There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.
Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.
Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
A few thoughts, having worked in "Quick Service Restaurants" a long long time ago.
Ignoring cost of human labor and a move to equipment maintenance for a moment, one of the key metrics tracked is waste/loss, i.e. from the bins in the kitchen. Amounts of discarded buns, lettuce, tomatoes, burnt or spoiled, past due-date, serve-time etc. it all gets tallied and recorded.
If you get sent one box of frozen fries weighing a known amount, that should translate into (x) number of servings +- a fairly narrow distribution curve. If you go through 10 boxes but only sold 9(x) servings then maybe your staff are overfilling, dropping, burning or eating the fries. Either way, they are losing you cash. The cash at the tail end of your otherwise carefully controlled supply chain.
Anything that cost effectively eliminates waste will be next.
Some parts of the cooking have been automated for a long time. For example, nobody flips burgers anymore. They're placed on a clamshell grill that cooks both sides at the same time and releases when it's done.
The next step will be loading the products into the grill and unloading them automatically...and that's already in the works.
But robot assembly of sandwiches is a long way off. Humans are way more flexible and efficient here. The key is removing the repetitive tasks from their workload.
We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados!
I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore.
In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.
This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.
I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on.
And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.
>we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization
this won't happen automatically. it will have to be a conscious decision. how do you propose to get there instead of the dystopian future where things are infinitely more scarce for some and not for others which seems to be our default trajectory
How is that our default trajectory? Things aren't infinitely more scarce for some these days. Poverty has been in long term decline across the world. The poor today are much better off than they were in the past despite huge populations; this is essentially because of improved technology. Much of it automation.
The top 0.1% very much enjoy their iphones, yachts, entertainment options, and the other products of a strong economy. They don't have much incentive to tear it all down.
Automation has overall improved quality of life significantly. We can now grow so much food that we can easily feed the world many times over. Clothing has become so cheap that many items are practically free. And trips around the world are no longer accessible to only that top 0.1-1%. It's not all gloom and doom.
We could feed the world, we don't. We could vaccinate, give clean water, nearly free electricity to every person on the planet. We don't. It's not that we don't have the resources, we consciously choose not to do these because they would cause a minor inconvenience to those who have enough. The top .001 percent don't even live in the same reality as the rest of us, and there's plainly no way they could. The don't interact with anyone who isn't like them.
Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity, and we move away from the idea every adult should be required to work 40 hours a week to survive?
>Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity
This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind.
Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation.
As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows?
If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!
Before you have said "unprecedented scale", do you realized that in XIX and XX century advances in agriculture production LITERALLY removed about 98% of the jobs of that era?
“Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.”
This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.
People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.
No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.
IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.
Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being necessary.
You can't grow food faster. You can only make more of it which requires more resources. The jobs being created today are mostly poverty level jobs or high end jobs and this trend is expected to continue which hollows out the middle class. Pure unemployment numbers aren't useful since the expected date increases with a tighter labor market haven't been happening at all. Once worker wages became decoupled from the value that they actually created, none of the idea that you're paid what your with was valid. Now you're paid what you can negotiate which depends entirely upon how much power you have. Most workers have none.
Robots are so much high maintenance than just touch panels and voice rec. Thus while it is a good idea the hurtles are much higher to get a positive ROI.
Touch panels seem to be way better than trying to figure out how to speak in "Robot English" instead of just pushing buttons that do what you mean (mostly) without fail. Also some people who take your order are rude and make whats just supposed to be a convenient grab for food into an awful experience.
Given that this is a drivethrough we're discussing, I'd love to not have more things to encourage people to use their phones while operating heavy machinery.
The way some of these places do it is you park at a pick up spot (I remember Chick-fil-a doing this). So you order before you go pick up the food. Usually while at a grocery store, or have a friend order for you.
As a guy that maintains robots at a factory.
They are literally a 1 hour side task once a month. The robot arms basically only needed a rebuild once in 15 years. The tooling is the only thing that goes bad and needs replacing every month and it's designed such that only a small part of the tooling needs replacement.
As a guy buying robots for a factory right now I have heard many stories like this. Including some robot arms operating for over 22 years with minimal maintenance. Incidentally, I am building a factory to build food robots!
Automated cooking seems more achievable to me, at least somewhere like McDonalds with fairly standardized items. The inputs and outputs are much more defined and there's much less need for AI.
> Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The robot janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Anything that complex would probably go through a chemical wash rather than having a robot get into every corner. Some medical equipment like endoscopes are cleaned this way.
Robots are great for repetitive tasks that have low variability like industrial parts that are almost exactly identical to spec. But when things aren't exactly to spec, I'm not sure that the robots would be easily able to recover with where the tech is today. Like let's say a slightly customized order, few buns stick together, something falls, tomatos are slightly more mushy than normal, or isn't loaded to the machine exactly right.
San Francisco has some self-cleaning public bathrooms that work like that. Locks between each person and cleans the whole thing including the floors. Pretty cool.
Hmm. It might have been ten years since I tried to use one of those here, generally I found them to be broken or continuously occupied for absurd lengths of time, I.e. camped in. There’s a reason nobody is advocating for more of these to be installed despite demand for well, public sanitary facilities.
I did however use the same model in Palo Alto recently. Turns out they’re not bad if they’re well maintained and charge a small fee (50¢) to use.
You're missing a trick I think ... Why not do an IKEA style build-it-yourself burger operation, where food is cooked and deposited into a box with how-to-build-your-burger instructions printed on top. The perfect personalised burger experience! We might even get websites that sell McD hacks that you can add to your self build burger experience!
I mean, what is the real MVP for McD? It's sourcing, uni-forming, storing and then cooking food. Assembly doesn't really need to be part of it.
In Austria, for a few shining years, we had "build my burger" where you could use the order terminals to create your perfect burger. For a year I ate a mess of three chicken patties and lots of cheese on a daily basis.
Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.
Here in Hong Kong, every McDonalds has 3+ touch screens, I hardly see anyone lining up at the counter these days. I for one only use the touch screens.
I use the McD touch screens. It works, but it takes about 30 clicks to buy something. Also, I was flummoxed until I figured out that [Add To Order] actually means "I'm done, I want to pay now".
I suppose all this was extensively play-tested, but I have no idea what sort of person play tested it given the result.
Maybe the software is different per country/region, because here it takes maybe ~5 clicks to buy something. And you can easily add multiple items before paying.
I used one in HK too, and various other places. One benefit for busy cities is that they are great for allowing tourists to go at their own pace if they struggle with the local language (and often have language options to help them).
> who don't like the attention when struggling with a language
I suppose I am the opposite. I enjoy attempting to order food in a tongue I am learning. But going through the process with a native English speaker, I'd rather just push a button on the kiosk.
Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?
Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process the car companies did.
What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.
Disclaimer: I currently work at a company in the QSR+mobile ordering space
It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc.
Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.
It seems like you could afford some duplication. US filet of fish could be menu item 23701 and Japan Filet of fish could be menu item 23702. I can see how this would be hard, but I don't think you would get any pity from the people who work on health care service billing codes.
How myopic for you have to be to not just wonder why a mcd app in Japan would not be expected to work in the us but to say that's how it should be? All the complex shit that goes into a company like mcd in a single country and you expect what you're expecting?
Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.
Senior lecturer in microbiology at London Metropolitan University Dr Paul Matewele said: ‘We were all surprised how much gut and faecal bacteria there was on the touchscreen machines. These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals.
> Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.
Did they swab the food bags and food that came out as well? Poo particles are probably everywhere.
Isn't this the result whenever someone investigates any surface people touch? Not everyone washes their hands, but everyone poops. The result is sadly predictable.
How many doorknobs do you typically touch outside of your home a day? Most doors here are automatic. Plus, I would be reluctant to use someone else's keyboard at work, even.
But...why? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Generally find yourself especially vulnerable to the errant bug? How do you feel when you breath in someone's fart? You're a walking bag of mud expressing discomfort at other bits of mud in the world. One bit in a million might be annoying. One in a billion actually painful.
The local Mickey D's put in a couple of tall touch-screen systems that I found surprisingly difficult to figure out. The touch screen was slow to respond -- nothing more frustrating than tapping a glass screen and wondering why nothing happened -- and the decision path didn't make sense. I suspect whoever designed it had one kind of user experience in mind, then it was modified by a different group to change the UX, leaving it worse than before. Anyway, I notice that no one uses it, and I visit frequently (it's so close that I often drop by to get the $0.99 coffee, and now my 14-year-old has started working there).
Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register.
Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.
They do have the issue that they run out of baked goods but don't update the state of the ordering system. I assume it is legitimately difficult to keep perfect inventory of the items to make that work, but it does lead to some confusion.
The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.
You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.
I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.
The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.
I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.
Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu.
[EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.
I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever.
I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.
The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.
Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.
We have those in New Zealand and they were initially awful - slow, hard to navigate/find stuff, actually missing lots of menu items. They seem to have swapped out the system now though and they seem to be relatively usable.
Anecdotally, McDonald's in Australia and New Zealand have touchscreen ordering and I can't remember the last time I saw someone actually ordering in person.
It's so much nicer to be able to take your time, actually view the menu and costs of items, and choose what you want to eat without a line of hungry people waiting behind you.
That will pass. At one point I could jump to the front of the airline check-in queue because nobody was using the touch-screen check-ins. Now the touch-screens are the only way.
Unclear why one needs kiosks when the user's device is much more compelling. While there are some (very good) exceptions, many remain yesteryear's technology and meh to outright garbage UIX. The only reason is to maintain some local control and (when available) human common sense in the equation.
Brick & mortar kiosks are the DVD Netflix of fast food.
Yes, that would work, but then that does not provide the marketing department with the same level of invasive tracking and push notification as "an app" does. So guess which option gets built....
My local mcdonalds has 3 panels and no cashiers at all except drive thru. People use them all the time and this is BFE Texas. Assistance is available of course, via the people who would normally bring out your order,for people who can't use them properly.
Most Burger Kings here in Sweden have touchscreen ordering and I hardly see anyone using the register any more. Personally I find it such a far superior experience.
The end game is to remove all drive throughs and fast food joints, and replace them with drone and/or pneumatic tube food delivery. I'm hoping for the tubes.
Why would I order with my voice by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that?
Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine.
Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds, but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched.
I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric.
Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment!
Their coupons used to be insane. I went all the time and they have to have lost money on me. I couldn't believe the amount of food I would get for almost nothing. It's no wonder that they couldn't sustain that.
This is a good point. Given the unreliability of voice recognition, an app would be preferable. But also, even a touchscreen where you can select your order would be a better idea.
I cannot wait. Finally, going to McDonald's will lose all semblance of visiting a restaurant, and be fully realized as the experience of receiving various permutations of bleached flour, HFCS, and sad meat from a giant red and yellow robotic playdoh factory that it was always meant to be.
One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added.
Yeah. That's a much better article. They're buying a company to work on it.
It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example.
I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxes of words around to fix mistakes / assign unknown variables. The coolest part was where they showed how they could teach the computer that "my crib" was slang for my home location.
It's one of those things where I figured it would be big deal and then I never heard about it again. I can't even remember what it was called.
In this case, I imagine they could do something similar. As long as the computer can do good enough speech to text, there can be a human in there somewhere fixing up the tough stuff.
I imagine it's a prelude to ordering directly from your phone as you're driving to pick up the food.
Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff. I would prefer a human taking my order. Automating this stuff has 2 benefits, reduced costs while still selling over-priced sub-par food. Second, being able to upsell using video and voice technology. Are either of these good for consumers, not particularly. Nor are they good for employees. They are potentially good for management and ownership.
That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight.
Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's.
I think you should take your analysis a bit further. Freeing up human time by using machines is amazing, the issue is distributing resources - which is what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's #1 policy of UBI ("Freedom Dividend" as he's branded it) will do - and paid for via a 10% VAT tax, so companies like Amazon who paid $0 in taxes last year can't avoid taxes. Allowing management, owners, innovators to maximize efficiency - allowing them to still be incentivized to do so, and simply taking a small portion - which is enough - and redistributing it to society will lead to an exponential increase in quality of life; the buying power of "$1,000" / month of UBI Yang wants to give every adult American will increase exponentially as automation replaces everything.
If I'm not mistaken, the VAT is a consumption tax that is paid for by the consumer and collected by the companies for the government. It's not a tax paid by companies.
I assume such a tax would replace the local state based sales taxes?
Having said that when I was in the US, it was very frustrating to never know how much something would cost me based on the advertised price.
Your initial point's thinking isn't evolved enough: in Europe the # I have heard, however I haven't confirm - it does however align with my own understanding, is that 55% of the VAT tax is paid for by a company's profits; companies have to maintain being competitive by not transferring 100% of the tax to consumers, e.g. companies will compete based on how much profit margin they're giving themselves.
I'm not sure how Andrew Yang at least will implement the VAT - it will be 10% VAT vs. Europe's 20% - which will maintain competitiveness with Europe. Likewise, Yang doesn't think income tax is a good idea because he believes you should incentivize and not penalize people who are actually working; tax people who are consuming.
And agreed, there is indeed a planned confusion - psychological trick - that occurs, manipulates people - when something is priced at say $9.97 - where people tend towards not calculating the final price that includes tax, and it otherwise requires people to unnecessarily use mental energy to do calculations if the person wants to stay very price conscious.
I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands.
I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc.
What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order.
I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
I'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct.
Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans.
My first job was at Burger King. Working the drive thru was seen by most as a punishment. During the day it wasn't that bad but at night people were absolutely ridiculous in their behavior and expectations. It didn't help that many were drunk or under the influence of other intoxicants. Not sure how well automated systems would be able to deal with such situations. Maybe the customers simply couldn't order food unless they conformed to the system. Or maybe they'd just drive off, with the business losing a sale.
With the near ubiquity of internet connected phones and tablets, making a greater push for people parking outside the restaurant, ordering on their phone and having it delivered to their car curbside seems like the better medium to long term play. Get rid of the drive thru altogether. Likely would make the entire place safer for pedestrians too.
Sounds like a design funnel using AI system that doesn't respond to the shenanigans would take the reward away from them, and they'd just "behave" and order.
Good point. Actually, why do they need a restaurant at all? Why not just a kitchen and a window that delivery people or robots go to get the food when its ready.
Although I think drone delivery could be more efficient. Even though you are flying, you are moving maybe 50 or 100 pounds instead of 2000 or 3000.
I am very concise with my orders, I know what I want when I pull up. Half the time they still get it wrong. I much prefer touch screens and smart phone apps for ordering.
You're thinking short-term. What are the odds the food service industry will employ humans to take mass-market food orders in 10 years?
Restaurant servers will still exist at the higher-end, much like chauffeurs do today. But most people won't be driving their cars and a human won't be taking burger orders or grilling the patty.
My honest opinion is that after investing in AI and seeing it come up short time and again, over the next 10 years, businesses are going to run from anything that calls itself AI.
What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.
If you step back and look at the tech we use everyday similar to expert systems + graph search like deep blue, it might seem like magic. Web search, online maps, digital advertising, all huge right now.
also throw in externalities like nearby construction, speech disorders, music with lyrics or radio shows, 2nd or 3rd language speakers using english improperly, or just plain stupid and bizarre behavior. not to mention it gives your competitors an easy marketing opportunity, 'real human servers' could become the new fresh not frozen.
mobile ordering would add a lot of convenience, but it's also very frustrating to see so many services become tied to the assumption that you have a phone & more or less inaccessible without one.
You make it sound like google could just flip a switch and the assistant would magically work better. If it were that simple, why would they intentionally limit the platform?
"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice."
Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
Humans can manage to screw up even the clearest order.
Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year.
Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin.
I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!".
When I was at the pay window paying, two or three different people stopped to ask the cashier if it was true that I had really changed my order.
When I got to the other window to pick up my order, there were still people coming up to the person manning the window to ask if it was really true that my order had changed. I could also hear people in the background talking about it.
In short, apparently everyone working there was talking about my change of order as if it was the most astounding thing they had ever witnessed.
They handed me the bag, and I checked it--and they had gotten it wrong! The sausage McMuffin was missing, another Egg McMuffin in its place.
Oh, you're one of those. My parents never order what's on the menu. They've always got to customize it. Which is fine. But then they get all bent out of shape when the order isn't right. From a fast food joint. Can't you just order what's on the damn menu?
It's not like they don't have the ingredients.. and I'm expressly asking them to give me less of them, not adding any.
