Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs.
That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.
> Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering
As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
> A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
I also worked at McDonalds. You example is interesting because this specific issue came up often. Different people interpreted it to mean different things. The cashiers who'd been around the longest had learned to clarify exactly what the customer wants.
Also, this is absolutely NOT a customer issue. It's a restaurant issue to clarify. Plain means different things at different restaurants, so the solution is to _always_ clarify exactly what the customer means.
Every fast food place I've been to, a "plain cheeseburger" includes cheese. However, at every high-end burger place I've been to, "plain" does NOT include cheese. So there is a somewhat standard meaning.
I have this conversation enough that I now call out "plain no cheese" and ensure "no cheese" is written on the ticket.
That's a strange source of confusion. A plain cheeseburger without cheese has a different name: a plain hamburger. I can't imagine saying "cheeseburger", no matter what qualifying words around it, and being surprised it included cheese.
I have a very funny childhood memory of being in a McDonalds with my Cub Scout chapter; one of the boys ordered a "cheeseburger with no cheese", which - of course - was delivered with cheese, and the boy's father escalated the 'situation' to management.
> Even more confusing when McDonalds calls them "burgers with cheese".
That's a fun regional difference with McDonalds it seems, we definitely have (literally) "Cheeseburger" as a independent item on the menu compared to "Hamburger" here in Spain: https://i.imgur.com/XDNuiUW.png
That's quite funny actually, Spain tends to translate everything and have everything in English, dubbed, but apparently the McDonalds Cheeseburger got to remain, and wasn't renamed to "Hamburguesa con Queso" as one would have expected :)
McDonald's main menu items aren't actually called "cheeseburgers"; they're called "burgers with cheese". To me, this reads that "cheese" is a "topping" on the burger.
Further, they _only_ showcase the "burger with cheese variant" in their combos and special. This further drives home that you should be thinking about cheese in the same way as toppings.
You're conflating two different things. A plain cheeseburger obviously will include cheese by definition. A "plain" at a "burger place" would mean a plain hamburger. Both are correct usages of the adjective "plain" because the nouns they're describing are inherently different.
> Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
99% of orders are not made incorrectly, and you're being told to go faster and keep times low. Is this the 1 order of the hour that the person will come back and complain that its wrong? Is this person going to come back regardless and say it was wrong to get free food? Its unambiguous enough to not be worth the time.
Be a bit smooth about it: as you type in the order, verbally say out loud what you're entering with other words, then ask them to confirm. No lost time, potentially less people to deal with in the future, win-win.
It's been several lifetimes since I worked in a fast food place (not McDonald's), but at least then, this was how we were trained to do it. Reading the order back like that was required.
That'd just annoy the 99% of people that agree with McDonald's on what plain means. People at McDonald's are often in a hurry, and some would get really annoyed at stupid questions. Better to piss off the 1% than the 99%.
If you're clarifying at this level, there are likely many other questions that you'd ask.
I've customized our McD's orders for my entire life - they mess it up maybe 1/20 times, about the same ratio I'll have to park and wait. Otherwise it's always worked for me!
I almost always (except if there is a big queue) customize something, because then it's guaranteed made at the spot, instead of the heated old stuff. And since I started using the kiosks, the orders are always right, and fresh.
A custom order used to be a hack to be sure you got a freshly-made sandwich and not one that had been sitting in a warmer for 15 minutes, but they make everything to order now. And they still fuck them up, often.
Hard to know for a fact without knowing where I live, I'm guessing :) FWIW, it's not true at McDonalds in Spain, they definitely have popular stuff sitting behind the counter for longer than the items you customize here.
Even better when the customer just plain orders the wrong thing. I have a vivid memory of my pregnant wife and I at breakfast one morning, and she ordered apple juice. When the waiter brought apple juice she said she’d ordered orange, and when the waitress looked confused, I had to remind my wife she’d ordered apple. Total brain fart on her part (pregnancy brain seems to be a very real thing). Waitress didn’t care, especially after we laughed it off, and brought orange. But I know I’ve undoubtedly done the same thing, so I’m patient with mixups.
