Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald’s calls “Experience of the Future,” includes digital ordering kiosks that will be offered in 2,500 restaurants by the end of the year and table delivery.
Yet somehow my order will still probably be wrong. :p
In separate news, the kiosks have demanded a raise and want uninterrupted power supplies installed in all facilities.
I’ve used the kiosks several times, they’re pretty much in all the medium sized or bigger McDonald’s in the area. They work very well, especially when paired with Apple Pay. The UI is as idiot-proof as they can make it. They also take coupons from the mobile app, but are not yet integrated with the mobile app so that you can’t order in advance. I suspect that’s coming very, very soon. I suppose the McD’s jobs will just move into the back, as the need for cashiers drops.
They really are going to automate a lot of jobs out of existence.
Maybe. Though the kiosks are widely used in MacDonalds around London and there is about as much staff behind the counter as before.
That’s because you still need them to pick up the food, put it on trays or in bags and distribute all those orders which are now being placed in parallel.
Also, the kiosks offer the option to have the food brought to your table once ready by specifying one of a number of zones you can sit in (they bring it to that area as find the person with the right order number).
It’s not like robots are suddenly cooking the meals or distributing them afterwards. So the 2 types of jobs remain.
What I believe it allows is queue optimisation and more meals to be served per hour.
burger flippers are next.
But how will it know to over salt my food. I am sure a human will be needed for this task.
Panera has had kiosks for awhile, but they just have more people delivering food around the restaurant now instead of working a register.
Yeah, I’ve never seen so many employees working at my local Paneras. And I noticed also the last time I went, a) the prices are quite a bit higher, lunch and a drink was a couple bucks more than I used to pay, and b) there were neato kiosks.
They definitely increased prices. Pretty much anything that’s not a standard ham sandwich went up. One other notable is that the kiosks allow you to tip.
I always kiosk order there now, mainly because you can use any saved orders or alterations to an item each time you go back. It also keeps me aware of rewards I’ve accumulated so they get used.
We use the Chick-Fil-a App to order pretty much anytime we wind up going. Even using it from the parking lot is a better experience than walking in and waiting in line. Just order, walk up to the pickup area and boom you’re done. It doesn’t hurt that we get free items fairly often too.
Certainly, and I can’t think of any justification not to automate every unskilled job.
It’s when you come to automating skilled white-collar jobs that it can get tricky. Every profession has its “janitorial” tasks that could be better done by a machine.
Doctors need to retain immense amounts of information and invest in continuing education to remain effective and licensed. Medicine can be reduced to contextualizing and correlating vast amounts of information to best inform a judgment call. That judgment call can never truly be automated, but all the data collection, organization, and contextualization can be. Several specialties are by nature more aligned to automation; Radiology is pattern recognition. Anesthesiology is a simple decision tree 99% of the time, requiring immediate life-saving triage the remaining 1%. Etc.
This applies to many other white-collar professions. Insurance adjusters, paralegals, database administrators, you name it, every field has significant opportunities for automation where humans are wasted.
(n.b., I actually do this for a living.)
when it comes to places like MickyDs I’d rather interact with a kiosk than a demoralized wage earner who is angry and depressed at how shitty their life lot in life. on the other hand you have In N Out and Chic Filet that emphasize good customer service where every person behind the counter greeting you with a smile and hello that doesn’t be feel contrived. Of course a large component of that is those two places tend to be overwhelming staffed by youngins who don’t have enough life experience to be jaded by easy credit ripoffs and temporary lay offs.
Automation is the future but we better addrsss the downsides of having millions of low skilled workers with nothing to do because they weren’t blessed with the IQ to go into STEM fields. UBI? Eugenics? Soylent Green? Millions of unemployed people who living in a country with abundant firearms sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I agree with you and sincerely hope that we figure out what to do with all the unemployed/unemployable people that result from that scale of automation.
Because covering our collective eyes while all the money rolls up to those with the capital and fewer and fewer people have gainful jobs to look forward to in the future is some sort of madness I think only humanity can pull off.
Well yes, it’s unarguable that people are getting left behind and are pretty pissed off about it. That’s a large excuse for the political situation in the US today. And the answer to that is… well, we don’t have one.
My grandpa worked for GM building cars. Union job. He made a great living, with incredible benefits, and when he retired they gave him a gold clock. When automobile manufacturing converted to robotics multitudes just like him were put out of work, 40-50 year old men with no actual skills. There was never a plan to save Detroit, and that great city was allowed to die slow.
But it’s manifest destiny. Robots build cars, and AI will pick up the phone when you call your insurance company because your roof leaks. What do you do about that?
Next on the plate is truck drivers. It’s incredibly clear that automated driving is coming soon-- in 5-10 years those truck drivers will be out of work. My dad was a doctor, and the father of my best friend growing up was a truck driver. He lived in the same housing development. Driving a truck was a great job, paying well, strong benefits. But just like my grandpa, he’s an unskilled guy. Once that job goes, assuming he’s 40-50 years old, what do you do with that dude? Do you train him to be a front-end web developer? Tell him to start writing apps? Send him to nursing school, at 50 years old with a highschool degree? C’mon.
Basically that generation is fucked. And it’s unavoidable.
None of the fast food joints around me have fancy kiosks yet, are they prone to the same problems as self-checkout lines? Specifically, do idiot customers slow the whole thing down to a crawl, making the situation worse than regular cashier check-outs?
Not that I’ve noticed. Unlike self-checkout, there are no bar codes to fumble around to find, or stuff to place into bags on a weight sensor. Scanning and bagging are the the real points of slowdown. These are huge touchscreens with big pictures of items, combos, and customizations. An illiterate person could probably figure them out.
Anybody in a market where they are testing the new “fresh beef” Quarter Pounder? That’s kinda my go to jam at McDonald’s and I am curious if it is a noticeable improvement.
I remember going to a Taco Bell in Boulder, CO that was testing this in about 1999. I honestly don’t know why self-serve tablet ordering hasn’t been rolled out everywhere by now – it just makes sense, it’s more efficient / faster, and I know I will get my order right!
The real question is whether or not they’ll add in a button for the greatest sandwich McDonald’s serves. . .
http://www.businessinsider.com/yes-there-is-a-mcdonalds-menu-item-called-the-mcgangbang-2013-3