It's not like being pissed off because something isn't in the color I want. Product colors and manufacturing are hard problems... getting a fast food order right isn't.
The problem is the younger generations don't give a damn about their quality of work.
As someone who only orders cheese on burgers (although with the buns), it means they only want the sandwich to consist of the meat and cheese (hold all other toppings; so if it would normally come with pickles, hold those).
If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all the other toppings (or plausibly all the toppings), the with cheese part confirms that you actually do want a cheeseburger and that you only want the cheese. I've found that specific order instruction to be the closest to universally working across all chains, while generating the fewest errors, after ~25 years of testing combinations.
Exactly.. if you don't say that part, they'll usually remove the cheese too. Similar on experimenting on how to order. "Diet Dr. Pepper" is another hard one, often you will get regular, or diet coke.
The dipping cup ranch, for those curious is because the ranch dressing has a lot of added sugar/carbs and the dipping cups are like 1.5g each. Severely diabetic and nearly 0 carb has been the only effective way to manage it well.
I worked McDonald’s drive thru as a kid and plain cheese burger meant bun cheese and meat. They even had a key for it on the POS, it was completely standardized.
Of course, it’s always possible some new employee would mess it up, or anything on your order actually. With turn over so high, there was no shortage of such errors.
I worked at a couple different McD's in my teens, was an opening manager at one for over a year at 19. Never underestimate nature's ability to build a better idiot.
That's actually a bit confusing to me, not sure if you're doing that deliberately. First of all the "Double Quarter Pounder with cheese" [0] would be the name of the sandwich. Also do you want to remove only 1 bun or both buns? I guess you meant "not the combo", so maybe saying "a la carte" would work here.
Yes, "with cheese" is part of the sandwich name, but because they don't have one that doesn't have cheese on the regular menu, when you ask for "plain" it often means they'll take the cheese off too. Also, there is only 1 bun, it's split in half with the burger in the middle and I don't want it at all.
Again, you'd be surprised how well orders can come out wrong and the way I do order it reduces that chance as much as possible. It's also less expensive to order as a meal with the side salad as a sub for fries, but that means more risk of the order being wrong in the end.
If I could order "Two quarter patties with cheese, ..." then I would do just that.
I think Wendy's did that for remote order takers... they found it worked better, and had more accuracy with dedicated/shared staff taking orders for multiple locations.
"Can I substitute the Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich for the Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Sandwich in Meal #6 if I don't get the fries?"
"Can I get a burger with two patties?"
Personally I usually just order what's on the menu but there must be lots of people asking for substitutions or modifications. That's the general public for you. I wonder how this "AI" is going to handle it.
Probably it will just pass the order to a human if it totally doesn't get it, rather than risk screwing it up too badly. Or maybe McDonald's has already figured out how much it will cost to re-do someone's meal versus having another human on the payroll.
Instead of trying to teach the computer to understand this ambiguous order, what would happen is customers learn the UX of the assistant. It only takes one or two tries to figure out what words Alexa/McAI understands.
I imagine a person is more likely to get that wrong, yes you may get lucky, but also many low wage staffers especially late at night tired could easily be quite confused. Versus an AI that can be programaged on all the various terms people use and be programmed to ask for clarification consistently when a request is made that can often me more than one thing, and even take into factor things such as the location of the McDonalds and the dialects used there. Sure will start off very buggy but then presumably would only get better with more data.
I wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered).
Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.
Unless the technology has improved I would say that most systems are not much better than a CB radio.
The external microphones can be subject to a lot of wear and tear, external noise. I haven't any knowledge of a system as sophisticated as recording voice and storing, let alone pairing an audio segment to data on the pos. But rightly identified as a perfect opportunity to label training data, and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to deploy, at least in a limited capacity for the initial training and validation on this project.
The local economist has been ascribing this move to the $15 minimum wage. His take is that the only way fast food can stay profitable, with the higher minimum wages, is automation. Computers cost less than people.
Everyone in the latest YC class working on an automation-like product can now bump up their "cost savings" numbers in their pitch decks. Minimum wage increases work only if companies have to hire people.
In some ways, the notion of humans as instruction-following-meat-robots actually just feels like an extension of a todo list or a check list, but with AI. So basically I could give the computer my task list, my goals, or whatever, along with data about my energy levels, mood, etc. Then it could return an optimized & personalized set of "Do X for the next 5 minutes, do Y for the next 15 minutes" instructions. That could result in significantly more productivity.
I'm quite the fan of the exocortex notion - the computer as an external brain that extends my intelligence, productivity, etc.
Was there some other short story about a similar concept (AI managed fast food workers)? Something by Stallman or Doctorow maybe? I have vague deja-vu at that story, but from much longer ago than 2017, when Manna was published.
1. the Australia Project resembles the society in Ian Banks' series The Culture
2. Curious that a post-capitalist society uses credits to ensure allocation, sort of a UBI, but it seems to gloss over a couple details:
2a. Do credits accrue or is it use-it-or-lose-it?
2b. It sounds like credits can be transferred between people (the space elevator story), what stops credit accrual from skewing via the Pareto Law into the same 1% having 99% of credits?
Space elevator is not credits transferred between people. It is credits being transferred to the public good. Lots of people wanted a space elevator, so they crowdfunded it, but the ownership of the elevator is public; i.e. you get access to the elevator regardless of whether or not you funded its construction.
Whimsically, I’d like to see this system only take orders in Japanese.
Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is).
Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations.
But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian.
At many fast food restaurants, especially the less busy one, the person taking drive through orders is multitasking. I've seen people run the front register and the drive through ordering at the same time.
It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could.
I've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering.
Plus, you can probably get better utilization from people in a call center. If the typical drive through worker is taking calls only 50% of the time, you can have one call center worker handle the work of two drive through people.
You could also emphasize the "drive through" aspect for some customers if you could convince them to call while they were en route, or use the app to order, you could have their food waiting for them in a place where they could drive up, tap their phone, automatically get their food, etc.
Why not just use a call center for this? Someone pulls up to the speaker, and someone in another part of the world takes their order and puts it into the restaurant’s system. Surely that would be easier and have a greater chance of success than voice gen?
Presumably because the idea is to save money, and a call center forever would be more expensive but the far more realistic issue, if unlike an AI that could provide a consistent on brand experience, with a call center your experience would be hit or miss every time and drive thoughts are already not usually a great experience so a low wage call center would probably be even worse. Taking away jobs is certainly an issue in itself but I imagine overall this will mean a more consistent experience that they can improve over time.
Lots of people here are saying they should just use a phone app.
I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily.
There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high.
Chick-Fil-A handles the queuing order problem by asking you just to confirm who you are at the drive through order station. They don’t start preparing your order until you check in.
> “Mobile order for zaroth!”
> “Thank you!”
Most people order the same thing every time. Open app, click Favorite Reorder button. It can be exactly one tap. Or a Hey Siri if you like.
This is how everyone orders their Starbucks coffee for years now. There’s no liability issue with providing an app to order ahead.
They already have a phone app though. You order on your phone then pull into one of the pickup slots, note in the app which slot you're in and your food is brought out to you. Has been here in Canada for awhile now.
Everything outdoors needs to be fairly robust, and the kiosks would be hard to reach and painfully slow compared to any voice system.
I use them most times I go to McDonalds, but they’re always slower than it would be to just order if there’s no line, and worse, they feel much slower than they probably are.
Voice ordering would have a lower installation cost since it can rely on the existing outdoor ordering interface, and it’s more familiar to their customers. There are 14,000 McDonalds in the US alone, so the switching costs and risks add up.
I'm about 99.99964% positive that a key point behind voice (and touchscreen) sales interfaces will be to integrate upsell and/or advertising into the transaction consistently.
Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells
Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
"What drinks do you have?" "Can I get combo without the drink?" "How much cheaper is it with a water?" "My kid wants the rainbow Happy Meal toy, can we have that one please?" "What time did you stop serving breakfast?" "Do you still have McFlurries? What flavors are there?"
Yeah, because the same machines that wiped the floor with a 9-dan Go champion a couple of years ago will be completely flummoxed by people placing orders at McDonald's.
How is this not a perfect example of a self-contained problem? There are only so many items on the manu. Each can only be prepared in so many different ways, with so many different ingredients.
Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News," IMO.
