4 ms·

U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the re

by jt2190 2y ago

U.S. labor is expensive, and the app delegates the order-taking job from an employee to the customer, keeping food prices more competitive and/or keeping the restaurant profitable. (Land cost is the other big expense.)

gowld 2y ago
None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.
- hunter2_ 2y ago
  For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else. Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
  - vundercind 2y ago
    I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
    - hunter2_ 2y ago
      Oh for sure, speaking to a cashier is the quickest/best, and scrolling on a screen (kiosk or app) is slower/worst. I'm just pointing out that if the store will reduce conversations with cashiers by shifting ordering to a screen, then the app is far superior to the kiosk: order before you arrive, avoid germs, frictionless invocation of the loyalty program, etc.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        They did some tests in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs and came to the conclusion that order accuracy is the best if you use the app.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      I do. Saves having to wait on a line at the drive thru. Or on a line inside the store. Nope, can't do that: they don't take orders at the cashier, so you have to use the kiosks which take even longer. So I use the app to order while at home, drive to the restaurant and grab my food and leave.
    - hluska 2y ago
      I find it very convenient. I can place an order, walk in and pick it up. There’s no wait involved. Other people have also agreed that it’s convenient.
- javagram 2y ago
  The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival. Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I just typed "taco" in the search bar of Safari and the second autocomplete result was for the restaurant 1.7 miles from me, the third was for the tacobell.com. Easy! In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot. As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances. There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
    - jdminhbg 2y ago
      You found a link to tacobell.com, that's great, but you're like 1/10 of the way there now. You have to open it, load all the resources, give it permission to use your location so you can find which store to order from, place the order, enter your payment information, and then move to your email app to get order updates. An app caches all of that locally, has your information saved, is pre-cleared for location permissions, etc. > People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React. This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Kiosks need an app as well, but also custom hardware, cleaning, etc, and customers can't order in advance. You could have a website, but lots of people currently expect an app.
- hedora 2y ago
  The app works better for the drive thru, and also for families with kids that like to push buttons on the giant ipad. Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”. I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants. Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    I was reading Graham's On Lisp which works a nice example of Augmented Transition Networks which were popular in the 1970s for writing parsers that could parse controlled vocabularies. For that matter I remember similar kinds of grammar to control voice response applications for platforms like TellMe circa 2001. I bet it would do fine for food ordering. (This is why a non-native speaker can do this job well, you don't need to know a lot of the language to parse orders like 芥兰牛肉)
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
    >I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants. I think this would lead to a lot of really frustrating errors in a food ordering context. In my experience LLM speech recognition is really prone to inserting or removing negation words, which can really shift the meaning. This is a problem in any speech recog use case but there's often sufficient context to understand when the error has occurred. In a list of what a customer does / doesn't want, there is no additional context to fill the gap. "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion no tomato" -> "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion tomato" or the inversion You can correct this to some degree with an order confirmation step but the error rate would mean a lot of customers need to make a correction, which adds time to the process and increases customer frustration. At that point I'd rather the drive thru have a touchscreen and just let me input the order directly, versus having to argue with an LLM about which ingredients i want included or excluded.
  - hluska 2y ago
    “A hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup.” Try: “A hamburger with only ketchup.” When you take hundreds of orders a day, circular communications won’t stick.
- neallindsay 2y ago
  They also have kiosks and a web site.
GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
I wonder what the income disparity is between minimum-wage Taco Bell employees and Pepsi’s executive team is, and how much the difference has grown in the last 20 years. I would be willing to bet that the company could, in reality, afford not to replace human jobs and still pull in huge profits/pay their shareholders and corporate officers quite a lot of money without requiring a bunch of my personal information in order to buy the worst taco I’ve ever had.
- astrange 2y ago
  Fast food workers are not minimum wage. I don't know about Taco Bell, but McDonald's has had signs up offering $18/hr in the Bay Area for a while which is like $3 more. Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers. > afford not to replace human jobs There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
  - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
    Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. It’s just another way to lower costs at the expense of non wealthy people. Why do you think it’s so hard to find help in any big box store nowadays? Or why most of them only have one or two cashiers working when lines get longer and longer? PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
    - astrange 2y ago
      > Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. Depends on demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living. That wasn't in 2024. It's $20 now. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Fast-Food-Minimum-Wage-FAQ.htm https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Fast-Food-Minimum-Wage-FAQ.htm

by jt2190 2y ago

gowld 2y ago

None of that justifies an app, vs an in-store kiosk or a website.

