov
Oh yeah, the app is probably even more convenient, especially with the pre-checkin, and the hygiene too, but there is no way I’m using that tracking bundle 😂. When I was born, nobody was counting how many burgers I was eating, and I’m not going to allow that to change. It’s a shame too because they hide all the actually good deals in the app, the ones that make eating there actually affordable, so I find myself not even going to eat there anymore. I feel like a rube paying the full price. Probably better for me in the long run anyway.
Is that because you’re worried about costs of health insurance if they figure out what you’re eating? 😂
Luckily we free health care
I wouldn’t call doing someone else’s job for free and upgrade.
Iceman as a job is now extinct thanks to freezer technology.
Lamplighters are obsolete thanks to electricity and lightbulb technology.
These are examples of forgotten jobs that used to exist, and noone bats an eye about them.
Jobs come, jobs go.
Those are both examples of improvements. Self-checkout is not an improvement, it’s outsourcing of work to customers.
That’s a good point. My examples are pretty bad in that regard, I admit. I would still argue that jobs do come and go though. We have many jobs today that didn’t exist 40 years ago.
About outsourcing work to costumers, I kindly disagree: I personally love self-checkout in my grocery store though. I see it as an improvement over standing in line, having to think which order to put stuff on the conveyor for optimal packaging (gotta put the heavy stuff first), still clogging up the conveyor after the cashier because you happen to have just enough bagspace, but only when you pack optimally, while 2 people look at you angrily because they now have to wait 5 seconds longer because your brain freezes over this stressful situation.
No, this didn’t happen everytime I went grocery shopping at a cashier. But enough to see self scanning as a way more relaxing time.
So for me, it’s not soing someones work, but rather that I, as the costumer, am in full control of the tempo and way I want to so things. But I understand not everyone feela the same way, and that’s ok.
There’s always a line for self-checkout now too though, and you still need to consider what to package first. Ultimately it’s down to personal preference. There are a lot of people on this platform with social anxiety who prefer self-checkout. Personally I hate it, and everything it represents, but I understand why some people prefer it. As an express lane it’s pretty okay, but self checkout for an entire cart of products is bullshit.
That… That’s a terrible comparison. Go home.
Sitting home comfortably, thank you!
They haven’t had dedicated cashiers for years. These allow them to spend more time making food and less time dealing with taking orders and handling cash. That’s it. If anything, it makes the employees’ jobs easier without eliminating positions. Speaking as someone who worked at a McDonald’s before that has had these kiosks for years now.
How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions? Is there some rule that states “every franchise must be staffed by exactly 8 people at all times”? Seems more likely to me the schedules will be adjusted until every worker is still occupied 100% of the time.
I’d personally prefer to focus on making food too, but there could be others who actually prefer manning the register.
How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions?
Did you miss the very first sentence of my comment? They haven’t had a dedicated cashier position for a long time. Until that kiosk can also make the food, nobody is losing their job to it.
You really don’t see the difference between 5 people working, spending 80% of time making food and 20% floating at register, versus 4 people working 100% making food serving the same total number of customers now that registers have been nearly entirely replaced by kiosks and apps?
No. Because not only do they hire the bare minimum for the restaurant already (which yes, actually there are rules for; they’re set by corporate), the kiosks aren’t the only way to order. You can still go up to the counter and get a real person to come off the line and take your order. Nobody is floating around the register at all until a customer comes up to it to make an order. Again, these simply stop the need for anyone to stop cooking or doing literally any other more time sensitive tasks and take an order.
I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this. If you don’t like the numbers I gave you because “you can still go up to the counter and get a real person” it’s an easy adjustment to make that tells the same story: before kiosks = 5 people working 75% at food and 25% at register, after kiosks = 4 people working 95% at food 5% at register. The conclusion is the same - your claim that automation does not eliminate positions is simply incorrect. I thought maybe you had some insider knowledge on mandatory staffing levels, but it seems you are just bad at math. Everyone else in these comments was arguing about jobs disappearing (not me! I only wanted to show off the cool cashbox) - it must have been really confusing to see all those people upset about something which you can’t even comprehend as a problem.
I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this.
Because it doesn’t fucking happen and your figures are entirely made up? You and everyone else claiming these have taken jobs clearly have never actually worked at a McDonald’s and are talking straight out of your asses.
This is a different situation than self-checkout at supermarkets. There yes you could argue a cashier who is experienced with scanning items all day and has access to a fully-featured POS can scan all your items faster and more efficiently than you could ever do on that locked-down self-checkout pos, and owners who take away cashiers are purely saving money at the expense of your time. But here you yourself have to communicate your order either way. I much prefer to browse at my leisure and tap at pictures rather than shouting my order 3 times while there is an impatient line behind me.
To each their own I suppose. You’ll get your way on this one, since every checkout that can be automated eventually will be.
We can keep the supermarket cashiers, we just have to demand it. Always choose the full-service line, and complain loudly if there are not enough cashiers to keep the line short, scoff at any suggestion to use the self-checkout and demand to speak to a manager and corporate. As I said elsewhere, one person can only do so much, but when a million people keep doing it the mountain will have to move. I feel personally responsible for the installation of these cashboxes by insisting to pay in cash every single time for the past several years.
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OP isn’t personally responsible for the installation of these kiosks. They would still exist regardless of OPs opinion.
To be fair, it is literally true that I am at least partially responsible, even if only by one part in a million. If there were a million people like me, and we each individually and separately decided to refuse to use the kiosk and demanded to be served by a human cashier and left the store if one was not immediately available, the owners would have no choice but to keep the humans. I just happen to like the kiosks because I am not a luddite.
You’re using a smartphone, you are directly responsible for the typewriter business going under and thousands out of a job.
Oh fuck off with that Luddite shit.
Automation is great, the issue is capitalism. Demanding the world not progress because Capitalists will fuck people over is idiotic.
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Fuck jobs.
I welcome a future where everyone is unemployed from meaningless labour.
Instead of “smashing the robots”, may I interest you in “eating the rich” option? It looks like you have been thinking a lot of smashing, but not enough about eating. Remember your priorities!
Being out of a job is good, it’s the not-being-able-to-eat afterwards that’s the bad part.
And if you live in an even remotely functioning society that’s a bad part that’ll never happen unless you deliberately refuse help.
Literally starving to death is more difficult nowadays than in the past, but every society is still structured around the idea that you must be doing something wrong if you are not employed. Food, housing, healthcare, all tied to employment, and the substitutes they maybe give you are designed to only barely keep you alive until you find more employment.
Yes, every job that has become obsolete in the past due to automation has been replaced with a new kind of job, many of which could not have even been imagined before. We don’t have buggy whip manufacturers, but we do have programmers. But that doesn’t mean that will continue always. Jobs that disappear now or in the near future may never get replaced. And many jobs that exist now, I’d argue, are totally bullshit already, and we don’t need more of them. We as a society need to reassess our expectations for 100% employment and better reallocate resources according to the new norms.
As a society we should strive to having no one perform any jobs, so they can focus on life instead.
But that won’t work until people like you get rid of their “work or die” mentality.
All these people saying they don’t use cash… do you never buy weed? Jeez.
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