Frankly this entire subthread is surreal, as if the site had seen a lot of recent signups from people who've never used a smart speaker before.
If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate.
On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.”
It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.
Up to 2 years ago our local McDonalds drive-in used to have a separate booth where you interacted with a person when you placed an order.
Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure.
Ironically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte.
Those of you who are touting use of the McDonald's app: have you bothered to look at the permissions you are granting to the contents and usage of your phone in order to use the app?
Logical turn of events though, everything goes to human replacement by robots and/or AIs in many kind of manufactures. Total human replacement by robots is a matter of time I believe.
Great another move to remove the human touch of service from the food industry. If anything I feel like we're still a few years away from being able to have AI sophisticated enough to mimic conversion for people to comfortable enough to use daily for even simple tasks such as taking orders.
I am fairly violently opposed to automation eliminating human jobs without some type of compensating control, which gets into a political place I don’t want to go right now.
But having said that...
The human touch of fast food ordering? What human touch? There isn’t much conversation that happens with the human that’s there today.
It's about time.
I love getting H1B programmers writing shit code for cheap so I can scam them for fake food.
Hopefully this'll shut that crap down for good.
I think it's bad idea since there are a few lawsuits against restaurants that are not serving deaf customers. I'd say quite a lot complicated than you think. I understand the concept of automation but there are between cons and pros. For example, a car automation may develop the brain cancer by the radiation through the high-energy reception or whatever the factor may be but that's the point...it's going to be a long shot for sure.
Next they'll come for the cooks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc
There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.
Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.
Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.
Lots of interesting operating considerations.
A few thoughts, having worked in "Quick Service Restaurants" a long long time ago.
Ignoring cost of human labor and a move to equipment maintenance for a moment, one of the key metrics tracked is waste/loss, i.e. from the bins in the kitchen. Amounts of discarded buns, lettuce, tomatoes, burnt or spoiled, past due-date, serve-time etc. it all gets tallied and recorded.
If you get sent one box of frozen fries weighing a known amount, that should translate into (x) number of servings +- a fairly narrow distribution curve. If you go through 10 boxes but only sold 9(x) servings then maybe your staff are overfilling, dropping, burning or eating the fries. Either way, they are losing you cash. The cash at the tail end of your otherwise carefully controlled supply chain.
Anything that cost effectively eliminates waste will be next.
Some parts of the cooking have been automated for a long time. For example, nobody flips burgers anymore. They're placed on a clamshell grill that cooks both sides at the same time and releases when it's done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mj7_a1Egew
The next step will be loading the products into the grill and unloading them automatically...and that's already in the works.
But robot assembly of sandwiches is a long way off. Humans are way more flexible and efficient here. The key is removing the repetitive tasks from their workload.
We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados!
I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore.
In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.
This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.
I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on.
And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.
>we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization
this won't happen automatically. it will have to be a conscious decision. how do you propose to get there instead of the dystopian future where things are infinitely more scarce for some and not for others which seems to be our default trajectory
How is that our default trajectory? Things aren't infinitely more scarce for some these days. Poverty has been in long term decline across the world. The poor today are much better off than they were in the past despite huge populations; this is essentially because of improved technology. Much of it automation.
I wonder what the guy who lived like 300,000 years before you thought... Probably just trying to get something to eat and not die.
The top 0.1% very much enjoy their iphones, yachts, entertainment options, and the other products of a strong economy. They don't have much incentive to tear it all down.
Automation has overall improved quality of life significantly. We can now grow so much food that we can easily feed the world many times over. Clothing has become so cheap that many items are practically free. And trips around the world are no longer accessible to only that top 0.1-1%. It's not all gloom and doom.
We could feed the world, we don't. We could vaccinate, give clean water, nearly free electricity to every person on the planet. We don't. It's not that we don't have the resources, we consciously choose not to do these because they would cause a minor inconvenience to those who have enough. The top .001 percent don't even live in the same reality as the rest of us, and there's plainly no way they could. The don't interact with anyone who isn't like them.
> We want automation
But we might just not want it _yet_. There’s a lot of work to be done first to prepare people for being layed off, reskilled, or retired en masse.
> Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.
Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity, and we move away from the idea every adult should be required to work 40 hours a week to survive?
>Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity
This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind.
Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.
If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation.
As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows?
If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!
Before you have said "unprecedented scale", do you realized that in XIX and XX century advances in agriculture production LITERALLY removed about 98% of the jobs of that era?
> What (..) job does automating away McDonald's workers create?
This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker.
I am not hopeful about the future.
Automated burger assembly machine operator.
> new, previously impossible jobs.
like this? https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...
“Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.”
This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.
If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.
Cooking at home isn't expensive. Robot cooks will probably cost more than your kitchen.
We will share them as public infrastructure.
Should the US Federal Government nationalize McDonald's then? It's already an ambassador for the country anyway.
People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.
No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.
IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.
Not in petro states, generally.
And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.
Long before you tell people they do not have a right to live, you will want to address consumption. Poor people are not consuming as much as rich.
Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being necessary.
You can't grow food faster. You can only make more of it which requires more resources. The jobs being created today are mostly poverty level jobs or high end jobs and this trend is expected to continue which hollows out the middle class. Pure unemployment numbers aren't useful since the expected date increases with a tighter labor market haven't been happening at all. Once worker wages became decoupled from the value that they actually created, none of the idea that you're paid what your with was valid. Now you're paid what you can negotiate which depends entirely upon how much power you have. Most workers have none.
Cost disease, i.e. things cost as much as they do because they always have. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
because in this case food prices are going to skyrocket in a climate change world.
Robots are so much high maintenance than just touch panels and voice rec. Thus while it is a good idea the hurtles are much higher to get a positive ROI.
Touch panels seem to be way better than trying to figure out how to speak in "Robot English" instead of just pushing buttons that do what you mean (mostly) without fail. Also some people who take your order are rude and make whats just supposed to be a convenient grab for food into an awful experience.
Seems to be easily solvable with an app on your phone, you order as you queue and by the time you reach the counter you already paid.
Given that this is a drivethrough we're discussing, I'd love to not have more things to encourage people to use their phones while operating heavy machinery.
The way some of these places do it is you park at a pick up spot (I remember Chick-fil-a doing this). So you order before you go pick up the food. Usually while at a grocery store, or have a friend order for you.
As a guy that maintains robots at a factory. They are literally a 1 hour side task once a month. The robot arms basically only needed a rebuild once in 15 years. The tooling is the only thing that goes bad and needs replacing every month and it's designed such that only a small part of the tooling needs replacement.
As a guy buying robots for a factory right now I have heard many stories like this. Including some robot arms operating for over 22 years with minimal maintenance. Incidentally, I am building a factory to build food robots!
Do you have some contact information? I'd love to ask a few questions about this.
Think to the future my friend. In time the technology will get better.
Nope, they'll come for the managers first. See Manna by Marshall Brain
Thanks for the recommendation - looks like an interesting read.
Automated cooking seems more achievable to me, at least somewhere like McDonalds with fairly standardized items. The inputs and outputs are much more defined and there's much less need for AI.
> Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The robot janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.
Anything that complex would probably go through a chemical wash rather than having a robot get into every corner. Some medical equipment like endoscopes are cleaned this way.
Robots are great for repetitive tasks that have low variability like industrial parts that are almost exactly identical to spec. But when things aren't exactly to spec, I'm not sure that the robots would be easily able to recover with where the tech is today. Like let's say a slightly customized order, few buns stick together, something falls, tomatos are slightly more mushy than normal, or isn't loaded to the machine exactly right.
This is true but predictable failure modes can be designed around.
San Francisco has some self-cleaning public bathrooms that work like that. Locks between each person and cleans the whole thing including the floors. Pretty cool.
Hmm. It might have been ten years since I tried to use one of those here, generally I found them to be broken or continuously occupied for absurd lengths of time, I.e. camped in. There’s a reason nobody is advocating for more of these to be installed despite demand for well, public sanitary facilities.
I did however use the same model in Palo Alto recently. Turns out they’re not bad if they’re well maintained and charge a small fee (50¢) to use.
Except when they’re not working, which is every single time I’ve tried one.
Only been in one, the one on Stanyan street near Waller. Worked fine for me!
