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"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than

"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. So the investment is a bit higher than that. But you will recoup it very quickly on McDonalds scale. And they will be able to provide better and faster service.

ghshephard 10y ago
Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion. With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human. (It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk) (Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)
formula_ninguna 10y ago
Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.
kevinr 10y ago
> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.
- ghshephard 10y ago
  That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing. About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
  - bsder 10y ago
    > That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US. It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
    - ghshephard 10y ago
      What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.
- averagewall 10y ago
  Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?
  - mantas 10y ago
    Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.
derefr 10y ago
Ah, but the backend system already exists; it's what is talked to by the registers the cashiers were using. Likewise, the registers themselves are already running software 90% equivalent to the kiosk's software—same view controllers, different views.
notahacker 10y ago
The basic technology to serve people fast food without human interaction (the Automat) has been around for longer than fast food franchises. Fast food franchises invest vast amounts on process optimization and kiosks are still at the experimental stage (and still with human food delivery!). Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.
- majewsky 10y ago
  That conclusion is not so obvious. Some middle managers might just be pushing back against automation because it eats their lunch, too.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    That might be the case for Mom and Pop listening to their restaurant manager, but nobody high up enough in McDonalds' hierarchy to have significant influence what experiments in store tech they roll out to some or all of their 37000 outlets/franchises faces any risk to their job from automation. Nor do the management consultants they hire to validate their assumptions and provide justification for their unpopular decisions. On the contrary, even a 1% productivity improvement is a major feather in their cap, bumper pay rise and appreciation in their shareholdings.
onion2k 10y ago
That would be the case for a restaurant that doesn't have any computerised systems already, but in a McDonalds the process is effectively just turning the till around to face the customer and letting them use it themselves.
mjevans 10y ago
Please, use NFC to push my order blob up to my private storage device, so that next time I visit I can tap my phone and /send/ the order back in to the system. So much the better if it's json or xml and editable offline. (Obviously validate either way...)
samsolomon 10y ago
You know, I'm not sure this goes into the automation category—this is more of an operational improvement. Originally, you'd go to a restaurant. You'd sit at a counter. They would take your order and give you a drink along with your meal. Then someone realized that it saved a huge amount of time just giving people cups and letting them fill their own drink. Not only that, but it made the job of staff easier, because they had one less thing to worry about. That happened again when they started putting the credit card readers in front of cashiers. It was one less thing staff had to worry about. It also reduced the amount of time ordering took and made stealing credit card information more difficult. I see this type of improvement inline with operational improvements. That's not to say automation isn't a threat—certainly self-driving cars are. I'm just not sure everything should be classified as automation.
- marchenko 10y ago
  At my last McDo visit, in Switzerland, most of the ordering was through kiosks and the staff was repurposed toward table service. The restaurant was especially clean and friendly, and there seemed to be a lot of staff. So there is hope for complementarity.
bad_user 10y ago
I do think that automating cashiers at McDonald’s would be a big mistake. We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a "would you like fries with that?" type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap "Skip" as an automatic gesture and without regrets. Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy. Of course, it's not like McDonald's is a varied restaurant, when in fact they are famous for having those 15 dishes taste the same wherever you go, but there's still choice involved when picking one of those burgers. And think of how in restaurants, even with a detailed menu with pictures, etc. people still ask the waiter "what do you recommend?". So yes, you can automate a cashier, but this means that the customer <-> McDonald’s interaction also gets automated in that process, this being a doubly edged sword and my guess is that it's not the customer that loses. Oh, and the irony of this automation trend is that in the end there won't be enough people left to pay for McDonald’s shitty burgers, unless we progress towards some socialist society with minimal income and so on, in which case McDonald's raison d'être will cease to exist.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  On the other hand, with kiosks you can start A/B testing and so on. I'm not really sure that people eat at McDonald's for the price. If you are price sensitive, cooking pasta at home costs less than McDonald's and isn't all that time consuming.
- seibelj 10y ago
  I get your point, but with a kiosk they could dynamically give special deals, like "add fries for $0.18" if it is profitable for them at that moment (maybe they are about to toss the batch of fries). Honestly I wouldn't consider McD's cashiers to be good salesmen.
- cm2012 10y ago
  I like McDonalds and have been to quite a few. I have never, ever been asked if I want fries with that or otherwise upsold. Not sure where this meme comes from.
  - 10y ago
coredog64 10y ago
> You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.

