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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

Where are all those robots that make us need UBI right about now? A burger flipper bot and a fully automated cashier kiosk seems like something that would prevent McDonald's offering $50 interview payments.

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Fully automated cashier kiosks exist and are available at a lot of McDonald's. From my own anecdotal experiences, the problem is people don't like to use them. There have been several times I've gone to a remodeled McDonald's with several automated kiosks available and usually only one backup register at the counter. There would be a line of people waiting for the human at the register to place their order while several kiosks sit unused. I've experienced a few times of ordering at the kiosk and getting my food before the people I would have been behind in the line even placed their order.

This hasn't been for just McDonald's either. I seem to recall seeing a similar setup at a Jack in the Box location before McDonalds started implementing the kiosks. They ended up tearing out the automated kiosks because nobody used them and put back in another manned register because people ignored them.

I really wonder what drives people to prefer placing their order with a human being at the register instead of an automated machine. Personally I prefer the kiosks as a well done one sometimes shows options I didn't even know existed and its far simpler to review my order before sending it off. I've yet to have a bad experience with a kiosk, other than one completely crashing halfway through accepting the credit card making me wonder if the order was placed or not.

The kiosks have a terrible UX, for one thing. Ordering a Big Mac value meal with a drink should take one or two actions, but for some reason it takes about 10.

Also last time I was at McDonalds the kiosks were displaying a Windows BSOD.

They might have terrible UX but the human cashier has even worse UX, especially if you want to customize your order, or want to know what customization are available.

What's so difficult about UX? You just need a machine with a bunch of buttons and a card reader. If someone wants an order not on the machine they can go to the sole cashier the restaurant has hired.

https://www.alamy.com/a-japanese-man-purchasing-a-meal-ticke...

Just my anecdotal experience but we've had the kiosks in Australia for a while now, and I've seen queues for a kiosk while there was a person waiting at the register with nothing to do... ...and I stood in the queue instead of going to the register...

My experiences with the kiosk at McD's have trained me to make the order there and then walk up to the counter to pay, because it would never let me pay at the kiosk. I like using it to order because it doesn't mishear me like the cashier usually does, so I also make bigger, more complex orders. But they do not have the full transaction worked out, last time I was there.

OTOH, I use the Starbucks online ordering all the time to have my order ready the moment I walk in. It let me feel like I was "getting out" during 2020 with minimal risk.

I use kiosks, but they are slow and have dark patterns, so I can understand why people don't want to use them.

The kiosks work good for simple things. When it gets complicated though, sometimes the kiosk throws up its hands and escalates to a human attendant (self-checkout at grocery and home improvement stores are horrible at this). By the time the attendant tends to the machine, often more time has passed than just going to the human cashier. This trains people to avoid the kiosks.

Which is such a bad experience that the stores tend to tweak it to improve it.

I remember when grocery store checkout lines used to flag weight mismatches because the front door was open and it was a windy day. That particular chain has dialed them -way- back on their sensitivity; I think I need to flag an attendant down 1/100 times I use one?

But either way, that's handling payment of goods that aren't determined. A far harder problem than an order kiosk at McDonald's. -Those- are great, and yeah, I've never had a problem, even ordering very customized meals that many servers aren't even aware are possible (i.e., getting a burger lettuce wrapped).

I prefer the kiosks, and when between equidistant McDs, choose the one whose kiosks are working. I'm pretty good with UIs, though, as a computer professional. Most of the people I see ignore them, and at two out of three locations near my house, they've been broken and down for months on end.

Plenty of McDonald's cashiers aren't great at using the POS, I don't know what we're expecting out of the average customer. 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate.

In all fairness... as someone who worked at McDonald's growing up just a decade or so ago, the POS was absolutely an awful experience at the time. Tons of very tiny images, similar colors, small text, prioritizing "meals" over individual items in lists. I wasn't particularly motivated to memorize the UI to make myself a more profitable wage slave either, of course, but I empathize with anybody who has to use that POS POS on a daily basis.

I'm not trying to be unfair, just audibly wondering why people think that the same people who can't design a UI that employees who spend 29 hours a week on can master are going to design a UI for people who spend 10 minutes on it a week.

'Same people' - citation needed.

UX has always been given short shrift when you can train someone to use it. When making it so trivial anyone can figure it out leads to reduced employee costs, you suddenly have a lot more incentive to get it right.

My experience with using computer ordering like kiosks and fast food apps is that you can easily make complex orders, but since the actual steps after involve humans you won’t actually get those orders.

Like, Starbuckses are usually out of more than half the things on their app. And lower end places are just going to ignore your requests.

For delivery that doesn’t even include the surprisingly high rate of the driver just giving you someone else’s order - I wonder who loses on the refund in that situation.

These kiosks miss very basic use cases. There's no equivalent to the verbal "can I have a (free) cup of water with the meal" on a McDonald's kiosk UI. You can purchase bottled water, however.

My guess: it's so far turned out to be impossible to build a robot that works and tolerates the humidity and grease of a kitchen, and has an hourly amortized cost of ownership less than what it would cost to pay a human.

And McDonalds would have to pay for the cost of taking care of the robot

Industrial food production has had this problem nailed at scale though. I'm not even sure the technology isn't there - I think there's just not enough people working in the space to find the right design.

You have to sell a lot of $1 hamburgers to recoup the costs on your million dollar hamburger assembly machine.

Industrial robots work repetitive tasks for high efficiency but have high capital costs. Fast food beat out automat style resturants for several reasons but one of them was the versatility of human labor. It seems to be a case of "we know how to do it but not do it cheap enough to be worth it".

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