You're missing a trick I think ... Why not do an IKEA style build-it-yourself burger operation, where food is cooked and deposited into a box with how-to-build-your-burger instructions printed on top. The perfect personalised burger experience! We might even get websites that sell McD hacks that you can add to your self build burger experience!
I mean, what is the real MVP for McD? It's sourcing, uni-forming, storing and then cooking food. Assembly doesn't really need to be part of it.
In Austria, for a few shining years, we had "build my burger" where you could use the order terminals to create your perfect burger. For a year I ate a mess of three chicken patties and lots of cheese on a daily basis.
Sadly, they got rid of it.
The new terminals have an option to customize your burger, I guess that's pretty much the same thing. Or did they remove it only recently?
You can customize burgers, yeah, but with "My Burger", you could think up insanities like 3 chicken patties and 5 pieces of cheese.
There's the terminal customization, and no-holds-barred buffet-style Just a Bunch of Food to mixup.
This is what fuddruckers basically does.
Like the 1€ Hotdogs at IKEA?
If you get robo servers and robo cooks your kitchen janitorial needs go way down.
at this rate they will soon need robo customers.
Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.
Here in Hong Kong, every McDonalds has 3+ touch screens, I hardly see anyone lining up at the counter these days. I for one only use the touch screens.
I use the McD touch screens. It works, but it takes about 30 clicks to buy something. Also, I was flummoxed until I figured out that [Add To Order] actually means "I'm done, I want to pay now".
I suppose all this was extensively play-tested, but I have no idea what sort of person play tested it given the result.
Maybe the software is different per country/region, because here it takes maybe ~5 clicks to buy something. And you can easily add multiple items before paying.
Yeah, I also find usability sucks, so I usually go to the register if the line isn't too long.
I used one in HK too, and various other places. One benefit for busy cities is that they are great for allowing tourists to go at their own pace if they struggle with the local language (and often have language options to help them).
That's very true, especially for introverted people like me, who don't like the attention when struggling with a language.
It also helps that the devices are pretty responsive, and allow you to order everything.
The downside is that I often see older people struggle with it, I guess for them it would be easier to talk to a human.
> who don't like the attention when struggling with a language
I suppose I am the opposite. I enjoy attempting to order food in a tongue I am learning. But going through the process with a native English speaker, I'd rather just push a button on the kiosk.
Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?
Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process the car companies did.
What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.
Disclaimer: I currently work at a company in the QSR+mobile ordering space
It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc.
Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.
It seems like you could afford some duplication. US filet of fish could be menu item 23701 and Japan Filet of fish could be menu item 23702. I can see how this would be hard, but I don't think you would get any pity from the people who work on health care service billing codes.
How myopic for you have to be to not just wonder why a mcd app in Japan would not be expected to work in the us but to say that's how it should be? All the complex shit that goes into a company like mcd in a single country and you expect what you're expecting?
I would avoid it just because of all of the various fingers that have touched it before me.
I don't like touching the screens either.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/28/poo-found-on-every-mcdonalds-...
Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.
Senior lecturer in microbiology at London Metropolitan University Dr Paul Matewele said: ‘We were all surprised how much gut and faecal bacteria there was on the touchscreen machines. These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals.
> Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.
Did they swab the food bags and food that came out as well? Poo particles are probably everywhere.
I think I've heard this ("there's poop on it") about everything. Keyboards, doorknobs, kitchen sinks, toothbrushes, etc.
Either it's simply not true, or it is true and it doesn't matter.
I think it's true, but you have an immune system that makes this largely irrelevant.
Isn't this the result whenever someone investigates any surface people touch? Not everyone washes their hands, but everyone poops. The result is sadly predictable.
You mean...like the doorknobs?
If you make doorknobs out of brass, they might still get poop on them, but many types of bacteria and viruses can’t survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...
Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...
Ok, but most doorknobs aren't brass.
How many doorknobs do you typically touch outside of your home a day? Most doors here are automatic. Plus, I would be reluctant to use someone else's keyboard at work, even.
But...why? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Generally find yourself especially vulnerable to the errant bug? How do you feel when you breath in someone's fart? You're a walking bag of mud expressing discomfort at other bits of mud in the world. One bit in a million might be annoying. One in a billion actually painful.
What about the money in your wallet, and the change returned to you when you pay? None of it is hygienic.
The local Mickey D's put in a couple of tall touch-screen systems that I found surprisingly difficult to figure out. The touch screen was slow to respond -- nothing more frustrating than tapping a glass screen and wondering why nothing happened -- and the decision path didn't make sense. I suspect whoever designed it had one kind of user experience in mind, then it was modified by a different group to change the UX, leaving it worse than before. Anyway, I notice that no one uses it, and I visit frequently (it's so close that I often drop by to get the $0.99 coffee, and now my 14-year-old has started working there).
My local McD had touch screens with exactly the experience you describe. I got in the habit of repeatedly tapping until I got the button to respond.
This last week I noticed the UI had some major improvements and was ultra snappy.
I expect they took user feedback and are slow rolling a version 2.0.
The one at mine is a completely smooth experience.
Same here. His McD's must have cheaped out.
Panera has a great touchscreen experience.
Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register.
Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.
They do have the issue that they run out of baked goods but don't update the state of the ordering system. I assume it is legitimately difficult to keep perfect inventory of the items to make that work, but it does lead to some confusion.
For the past year or so, there are touchscreen monitors in all McDonalds. So they are already replacing slowly employees by machines.
We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.
The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.
Custom orders are really slow to enter
You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.
I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.
The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.
I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.
Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu.
[EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.
This may be my old man moment.
I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever.
I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.
The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.
Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.
We have those in New Zealand and they were initially awful - slow, hard to navigate/find stuff, actually missing lots of menu items. They seem to have swapped out the system now though and they seem to be relatively usable.
New Zealand was the first country to get them, I believe, which is why they had usability problems to start with.
Anecdotally, McDonald's in Australia and New Zealand have touchscreen ordering and I can't remember the last time I saw someone actually ordering in person.
It's so much nicer to be able to take your time, actually view the menu and costs of items, and choose what you want to eat without a line of hungry people waiting behind you.
That will pass. At one point I could jump to the front of the airline check-in queue because nobody was using the touch-screen check-ins. Now the touch-screens are the only way.
Unclear why one needs kiosks when the user's device is much more compelling. While there are some (very good) exceptions, many remain yesteryear's technology and meh to outright garbage UIX. The only reason is to maintain some local control and (when available) human common sense in the equation.
Brick & mortar kiosks are the DVD Netflix of fast food.
Do you really want dozens of apps on your phone, one for each restaurant you could possibly eat at? I don't.
WiFi web portal you use in the store?
Yes, that would work, but then that does not provide the marketing department with the same level of invasive tracking and push notification as "an app" does. So guess which option gets built....
My local mcdonalds has 3 panels and no cashiers at all except drive thru. People use them all the time and this is BFE Texas. Assistance is available of course, via the people who would normally bring out your order,for people who can't use them properly.
Most Burger Kings here in Sweden have touchscreen ordering and I hardly see anyone using the register any more. Personally I find it such a far superior experience.
The end game is to remove all drive throughs and fast food joints, and replace them with drone and/or pneumatic tube food delivery. I'm hoping for the tubes.
Robo janitors are closer than you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3bgMyMQB9U
Why would I order with my voice by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that?
Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine.
Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds, but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid for. This takes like 2.5 seconds from the time the app is launched.
I’m not going to, like, recite out loud the 7 different modifications I made between the sandwiches, toppings, drinks, and sides every time I want something to eat. That would be barbaric.
Next thing you’re going to tell me is I’m supposed to hand a thin plastic rectangular device to a human so they can stick it in some other device just to process my payment!
McDonald's app is really convenient for ordering and paying. And they have coupons. I am a fan.
Used to be a fan until they started having shittier coupons.
Their coupons used to be insane. I went all the time and they have to have lost money on me. I couldn't believe the amount of food I would get for almost nothing. It's no wonder that they couldn't sustain that.
This is a good point. Given the unreliability of voice recognition, an app would be preferable. But also, even a touchscreen where you can select your order would be a better idea.
I cannot wait. Finally, going to McDonald's will lose all semblance of visiting a restaurant, and be fully realized as the experience of receiving various permutations of bleached flour, HFCS, and sad meat from a giant red and yellow robotic playdoh factory that it was always meant to be.
One can only hope the robot arms will sport giant mickey mouse gloves. Value added.