You can order a hamburger with "no salt" now via the app (and probably the kiosk?). But I'm not sure if there are other seasonings you're referring to, though.
That's really the worst part. The upsells are insulting and get in the way of ordering what I want. Classic enshittification, starting with something which people like and slowly deteriorating it in order to make an extra buck. I'm sure the MBAs love it though.
> the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
Those kiosks are horrific and greatly reduced the number of visits I made to McDonald's. The insane pricing since then further reduced those visits to zero.
> in 2025 how is it so hard to make a user interface that doesn't lag like a bastard on every scroll/click/...
Because everything is done in fucking React or Node or Blazor or whatever the newest flavor of this wRiTe oNcE rUn aNyWheRe bollocks is, because it always, always, always the exact same fucking thing: abstracting UI elements to fucking goddamn JavaScript and running it in a browser.
And heaven knows McDonald's can't possibly pay for proper software development, they only made like 14 billion last year. They're barely scraping by.
That's not the issue. All these technologies can be nice and snappy. The problem is that developers suck at making software nice and snappy.
I've taken over several react apps over the years and one thing I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly - as it should. Its very common for pages to take 10-60+ seconds to load, and when I look into it it's always obvious why they're so slow and easy to fix. The devs who made it just sucked.
> I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly
I always have to remind people to add spinners, just because it loads instantly on your developer machine with a fiber connection (if not talking to a local container even) doesn't mean it will in the real world. But spinners only show when actively fetching so if it's fast they only show for a split-second. It's the best of both worlds.
Yeah, I don't like the split second spinners. And I work on company internal apps so every user is generally on a good connection.
What I might do is just add a global spinner using tanstack query, what I don't like is having 50 different spinners for every little component. Makes the site feel janky and weird.
I just don't see the point unless it's loading for 5+ seconds. If it's faster than that then the user won't have time to wonder if it's stuck anyway. And I prefer to have one or very few requests, rather than 10+ different ones for a single page.
No, devs being bad is not a solvable problem. You just have to find devs who know what they're doing, or at least have a few who can teach the less talented ones and check their work.
There is no programming language that you can't write slow code in.
In my humble opinion, this kind of thing is the largest blind spot in the current tech economy.
Massive LLMs had a breakout moment with chat, and now everyone has invested HARD into that technology while in fact there is really no good reason to think that massive models (billions of parameters, requiring billions of dollars to train, and requiring power-gulping servers to run) are needed or even preferred for most AI tasks.
We had algorithmic automation for all kinds of things in the 80s, and that has been steadily improving for everything from chess engines to computer vision to content suggestion ever since. Photo touch-up runs on handheld devices and is nearly instantaneous. Self-checkout is ubiquitous. Digital CNC and 3D printing is no longer to relegated to professionals, the point that amateurs can buy off-the-shelf solutions and start creating products with a few mouse clicks.
Billions is being spent on shovels in the current gold rush but are they really needed?
Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues
Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs
As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this.
Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard.
* Often lots of background noise
* Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic)
* People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out.
* People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu".
* The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me".
* It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food.
* Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.
Yes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.
Actually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...
The thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated.
Take automated phone menu systems, for example.
"If you are calling about X, press 1
If you are calling about Y, press 2
If you are calling about Z, press 3"
customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human
"I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9."
Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.
As others have pointed out, LLMs were not involved in the project from the article. But this transition will happen quickly—fast food chains are ruthless about efficiency and ordering from a discrete set of available options actually is something that AIs can do really well.
I just did a captcha the other day that asked the user to select which items can fit inside the sample item (which was a handbag). You'd think that a multimodal deep learning model could figure out what objects fit inside other objects if it's going to cure cancer or whatever, but no I'm assuming that it needs to be taught explicitly.
There's a fun experiment with toddlers where they re-enter a room but the car they just sat in was replaced by a tiny version: They will try to get into the car even though only their foot fits in.
So size/scale is not as easy a concept to model in our minds as we might assume.
Prob what will happen is that you will need to use the app to "order" and then scan a generated code before accessing the drive thru. Not really AI needed, kiosk has been replacement these jobs since Corona (and prob earlier than that).
If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo
Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.