Yes, but the flip side is that it's much more practical for a McDonald's to have 6 or 8 or 10 ordering kiosks than a bunch of employees taking orders.
Personally I prefer having the gaggle of kiosks because while it's slower, there's a few advantages:
* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above
* Can take my time looking through everything, even with a more complex order, without social pressure of knowing I'm hindering everyone behind me
* Foreign language options when traveling
Of course, it's probably a good idea to have at least one human employee who can at least optionally handle orders in cases where the kiosk doesn't work.
Yeah McDonald’s really gets self serve right. Their kiosks do a good job at exposing options I didn’t know were even possible when human ordering. And if you are tight on budget, you can easily see what each option costs and the alternatives without the social pressure of having to order quickly.
they should really print out or email you a QR code so you can simply repeat your order by re-scanning it on next visit. this would save hours of time re-spent in their laggy UI; okay, i'll do it once, why should i do it twice?
AND they should provide a way to just type in what you want to quickly filter it from a global list of items via fuzzy match.
i'm not even suggesting to incorporate NLP and speech recognition. we have self driving cars, reusable rockets, DALL-E, and GPT-3 in 2022 and still have to waste time manually entering a fast food order?
i'm a weird privacy nut. i dont do apps except a few small ones from f-droid that get no internet access. if i need Uber, i use https://m.uber.com/.
an app to submit an order instead of a proper mobile site? no thanks, i dont need to swallow those twitter and facebook sdks, and god knows what else. the APK is 80MB :D
* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above
It's called fast food for a reason. I spend more time waiting for my food than ordering. If there's a long line it means the restaurant is understaffed. I'd leave in that case.
* Can take my time looking through everything, ...
You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
* Foreign language options when traveling
France. I can see some larger chain restaurants having this feature but no mom and pop shop is going to need or care to translate their menu unless its a tourist destination. And even then it detracts from the native atmosphere and immersiveness. Besides, not many people travel as they don't have the money. (Though perhaps beneficial for immigrants)
> If there's a long line it means the restaurant is understaffed. I'd leave in that case.
Good for you? What even is the point of such a comment?
> You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
Waiter? What kind of places do you think we're talking about?
> I can see some larger chain restaurants having this feature but no mom and pop shop is going to need or care to translate their menu unless its a tourist destination.
Again with an utterly bizarre comment. As if chain restaurants just didn't matter at all, or machine translation software didn't exist?
> Besides, not many people travel as they don't have the money.
Talk about out of touch. At least before the pandemic, there was probably more world travel than there ever had been in history.
> You can read the menu as long as you'd like before you get on the line to order. The waiter can always come back. I mean really...
No I can't, because lots of restaurants don't bother to put all possible options and their descriptions or even just a list of non-alcoholic beverages there. Wine cart is always there, but specifying a kind of tea seems like a big no-no. What kind of tea is that? Oh, some random bags which you can check in the kitchen in a few minutes? Do you have apple juice then? How large is it? Can you make it without ice? Maybe you have some other rarer drinks that I like? Can you remove pickles from the burger, even though there were none on the picture, but I've heard from the neighboring table that there are some?
An average kiosk answers all these questions because it _has to_ have buttons for these options. An average menu does not, it relies on me remembering all the possibilities and interacting with a waiter or a cashier.
And I'm not even talking fast-food restaurants where the menu is up at the top, only listing a tenth of the options with pictures, and the rest being written in a small font I'm unable to see without binoculars.
> No I can't, because lots of restaurants don't bother to put all possible options and their descriptions or even just a list of non-alcoholic beverages there.
> An average kiosk answers all these questions because it _has to_ have buttons for these options.
So a restaurant which cant be bothered to list everything in a printed menu is going to list everything in a kiosk? Did you really type all this without thinking?
> So a restaurant which cant be bothered to list everything in a printed menu is going to list everything in a kiosk?
Correct, because in a printed menu you usually don't have things like "no pickles" or "extra onions" because it's assumed you'll tell an employee that vocally, whereas in a kiosk you obviously need to be able to do that in the interface.
In practice, this means that there can be 'hidden options' that people may not be aware of on a printed menu.
Personally I prefer having the gaggle of kiosks because while it's slower, there's a few advantages:
* Fewer/shorter lines to begin ordering, due to the advantage in numbers described above
* Can take my time looking through everything, even with a more complex order, without social pressure of knowing I'm hindering everyone behind me
* Foreign language options when traveling
Of course, it's probably a good idea to have at least one human employee who can at least optionally handle orders in cases where the kiosk doesn't work.