As long as the AI can reliably and accurately serve me a decaf coffee, I'll be satisfied.
Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu...
@dang can we get the URL changed?
Yeah. That's a much better article. They're buying a company to work on it.
It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example.
I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxes of words around to fix mistakes / assign unknown variables. The coolest part was where they showed how they could teach the computer that "my crib" was slang for my home location.
It's one of those things where I figured it would be big deal and then I never heard about it again. I can't even remember what it was called.
In this case, I imagine they could do something similar. As long as the computer can do good enough speech to text, there can be a human in there somewhere fixing up the tough stuff.
I imagine it's a prelude to ordering directly from your phone as you're driving to pick up the food.
Seems like they have access to a goldmine of labeled training data
Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff. I would prefer a human taking my order. Automating this stuff has 2 benefits, reduced costs while still selling over-priced sub-par food. Second, being able to upsell using video and voice technology. Are either of these good for consumers, not particularly. Nor are they good for employees. They are potentially good for management and ownership.
That's pretty sad outcome to all this. Optimizing increasing the number of calories people are eating by up-selling sugary drinks and other add-on items or larger sizes (was recently at a McDonalds and that's exactly what their large ordering terminal was doing) and optimizing for increasing people's weight.
Imagine using the same technology to reduce people's weight. But that's not usually the way to profit for fast food companies like McDonald's.
I think you should take your analysis a bit further. Freeing up human time by using machines is amazing, the issue is distributing resources - which is what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang's #1 policy of UBI ("Freedom Dividend" as he's branded it) will do - and paid for via a 10% VAT tax, so companies like Amazon who paid $0 in taxes last year can't avoid taxes. Allowing management, owners, innovators to maximize efficiency - allowing them to still be incentivized to do so, and simply taking a small portion - which is enough - and redistributing it to society will lead to an exponential increase in quality of life; the buying power of "$1,000" / month of UBI Yang wants to give every adult American will increase exponentially as automation replaces everything.
If I'm not mistaken, the VAT is a consumption tax that is paid for by the consumer and collected by the companies for the government. It's not a tax paid by companies.
I assume such a tax would replace the local state based sales taxes?
Having said that when I was in the US, it was very frustrating to never know how much something would cost me based on the advertised price.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Your initial point's thinking isn't evolved enough: in Europe the # I have heard, however I haven't confirm - it does however align with my own understanding, is that 55% of the VAT tax is paid for by a company's profits; companies have to maintain being competitive by not transferring 100% of the tax to consumers, e.g. companies will compete based on how much profit margin they're giving themselves.
I'm not sure how Andrew Yang at least will implement the VAT - it will be 10% VAT vs. Europe's 20% - which will maintain competitiveness with Europe. Likewise, Yang doesn't think income tax is a good idea because he believes you should incentivize and not penalize people who are actually working; tax people who are consuming.
And agreed, there is indeed a planned confusion - psychological trick - that occurs, manipulates people - when something is priced at say $9.97 - where people tend towards not calculating the final price that includes tax, and it otherwise requires people to unnecessarily use mental energy to do calculations if the person wants to stay very price conscious.
> I assume such a tax would replace the local state based sales taxes?
Probably not. Government's aren't keen on reducing tax.
So you have a problem with a fast-food restaurant trying to sell fast foods?
> Article you posted is mostly P/R fluff.
This article is the source of the HN-linked BBC article.
Their company doesn't need to use your morals
I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands.
I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc.
What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order.
I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
I'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct.
Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans.
Have you seen people order? I would shoot half the customers if I worked a fast food counter much less the drive through.
My first job was at Burger King. Working the drive thru was seen by most as a punishment. During the day it wasn't that bad but at night people were absolutely ridiculous in their behavior and expectations. It didn't help that many were drunk or under the influence of other intoxicants. Not sure how well automated systems would be able to deal with such situations. Maybe the customers simply couldn't order food unless they conformed to the system. Or maybe they'd just drive off, with the business losing a sale.
With the near ubiquity of internet connected phones and tablets, making a greater push for people parking outside the restaurant, ordering on their phone and having it delivered to their car curbside seems like the better medium to long term play. Get rid of the drive thru altogether. Likely would make the entire place safer for pedestrians too.
Reminded me of this:
https://theuserisdrunk.com/
Drive-thrus aren't the only things people use while they're drunk
There are probably people using your website or app while drunk. How does your user experience handle this?
Sounds like a design funnel using AI system that doesn't respond to the shenanigans would take the reward away from them, and they'd just "behave" and order.
Sounds great for the employees, but where's the sell for the franchisee/HQ?
Eh, competitors who are doing it will put you out of business if you're not innovating towards same efficiencies. :)
Good point. Actually, why do they need a restaurant at all? Why not just a kitchen and a window that delivery people or robots go to get the food when its ready.
Although I think drone delivery could be more efficient. Even though you are flying, you are moving maybe 50 or 100 pounds instead of 2000 or 3000.
Coffee delivery by drone was in the trial stage in Australia beginning of this year: https://www.ubergizmo.com/2019/01/google-coffee-delivery-dro...
I am very concise with my orders, I know what I want when I pull up. Half the time they still get it wrong. I much prefer touch screens and smart phone apps for ordering.
You're thinking short-term. What are the odds the food service industry will employ humans to take mass-market food orders in 10 years?
Restaurant servers will still exist at the higher-end, much like chauffeurs do today. But most people won't be driving their cars and a human won't be taking burger orders or grilling the patty.
My honest opinion is that after investing in AI and seeing it come up short time and again, over the next 10 years, businesses are going to run from anything that calls itself AI.
I think we are going to have another “AI” winter.
I think AlphaGo put paid to that notion. It's real this time. It's all over but the scaling.
I'm picturing someone saying the same thing about Deep Blue a couple of decades ago.
Are we so sure it's that different this time around? Sure, current AI are better, but are they better enough?
What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.
If you step back and look at the tech we use everyday similar to expert systems + graph search like deep blue, it might seem like magic. Web search, online maps, digital advertising, all huge right now.
Yes. Chess and Go are that different.
On screen confirmations should cut down on those issues.
also throw in externalities like nearby construction, speech disorders, music with lyrics or radio shows, 2nd or 3rd language speakers using english improperly, or just plain stupid and bizarre behavior. not to mention it gives your competitors an easy marketing opportunity, 'real human servers' could become the new fresh not frozen. mobile ordering would add a lot of convenience, but it's also very frustrating to see so many services become tied to the assumption that you have a phone & more or less inaccessible without one.
Siri and Google Assistant are much more (intentionally?) gimped than the state of the art. But I don't have any faith in McDonald's version either.
Google Assistant gimped? How so?
You make it sound like google could just flip a switch and the assistant would magically work better. If it were that simple, why would they intentionally limit the platform?
"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice."
Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
Humans can manage to screw up even the clearest order.
Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year.
Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin.
I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!".
When I was at the pay window paying, two or three different people stopped to ask the cashier if it was true that I had really changed my order.
When I got to the other window to pick up my order, there were still people coming up to the person manning the window to ask if it was really true that my order had changed. I could also hear people in the background talking about it.
In short, apparently everyone working there was talking about my change of order as if it was the most astounding thing they had ever witnessed.
They handed me the bag, and I checked it--and they had gotten it wrong! The sausage McMuffin was missing, another Egg McMuffin in its place.
At a cafe near the office, the barrista would line up my drink as I entered the door, I only had to smile at her and pay at the counter.
This over 20 years ago.
Some things stick in the memory, on both sides.
Regular customers definitely have an air of celebrity about them.
Honestly, I expect that would be the easy part.
The hard part is:
"Can you put [specific toy] in the kids meal?"
"Wait, no, I want ketchup on that. I mean, mustard."
"Can you bring it out to me when its ready?"
"Your ice machine is broken?"
"My debit card doesn't have much money on it, so just ring up my order until it hits $20."
Taking an order is totally doable. Answering questions that require stateful knowledge is hard.
“A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.”
https://twitter.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232
<artificial sound of typing>
"Just wait a second while I look that up"
"Ok, your debit balance is zero."
"I see you haven't ordered a drink, would you like to add one?"
Oh, you're one of those. My parents never order what's on the menu. They've always got to customize it. Which is fine. But then they get all bent out of shape when the order isn't right. From a fast food joint. Can't you just order what's on the damn menu?