hunter2_ 2y ago
For customers to feel like they're saving time (versus having a cashier take their order) the kiosk isn't it: you can't on average discover and select on a screen faster than you can speak. The time savings of the app/website is from building the order on the way there, reducing the in-store interaction to speaking your name or order number (which is mostly constant across all methods of ordering). As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
- dylan604 2y ago
  also, there's only so many kiosks available just like there's only so many human staffed registers. This means there's potential for waiting in line. If every one has an app, there's no line. Ever. Well, except for when you show up to pick up your order and have to wait for everyone else. Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
- vundercind 2y ago
  I don’t know anyone who likes having to order through the apps for fast food places, or regards them as a time-saving convenience—rather, they’re an inconvenience the places make you suffer to get what should be normal menu prices under the broader inflation rate, rather than the 300% markup above that all these places have applied to their menu prices.
  - hunter2_ 2y ago
    Oh for sure, speaking to a cashier is the quickest/best, and scrolling on a screen (kiosk or app) is slower/worst. I'm just pointing out that if the store will reduce conversations with cashiers by shifting ordering to a screen, then the app is far superior to the kiosk: order before you arrive, avoid germs, frictionless invocation of the loyalty program, etc.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      They did some tests in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs and came to the conclusion that order accuracy is the best if you use the app.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    I do. Saves having to wait on a line at the drive thru. Or on a line inside the store. Nope, can't do that: they don't take orders at the cashier, so you have to use the kiosks which take even longer. So I use the app to order while at home, drive to the restaurant and grab my food and leave.
  - hluska 2y ago
    I find it very convenient. I can place an order, walk in and pick it up. There’s no wait involved. Other people have also agreed that it’s convenient.
javagram 2y ago
The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival. Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I just typed "taco" in the search bar of Safari and the second autocomplete result was for the restaurant 1.7 miles from me, the third was for the tacobell.com. Easy! In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot. As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances. There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
  - jdminhbg 2y ago
    You found a link to tacobell.com, that's great, but you're like 1/10 of the way there now. You have to open it, load all the resources, give it permission to use your location so you can find which store to order from, place the order, enter your payment information, and then move to your email app to get order updates. An app caches all of that locally, has your information saved, is pre-cleared for location permissions, etc. > People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React. This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.
robertlagrant 2y ago
Kiosks need an app as well, but also custom hardware, cleaning, etc, and customers can't order in advance. You could have a website, but lots of people currently expect an app.
hedora 2y ago
The app works better for the drive thru, and also for families with kids that like to push buttons on the giant ipad. Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”. I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants. Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I was reading Graham's On Lisp which works a nice example of Augmented Transition Networks which were popular in the 1970s for writing parsers that could parse controlled vocabularies. For that matter I remember similar kinds of grammar to control voice response applications for platforms like TellMe circa 2001. I bet it would do fine for food ordering. (This is why a non-native speaker can do this job well, you don't need to know a lot of the language to parse orders like 芥兰牛肉)
- sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
  >I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants. I think this would lead to a lot of really frustrating errors in a food ordering context. In my experience LLM speech recognition is really prone to inserting or removing negation words, which can really shift the meaning. This is a problem in any speech recog use case but there's often sufficient context to understand when the error has occurred. In a list of what a customer does / doesn't want, there is no additional context to fill the gap. "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion no tomato" -> "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion tomato" or the inversion You can correct this to some degree with an order confirmation step but the error rate would mean a lot of customers need to make a correction, which adds time to the process and increases customer frustration. At that point I'd rather the drive thru have a touchscreen and just let me input the order directly, versus having to argue with an LLM about which ingredients i want included or excluded.
- hluska 2y ago
  “A hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup.” Try: “A hamburger with only ketchup.” When you take hundreds of orders a day, circular communications won’t stick.
neallindsay 2y ago
They also have kiosks and a web site.

GuinansEyebrows 2y ago

I wonder what the income disparity is between minimum-wage Taco Bell employees and Pepsi’s executive team is, and how much the difference has grown in the last 20 years. I would be willing to bet that the company could, in reality, afford not to replace human jobs and still pull in huge profits/pay their shareholders and corporate officers quite a lot of money without requiring a bunch of my personal information in order to buy the worst taco I’ve ever had.

astrange 2y ago
Fast food workers are not minimum wage. I don't know about Taco Bell, but McDonald's has had signs up offering $18/hr in the Bay Area for a while which is like $3 more. Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers. > afford not to replace human jobs There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
  Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. It’s just another way to lower costs at the expense of non wealthy people. Why do you think it’s so hard to find help in any big box store nowadays? Or why most of them only have one or two cashiers working when lines get longer and longer? PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > Higher productivity in this environment pretty much universally translates to fewer staff on shift. Depends on demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living. That wasn't in 2024. It's $20 now. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Fast-Food-Minimum-Wage-FAQ.htm https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Fast-Food-Minimum-Wage-FAQ.htm