5 ms·
Automation is expensive to acquire, operate and maintain. It is better to hire employees...unless employees become much more expensive.
by Jsebast24 2y ago
Automation is expensive to acquire, operate and maintain. It is better to hire employees...unless employees become much more expensive.
- atoav 2y agoFull 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.
- rightbyte 2y agoInstead 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'.
- HPsquared 2y agoThat time would probably have been spent queuing before.
- kbar13 2y agothere 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
- rightbyte 2y agoMaybe. But is hard to compare since the cashier also picked together your meal. The ordering part was way faster. Coming into an empty restaurant was way way faster.
- HPsquared 2y agoMaybe an opportunity for LLM-powered AI agent with voice recognition on the automated kiosks. Can even ask it how its day has been.
- woleium 2y agoYour AI will interact with the stores api eventually, solving the problem
- toomuchtodo 2y agoAccelerando was a cautionary tale.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoWhy 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.
- redox99 2y agoI prefer kiosks because I can take my time and browse all the options, instead of being forced to quickly answer the cashier.
- chongli 2y agoWhy 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.
- bingbingbing777 2y agoI just want to buy a mcmuffin and not have to download some spyware on my phone
- rjbwork 2y agoYou 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!
- thermin 2y agoEver heard of sandboxing? App Clips? Or are you concerned that the app is not compatible with the Android 9-based custom ROM you are rocking?
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoEat a carrot, instead.
- fragmede 2y agodon'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.
- brnt 2y ago> Just have a QR code you scan and it installs the app on your phone. Those at wordt thatll never enter my mind. At all. Why do people surrender their hardware so easily?
- jojobas 2y agoThey'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?".
- itake 2y agoMcDonald’s have like 4 to 6 kiosks And one to two cashiers. I’d rather spend more time tapping buttons than waiting in line
- nitwit005 2y agoThe 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.
- bluGill 2y agoThat 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.
- tyingq 2y ago> patients fill out forms on an iPad 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?
- littlestymaar 2y ago> 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)
- drewcoo 2y agoCapEx v OpEx https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-difference-between-capital-expenditures-capex-and-operational-expenditures-opex.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-differ...
- littlestymaar 2y agoThe 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.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoAre 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?
- littlestymaar 2y agoHere 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…).