:)
It's not like they don't have the ingredients.. and I'm expressly asking them to give me less of them, not adding any.
It's not like being pissed off because something isn't in the color I want. Product colors and manufacturing are hard problems... getting a fast food order right isn't.
The problem is the younger generations don't give a damn about their quality of work.
"Dad you're giving $4 for this meal, do not act like you're buying a $25 gourmet burger and hurry TFU"
https://youtu.be/cnlm2e3EN78
I don't think I could get that right, what does "only cheese" mean exactly?
As someone who only orders cheese on burgers (although with the buns), it means they only want the sandwich to consist of the meat and cheese (hold all other toppings; so if it would normally come with pickles, hold those).
If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all the other toppings (or plausibly all the toppings), the with cheese part confirms that you actually do want a cheeseburger and that you only want the cheese. I've found that specific order instruction to be the closest to universally working across all chains, while generating the fewest errors, after ~25 years of testing combinations.
Exactly.. if you don't say that part, they'll usually remove the cheese too. Similar on experimenting on how to order. "Diet Dr. Pepper" is another hard one, often you will get regular, or diet coke.
The dipping cup ranch, for those curious is because the ranch dressing has a lot of added sugar/carbs and the dipping cups are like 1.5g each. Severely diabetic and nearly 0 carb has been the only effective way to manage it well.
I worked McDonald’s drive thru as a kid and plain cheese burger meant bun cheese and meat. They even had a key for it on the POS, it was completely standardized.
Of course, it’s always possible some new employee would mess it up, or anything on your order actually. With turn over so high, there was no shortage of such errors.
I worked at a couple different McD's in my teens, was an opening manager at one for over a year at 19. Never underestimate nature's ability to build a better idiot.
No ketchup, pickles, onions or mustard.
Or bun
It’s happened. At the McDs I worked at we’d put the rest of the burger on the tray used for hotcakes.
It's just an order for gluten-free/keto burger and salad with no toppings other than cheese. Plus some tenders.
I actually don't think tenders is included in the order... I think they just ordered the ranch dip cups you would get if you ordered nuggets.
correct.. the dip cups are ~1g carbs per cup, the salad dressing packets are around 12g (mostly sugars) iirc.
> just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun
I wouldn't expect anyone to figure this out. Every fragment is a contradiction! Without a bun is it a sandwich? Only cheese already means no bun?
At McD, “just the sandwich” is code for “I don’t want the fries & drink meal package.”
(Cheese/bun part addressed in other comments.)
That's actually a bit confusing to me, not sure if you're doing that deliberately. First of all the "Double Quarter Pounder with cheese" [0] would be the name of the sandwich. Also do you want to remove only 1 bun or both buns? I guess you meant "not the combo", so maybe saying "a la carte" would work here.
[0] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/double-quarter-po...
Yes, "with cheese" is part of the sandwich name, but because they don't have one that doesn't have cheese on the regular menu, when you ask for "plain" it often means they'll take the cheese off too. Also, there is only 1 bun, it's split in half with the burger in the middle and I don't want it at all.
Again, you'd be surprised how well orders can come out wrong and the way I do order it reduces that chance as much as possible. It's also less expensive to order as a meal with the side salad as a sub for fries, but that means more risk of the order being wrong in the end.
If I could order "Two quarter patties with cheese, ..." then I would do just that.
Please hold on, we'll connect you with our teleoperator.
"Hello this is Lakshmi, how may I help you?"
McDonalds trialled a remote operated drive-through a long time ago.
I think they found that orders were a couple seconds faster. Dunno why they didn't go forward with it: the outsourcing advantages are obvious.
Found the article: 2006 NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
I think Wendy's did that for remote order takers... they found it worked better, and had more accuracy with dedicated/shared staff taking orders for multiple locations.
"Can I substitute the Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich for the Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Sandwich in Meal #6 if I don't get the fries?"
"Can I get a burger with two patties?"
Personally I usually just order what's on the menu but there must be lots of people asking for substitutions or modifications. That's the general public for you. I wonder how this "AI" is going to handle it.
Probably it will just pass the order to a human if it totally doesn't get it, rather than risk screwing it up too badly. Or maybe McDonald's has already figured out how much it will cost to re-do someone's meal versus having another human on the payroll.
This is where the engineers have an opportunity to hide the best easter eggs.
Instead of trying to teach the computer to understand this ambiguous order, what would happen is customers learn the UX of the assistant. It only takes one or two tries to figure out what words Alexa/McAI understands.
Judging by the interface you get with Uber Eats, I doubt it would be any better.
I imagine a person is more likely to get that wrong, yes you may get lucky, but also many low wage staffers especially late at night tired could easily be quite confused. Versus an AI that can be programaged on all the various terms people use and be programmed to ask for clarification consistently when a request is made that can often me more than one thing, and even take into factor things such as the location of the McDonalds and the dialects used there. Sure will start off very buggy but then presumably would only get better with more data.
I'll bet it's better the second time you order after it recognizes you hearing your voice, reading your license plate, peering at your phone or face.
WOULD YOU LIKE THE REGULAR, MR TRACKER1? DIET DR. PEPPER IS ON SALE THIS WEEK.
I'm also assuming that if the AI is having trouble, they just shoot the tasty food ordering mic over to a call center in the Philippines.
I wonder if mcdonalds records/retains the audio from its drive through systems. Seems like a goldmine of validation data thats already labelled (with the order the employee entered).
Voice with some minor interaction seems like a much better solution for the kiosks as well. "Large Big mac meal" is a lot quicker than clicking through a kiosk.
Unless the technology has improved I would say that most systems are not much better than a CB radio.
The external microphones can be subject to a lot of wear and tear, external noise. I haven't any knowledge of a system as sophisticated as recording voice and storing, let alone pairing an audio segment to data on the pos. But rightly identified as a perfect opportunity to label training data, and you wouldn't think it would be too hard to deploy, at least in a limited capacity for the initial training and validation on this project.
I imagine some old systems from before the dawn of big data don't.
The local economist has been ascribing this move to the $15 minimum wage. His take is that the only way fast food can stay profitable, with the higher minimum wages, is automation. Computers cost less than people.
Everyone in the latest YC class working on an automation-like product can now bump up their "cost savings" numbers in their pitch decks. Minimum wage increases work only if companies have to hire people.
Welcome Manna.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
In some ways, the notion of humans as instruction-following-meat-robots actually just feels like an extension of a todo list or a check list, but with AI. So basically I could give the computer my task list, my goals, or whatever, along with data about my energy levels, mood, etc. Then it could return an optimized & personalized set of "Do X for the next 5 minutes, do Y for the next 15 minutes" instructions. That could result in significantly more productivity.
I'm quite the fan of the exocortex notion - the computer as an external brain that extends my intelligence, productivity, etc.
Was there some other short story about a similar concept (AI managed fast food workers)? Something by Stallman or Doctorow maybe? I have vague deja-vu at that story, but from much longer ago than 2017, when Manna was published.
It's from 2003. I guess the copyright notice became a hassle to update after 2017 :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
That explains it, thanks!
A lot going on there, my main observations:
1. the Australia Project resembles the society in Ian Banks' series The Culture
2. Curious that a post-capitalist society uses credits to ensure allocation, sort of a UBI, but it seems to gloss over a couple details:
2a. Do credits accrue or is it use-it-or-lose-it?
2b. It sounds like credits can be transferred between people (the space elevator story), what stops credit accrual from skewing via the Pareto Law into the same 1% having 99% of credits?
Space elevator is not credits transferred between people. It is credits being transferred to the public good. Lots of people wanted a space elevator, so they crowdfunded it, but the ownership of the elevator is public; i.e. you get access to the elevator regardless of whether or not you funded its construction.
Whimsically, I’d like to see this system only take orders in Japanese.
Well, you can speak to it in English (or whatever native tongue you prefer) but it gets translated out loud to you, then in response it speaks Japanese back to you and again on the fly translates that to you in your native tongue. Imagine a live translator between you and the ordering system (as redundant as it is).
Eventually returning customers would learn to order in Japanese and they would not need the translations.
But I want it to have a contrived aspect of Japanese futurism even if it’s rubegoldbergian.
