McDonald's and other chains are giving their drive-thrus the Jetsons treatment

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/tech/mcdonalds-drive-thru-artificial-intelligence/index.html

by apsec112 • 5 years ago

26 20 5 years ago

gruez• 5 years ago

Users have to sign up in advance via smartphone with a selfie and a credit card. Then, after they order, they can say they want to use PopPay; a camera will take a photo so their identity can be confirmed and money deducted from their account.

This seems pointless. In the time it takes you to pull up to the camera, stop the car, line up your face, wait for your face to be recognized, you could have paid with a NFC card/phone. NFC also doesn't require you to register for an account and deposit money ahead of time. The only advantage I can think of is for mcdonalds, which pays less credit card fees because they can bundle transactions together.

AI order taking also seems questionable to me. Voice ordering is bad enough (shitty audio quality, having to repeat/clarify yourself), I don't want to contend with a shitty chatbot on top. App based ordering seems better in every way. It also allows you to park your car and do your ordering/waiting in peace, as opposed to wasting gas while inching through the drive-through lane with half a dozen cars behind you.

dripton• 5 years ago

I think it's mostly to get you to install the app, so they can advertise at you.

me_me_me• 5 years ago

and tie your face/info to credit card

WoodenChair2• 5 years ago

This seems pointless. In the time it takes you to pull up to the camera, stop the car, line up your face, wait for your face to be recognized, you could have paid with a NFC card/phone. NFC also doesn't require you to register for an account and deposit money ahead of time. The only advantage I can think of is for mcdonalds, which pays less credit card fees because they can bundle transactions together.

The recognition will only get better/faster over time. And if you are a regular at a certain restaurant, it will probably save you quite a bit of time over the years. What if you forget your phone or wallet? You can still get a burger. But overall, yes, I think there is more benefit for the restaurant than the consumer. At the same time, any restaurant savings may result in lower food prices, more investment in cleaner restaurants, higher quality food, etc.

BuyMyBitcoins• 5 years ago

Heck, you could just use a license plate reader and get the same result. Not really “secure” but I’m okay with less than robust identity verification to buy a McDouble and some happy meals.

diduuee• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I agree the gains are so small. Since automated order taking is already solved then once you remove the need to wait for customers to physically present payment you can largely remove cashier roles entirely unless one is requested by a customer. This also has a lot of interesting potential for servicing individuals who might be prone to losing money/cards such as the homeless. I'm all for demanding they retain the ability to take payment in more privacy respecting mediums but personally I'd find this wildly convenient.

grawprog2• 5 years ago

then the 2020s could be the golden age of drive-thru tech.
In 2019 the average McDonald's drive-thru took six minutes and 18 seconds, but recently the company trimmed that to five minutes and 49 seconds in 2020,

I mean i guess if you're in accounting and your sole goal is to make sure you've saved every penny possible then yeah i suppose trimming drive thru time down by around 30-40 seconds must seem like the golden age...and i guess in the next 5 years, automation will save the mcdonalds corp another minute or two and increase their profits by a few million and their board will be happy.

WoodenChair2• 5 years ago

Time is the only resource that is limited for all people. If over the course of my life, drive throughs getting shorter cumulatively save me many hours, I appreciate that.

When I'm on my way to work and a drive-through saves me 30-40 seconds compared to what it did last year, I appreciate that. I'm often rushed in the morning.

mc32• 5 years ago

If you’ve been in an In and Out burger drive thru multiply that by twenty cars ahead of you. That is indeed golden.

burnthrow• 5 years ago

Ordering isn't the bottleneck at In n Out, it's the food made fresh, sometimes for custom orders. The menu itself couldn't be much simpler. The kids taking down the orders work quickly and are always at the end of the line. That they're friendly humans and not a confused AI is an added benefit.

On the other hand this should work for McDonalds, where nobody's expecting friendliness or much of anything; it's basically a feed trough.

CharlesW• 5 years ago

i suppose trimming drive thru time down by around 30-40 seconds must seem like the golden age...

I suspect that this is largely pretend savings. Since locations are pressured to game this metric, for any order that they think might take too much longer than the median drive-thru time, they will (1) send customers from the drive-thru line to a parking spot then (2) bring their food out 5-10 minutes later. This can easily double customer wait time, and the food is often noticeably worse for the delay. It's a terrible customer experience.

grawprog2• 5 years ago

I dunno, years ago, i learned something that stuck. I worked in a grocery store, we stocked those 4L ice cream buckets, the year i took over the frozen food section, dairyland decided to remove the handles on their buckets...people lost their shit. Like honestly, i had old ladies flipping out at me screaming because those bucketed handles were the only reason why they bought that ice cream.

So one day, i asked the dairlyand rep why...he told me someone figured out they could save 1¢ per bucket by removing the handle...this added up to millions of dollars a year....

Yes decisions like this are made on the basis of mere cents that add up to millions...

op03• 5 years ago

McDonalds optimization story detected. Adding link to Manna - https://marshallbrain.com/manna

gremlinsinc• 5 years ago

Can't come fast enough. I welcome ai/ml replacing jobs left and right from fast food to janitorial to grocery stocking and call centers.

I'm anxious to see what the next step is in our evolutionary process economically. Do the people who rely on these jobs starve and does society descend into Mad Max or do we actually create UBI?

What happens when 60% of most country's populations are just surplus? What happens when even elite college grads are mostly just surplus?

When only 30-40% of the adult population is employable how will the market compensate and how will the economy work?

There's obviously going to be painful years ahead as governments and industry catch up, but it could be an exciting shift if we actually get to a post-scarcity society that actually functions and has a way so everyone "fits" and can still find purpose.

What do we do when ai can do 100% of the jobs? How do we find purpose then?

anaganisk• 5 years ago

Visionaries beleive, post AI people will live in some Wall-E lifestyle, but looking at world how people crave for power and wealth, I don't think so. There will be revolutions when majority is starving. Powerful men hold power as long as people can take it, no amount of AI/weapons can suppress fights born from hunger. If majority lives under UBI, who pays the taxes to replenish them?

sparrish• 5 years ago

Nowhere does it mention the fact that the minimum wage increase is the real driver for this change.

alphabettsy• 5 years ago

Maybe because it isn’t?

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

I'd like if it remembered my common orders. So I can have my own version of a meal #1 etc. To be honest, I order the same small sets over and over. It would really speed things up.

pram• 5 years ago

Why talk at all? I can put my order into the Sonic app and pull up, press the button, and have my burger and tots brought out. A better, frictionless experience for shoving fatty food into my greasy maw

cbhl• 5 years ago

Apps work great if you are a repeat customer; I think Starbucks is best-in-class for this because it combines payments, rewards, and "predictive" ("bonus stars", and an obviously-history-driven one-tap reordering).

The legacy drive-thru interface with a two-way speaker is great for my parents' generation, for whom apps can be difficult to use (small print, fine motor control). As for me, a 90s kid, drive thrus give me nostalgia for being in the back seat as a child, reading off a large analog menu board with fine print. In some sense you could consider this a "compatibility layer" or the "adapter pattern".

In-person ordering (through the drive thru or at a register in-store) also has to handle weird edge cases that the apps don't handle, like a tourist visiting from another country. (McDonald's and Starbucks both have per-country apps, and if you leave the US with the US apps, you can't place mobile orders in other countries or even see local store locations. Contrast this with Uber, who will happily let you order an Uber in Tokyo or Zurich with an app downloaded in SF, but has an app size to match.)

McDonald's and other chains are giving their drive-thrus the Jetsons treatment

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