ghshephard 10y ago

Indeed, Singapore where the new kiosks are almost ubiquitous, it's not uncommon for a cashier to have nobody waiting for them, but people still use the kiosks. 100% of the time when there is at least one person in line, I'll use the Kiosk - as all the orders are funneled into the same process queue. I particularly like the Kiosk because you can hyper customize every element of your order without confusion. With that said - these Gen 1 Kiosks are kind of kludgy, not super responsive - and have a lot of room for improvement. Once they improve the performance, I don't ever see ordering from a human. (It's already been many months since I've used a cashier to check out with at a local market - everything through the Kiosk) (Note: Singapore has no minimum wage and lots of intergenerational living, so there is a lot of inexpensive labor available from Seniors that work at McDonalds - this type of technology will have a big impact on them)

formula_ninguna 10y ago

Hence they'll be to sell people junk food even faster with better service? And more people will become more fat and sick in the long-term? coca-cola + humber = parapapapa. I'm loving it. McDonalds.

kevinr 10y ago

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

ghshephard 10y ago
That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing. About the only thing that's tricky is putting a large flat of eggs into the bag, and there's usually one person monitoring six kiosks who can swing by and give you a hand with the bag (it's kind of a two person job)
- bsder 10y ago
  > That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US. It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the cretins is more productive.
  - ghshephard 10y ago
    What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.
averagewall 10y ago
Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?
- mantas 10y ago
  Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.

derefr 10y ago

Ah, but the backend system already exists; it's what is talked to by the registers the cashiers were using. Likewise, the registers themselves are already running software 90% equivalent to the kiosk's software—same view controllers, different views.

notahacker 10y ago

The basic technology to serve people fast food without human interaction (the Automat) has been around for longer than fast food franchises. Fast food franchises invest vast amounts on process optimization and kiosks are still at the experimental stage (and still with human food delivery!). Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.

majewsky 10y ago
That conclusion is not so obvious. Some middle managers might just be pushing back against automation because it eats their lunch, too.
- notahacker 10y ago
  That might be the case for Mom and Pop listening to their restaurant manager, but nobody high up enough in McDonalds' hierarchy to have significant influence what experiments in store tech they roll out to some or all of their 37000 outlets/franchises faces any risk to their job from automation. Nor do the management consultants they hire to validate their assumptions and provide justification for their unpopular decisions. On the contrary, even a 1% productivity improvement is a major feather in their cap, bumper pay rise and appreciation in their shareholdings.

onion2k 10y ago

That would be the case for a restaurant that doesn't have any computerised systems already, but in a McDonalds the process is effectively just turning the till around to face the customer and letting them use it themselves.

mjevans 10y ago

Please, use NFC to push my order blob up to my private storage device, so that next time I visit I can tap my phone and /send/ the order back in to the system. So much the better if it's json or xml and editable offline. (Obviously validate either way...)

samsolomon 10y ago

You know, I'm not sure this goes into the automation category—this is more of an operational improvement. Originally, you'd go to a restaurant. You'd sit at a counter. They would take your order and give you a drink along with your meal. Then someone realized that it saved a huge amount of time just giving people cups and letting them fill their own drink. Not only that, but it made the job of staff easier, because they had one less thing to worry about. That happened again when they started putting the credit card readers in front of cashiers. It was one less thing staff had to worry about. It also reduced the amount of time ordering took and made stealing credit card information more difficult. I see this type of improvement inline with operational improvements. That's not to say automation isn't a threat—certainly self-driving cars are. I'm just not sure everything should be classified as automation.

marchenko 10y ago
At my last McDo visit, in Switzerland, most of the ordering was through kiosks and the staff was repurposed toward table service. The restaurant was especially clean and friendly, and there seemed to be a lot of staff. So there is hope for complementarity.

bad_user 10y ago

I do think that automating cashiers at McDonald’s would be a big mistake. We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a "would you like fries with that?" type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap "Skip" as an automatic gesture and without regrets. Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy. Of course, it's not like McDonald's is a varied restaurant, when in fact they are famous for having those 15 dishes taste the same wherever you go, but there's still choice involved when picking one of those burgers. And think of how in restaurants, even with a detailed menu with pictures, etc. people still ask the waiter "what do you recommend?". So yes, you can automate a cashier, but this means that the customer <-> McDonald’s interaction also gets automated in that process, this being a doubly edged sword and my guess is that it's not the customer that loses. Oh, and the irony of this automation trend is that in the end there won't be enough people left to pay for McDonald’s shitty burgers, unless we progress towards some socialist society with minimal income and so on, in which case McDonald's raison d'être will cease to exist.

maxerickson 10y ago
On the other hand, with kiosks you can start A/B testing and so on. I'm not really sure that people eat at McDonald's for the price. If you are price sensitive, cooking pasta at home costs less than McDonald's and isn't all that time consuming.
seibelj 10y ago
I get your point, but with a kiosk they could dynamically give special deals, like "add fries for $0.18" if it is profitable for them at that moment (maybe they are about to toss the batch of fries). Honestly I wouldn't consider McD's cashiers to be good salesmen.
cm2012 10y ago
I like McDonalds and have been to quite a few. I have never, ever been asked if I want fries with that or otherwise upsold. Not sure where this meme comes from.
- 10y ago

coredog64 10y ago

> You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare. It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.