Mildly Interesting

Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don't have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can't afford the product they used to make.

They tell us "Replacing jobs is OK! We'll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!" but the new jobs are mostly "telemarketer", and "tech support scammer", and "ornamental hermit" at factory owner's mansion.

But all that still doesn't convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!

Yeah, the Costco food kiosks are the gold standard. One screen with all items, big buttons, responsive, and obvious checkout process. I can literally order for the family in under thirty seconds with the receipt in hand. It's like magic.

Yeah, I'm in the drive thru and about to order when suddenly the list of items is replaced by a fucking ad. I'm already here and ordering, calm down with the fucking marketing.

machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine

Good to know, thanks! It used to be this way here too, but they stopped displaying the "cash at counter" option on the screen entirely after one of the interface redesigns. What they really want to force you to do is use the app all the time, so they can have better tracking and would have no need for cashiers OR kiosks.

I've helped people order at various restaurants here in Japan before, and the kiosks definitely help in cases where people need to customize to avoid certain foods, etc. which are often hard when neither party speaks the same language.

Yeah, very odd assumption that one.

Only in a society that requires cash. They could have just handed people a meal when the walked up and asked for one. there would be no difference except a few executives don't get their cut.

I always carry cash, probably around $100. Not enough that it would be a problem if I got mugged but plenty if I hit a point where I need something essential (food/fuel) to get home or something. I also keep a $20 in the car for fuel if I somehow forget my wallet and run low.

Granted, I only ever use it in a pinch, might as well get the rewards on my credit card instead. But I do on occasion hit a restaurant/store where their internet is down and it's cash-only.

In Canada less just over a year ago one major telecom provider's network went down completely for a couple days... a bunch of businesses couldn't accept debit or credit, ATMs stopped working, at some places but others running on competitor networks were working. It was still a big annoyance and people got nothing except for sorry! and maybe 20 dollars from carrier at fault (Rogers)

All good points! When these kiosks started out, they were ridiculously laggy, way more than a simple GUI had any right to be, as if every tap and swipe had to be proxied through New Zealand. Thankfully the lag has been solved in one of the interface updates since.

The upsell spam is still annoying, but having used the interface a couple times I have become the Neo of offer dodging. *Tap tap tap* (No I don't want to log in. Yes I am sure I don't want to log in. No, I don't want to make it a meal. No I don't want to add a soda or side of nuggets. Checkout. Cancel payment. Done!) Would be better without, but currently manageable. As others have mentioned, they already managed to fuck up the tableau screens above the counter by having the images move around, so that if you want to know how much a medium fry would cost you have to wait through 30 seconds of slideshow first, and then not miss the 2 seconds that the price is actually on screen. The kiosk is actually the winner for me here.

The waiting in line to pay cash was my last problem, which is why I got excited to see these automatic cashboxes installed. Money goes in, food comes out.

Honestly, I feel like it gets an unfairly bad rap. Their fries are super good imo. I can get 20 chicken nuggets and a large fries, which feeds me for 2 meals, for $7. It's really hard to beat that.

It's not great food, but it's cheap AF, it's really fast, and I think it's not as bad as people act like it is.

Shhh, don't tell them!

if something goes wrong with it, you fumbled it

You're making the bold (and wrong) assumption that the people making the order are completely infallible...i still have to go back and get them to make my actual order quite often. As soon as you deviate from default, there's a huge risk they mess up.

They've been the most vocal opponent to $15 minimum wage increase in New York, which I've always found odd, since they'd be the ones to most benefit from it via competitive advantage, as you said, due to economies of scale. They've been making threats the entire time "We'll replace cashier with computers! If you raise the wage, we'll totally do it, you'll see!" and I'm like "Dude, if you had the capability to do it, you gonna do it either way anyway, why you extorting us?"

I guess the smaller competitor restaurants will need to get kiosks as well. They can't develop their own in-house technology like the big chains do, but they can still purchase 3rd-party ready solutions, like all of them have already done with online ordering. Slightly more expensive to use 3rd party, but that's economies of scale for ya.