M:いらっしゃいませ
C:ハンバーガーを1つくださ
M:はい
At many fast food restaurants, especially the less busy one, the person taking drive through orders is multitasking. I've seen people run the front register and the drive through ordering at the same time.
It's very impressive, and it also means this won't cost quite as many jobs as it could.
I've never understood why drive through ordering was not done through a call center. It could be in India for cheap labor. At the end of the day, you are "calling" someone and they punch things into a computer that is the same system no matter where you are ordering.
I believe they experimented with this in the late 90's early 00's. I recall seeing job ads for rural remote workers doing exactly this kind of work.
You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.
>You don't even need to go overseas, as rural America & people looking for temp work would probably offer you higher quality for very low wages.
Hah. Low wages yes, but not Indian low wages. Profit trumps all.
Plus, you can probably get better utilization from people in a call center. If the typical drive through worker is taking calls only 50% of the time, you can have one call center worker handle the work of two drive through people.
You could also emphasize the "drive through" aspect for some customers if you could convince them to call while they were en route, or use the app to order, you could have their food waiting for them in a place where they could drive up, tap their phone, automatically get their food, etc.
Why not just use a call center for this? Someone pulls up to the speaker, and someone in another part of the world takes their order and puts it into the restaurant’s system. Surely that would be easier and have a greater chance of success than voice gen?
Presumably because the idea is to save money, and a call center forever would be more expensive but the far more realistic issue, if unlike an AI that could provide a consistent on brand experience, with a call center your experience would be hit or miss every time and drive thoughts are already not usually a great experience so a low wage call center would probably be even worse. Taking away jobs is certainly an issue in itself but I imagine overall this will mean a more consistent experience that they can improve over time.
They've been doing that since 2006. I guess this is next step.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
Lots of people here are saying they should just use a phone app.
I see it as problematic to require drivers, even those stopped at a drive through, (you don't generally put your car in park) to use their phone. There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering. I'm not even sure that a McDonalds policy that said "put it in park" would pass legal review since the car is on and you're only stopped temporarily.
There would also be an issue with keeping the orders in the proper order. 10 people in line at the drive through sending their orders through at once would make that difficult, error rates could be high.
Maybe a kiosk would work though.
I use the phone app every time I go through the Mcdonalds drive thru (in the UK). I order on my phone, drive up, give them the order number.
This is already a thing. The only thing it's missing is number plate recognition, so I don't need to talk to anybody.
> There are laws against it, and they don't have exclusions for drive through ordering.
Depends. Sometimes traffic laws only apply on roadways/highways, and not on private property.
Chick-Fil-A handles the queuing order problem by asking you just to confirm who you are at the drive through order station. They don’t start preparing your order until you check in.
> “Mobile order for zaroth!”
> “Thank you!”
Most people order the same thing every time. Open app, click Favorite Reorder button. It can be exactly one tap. Or a Hey Siri if you like.
This is how everyone orders their Starbucks coffee for years now. There’s no liability issue with providing an app to order ahead.
They already have a phone app though. You order on your phone then pull into one of the pickup slots, note in the app which slot you're in and your food is brought out to you. Has been here in Canada for awhile now.
I wouldn't want to touch an outdoor drive thru kiosk, I'd imagine it'd get gross very fast.
Why not just stick a kiosk there?
In Europe most McDs have kiosks inside them... make it weatherproof / stick a roof over it, done.
Everything outdoors needs to be fairly robust, and the kiosks would be hard to reach and painfully slow compared to any voice system.
I use them most times I go to McDonalds, but they’re always slower than it would be to just order if there’s no line, and worse, they feel much slower than they probably are.
Moes, a texmex chain in the United States, already does this. This firm provides the systems: https://www.nextepsystems.com/products/touchscreen-drive-thr...
Voice ordering would have a lower installation cost since it can rely on the existing outdoor ordering interface, and it’s more familiar to their customers. There are 14,000 McDonalds in the US alone, so the switching costs and risks add up.
I'm about 99.99964% positive that a key point behind voice (and touchscreen) sales interfaces will be to integrate upsell and/or advertising into the transaction consistently.
Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells
Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
"What drinks do you have?" "Can I get combo without the drink?" "How much cheaper is it with a water?" "My kid wants the rainbow Happy Meal toy, can we have that one please?" "What time did you stop serving breakfast?" "Do you still have McFlurries? What flavors are there?"
This won't go well.
Will is stop people from using drive thru? If not, then it'll be annoyingly tolerated.
I see no reason why a computer couldn't answer those questions
Yeah, because the same machines that wiped the floor with a 9-dan Go champion a couple of years ago will be completely flummoxed by people placing orders at McDonald's.
They’re totally different domains. McDonald’s orders don’t have the crazy branching structure of Go, but they also aren’t nearly so self-contained.
How is this not a perfect example of a self-contained problem? There are only so many items on the manu. Each can only be prepared in so many different ways, with so many different ingredients.
Never mind Go, this application would have been possible in the days of Zork if speech recognition had been up to the task. It is now. Anyone who doesn't understand that has questionable business on a site called "Hacker News," IMO.
Frankly this entire subthread is surreal, as if the site had seen a lot of recent signups from people who've never used a smart speaker before.
If you can get people to treat it like a voice-activated commandline (“tea, Earl Grey, hot; Big Mac combo, medium, Sprite”), then sure, it’s probably doable. This is how people mostly use Alexa, Siri, etc. It’s not the greatest experience though, especially when there’s “state” to manipulate.
On the other hand, humans conversations assume a lot of background knowledge. “I’ll have a coffee if it’s fresh; orange juice otherwise” needs facts the system might not even have access to. You need to know a bit of pragmatics to figure out that “a cheeseburger with nothing on it” should still have cheese and a bun and exactly how many drinks and fries are being ordered when someone says “Two cheeseburger happy meals and one chicken nugget. I’ll have crispy chicken sandwich too. Fries and milk for the kids; just a Diet Coke for me.”
It’s obviously not impossible to figure this stuff out, but it might require emulating more of a teenager than you might naively imagine.
Menu ordering can be automated. Customers, however, can't be, and they'll ask for and do the wackiest shit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromretail/top?t=month
Up to 2 years ago our local McDonalds drive-in used to have a separate booth where you interacted with a person when you placed an order.
Now you have to shout through a rather crappy tinny loudspeaker that sounds like a telephone and they now inevitably get it wrong so you repeat the order to each other 3 times to make sure.
TBH I wondered why they took so long.
Ironically, all this voice input stuff is making the regular people bend over backwards so that the computer understands what they want. The one extreme is programmers who completely bend over backwards to tell the computer exactly what to do with each byte.
Those of you who are touting use of the McDonald's app: have you bothered to look at the permissions you are granting to the contents and usage of your phone in order to use the app?
Logical turn of events though, everything goes to human replacement by robots and/or AIs in many kind of manufactures. Total human replacement by robots is a matter of time I believe.
Oh that won't be infuriating at all
Great another move to remove the human touch of service from the food industry. If anything I feel like we're still a few years away from being able to have AI sophisticated enough to mimic conversion for people to comfortable enough to use daily for even simple tasks such as taking orders.
I am fairly violently opposed to automation eliminating human jobs without some type of compensating control, which gets into a political place I don’t want to go right now.
But having said that...
The human touch of fast food ordering? What human touch? There isn’t much conversation that happens with the human that’s there today.
There are the beginnings of political attention right now.
Andrew Yang is of course the biggest champion in this cycle. But it's also started to catch the attention of Biden and DeBlasio (robot tax).
Then on there are still some candidates who are in the "it's not happening" camp.
> McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
So that's a lie.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli...
Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out?
Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out?
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when.
This article contributes nothing.
All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet.
> "Their job is to be fast on the mouse -- that's their job,"
Ugh. No wonder why the project failed. It treated people as tools instead of people.
There should be a custom board of keys. The more common the order item, the bigger the button to press.
It's about time. I love getting H1B programmers writing shit code for cheap so I can scam them for fake food. Hopefully this'll shut that crap down for good.
I think it's bad idea since there are a few lawsuits against restaurants that are not serving deaf customers. I'd say quite a lot complicated than you think. I understand the concept of automation but there are between cons and pros. For example, a car automation may develop the brain cancer by the radiation through the high-energy reception or whatever the factor may be but that's the point...it's going to be a long shot for sure.
How do you order at a drive through if you're deaf today?