Unfortunately, because the number of imports is restricted the cars will likely be about as expensive as the competition. Chinese car companies have no strong incentive to undercut the market when they can take a fat margin and still sell out anyway.
It’s pure efficiency. I always customize my orders and it’s too many taps on a usually laggy system. I’m also usually ordering for 3, all customized. I can tell a cashier the entire order in less than 20s. And somehow their UI allows them to enter it just as quickly. It’s not a muscle memory thing either, it’s literally the interface and hardware they use runs fast and is perhaps designed with efficiency. The kiosk app is designed for dummies and takes forever to use. I’ve tried it at several places and it’s always my take away. When I use it I literally watch 5+ people place human cashier orders before I can place my order.
I’m not against talking to people for transactions. I’m against being forced to use inefficient machines.
One rule I had with my kids at McDonalds: you take it like they make it. No customizations; they will just fuck it up anyway. If you don't like pickles take them off yourself.
It’s coming. They’ll let Taco Bell work out the kinks. No need to be first mover there when the food’s staying the same and I doubt anyone will undercut them in the meantime.
Idk, they've all been wanting these kiosks to take off for a long while - maybe ~10 years - and it's just a UX problem keeping most people away from them. Given the labor savings at stake and the simple availability of speech prompted data entry, I'd think they'd take it more seriously.
A dumb easy solution is to just create a call center of sorts and allow the same voice interaction human-to-human while the other person enters in your commands quickly and you just pay the kiosk at the end. They could have done this with very little investment in technology. Could improve the drive-thru experience too (my experience is they can't hear anything you say, I'll have to repeat myself 3x minimum, and chances are I won't be able to understand them if they ask me anything either).
When I visit Shake Shack, it's the one place I see that the kiosk is mandatory. But, at least they are iPads and decently designed. It's still very tap heavy and slow to enter simple customizations. The main thing they did right was put 6 of them out, so it's rare you have to wait for one because if you do have to, it's probably a long wait. It's also when one of them will step up to the register and start to help alleviate the line. The worst thing they did, was prompt for a tip at the self-service kiosk before you've seen your food or even found out if anyone is actually working back in the kitchen.
Yes, right. Well McD sure is serious, up to possibly letting customers walk out of restaurants rather than serve them at the registers. They really want a conveyer belt to deliver the food, no human interaction at all if you insist on visiting some of their expensive real estate.
No sooner did I hit post than I had to run. But on my way, I thought with what I wanted to edit my post, which was to clarify the current testing Taco Bell is doing in the drive through. But I assume wherever you do it, once it gets good enough, maybe you can move it into the restaurant. Like you say, labor savings, so they'd have to move it into the restaurant the moment they could get away with it.
I prefer the machine because the order is correct 100% of the time. When I used to have someone take the order, I had to double check the receipt to make sure the order was correct.
Just wait until you have to make a complicated order in a country where people don't speak English very well, you will be very thankful for the kiosks. Even the US has two languages.
Yeah, the app and kiosks are slow and buggy, but I've never had a custom order prepared wrong with the kiosk or app. And as slow as it is, it's still almost always faster than ordering in person because your order is usually ready when you arrive and you never have to wait in line at the register or drive thru (assuming you choose to pick up at the counter, which you should if the dining room is open and you don't want to wait).
Also, when the app or kiosk bugs out and fails to correctly process an offer, or lose an order, McDonald's cashiers and managers are in my experience typically trained to set things right. Not only will cashiers honor "app only" deals at the register when something goes wrong, managers will occasionally comp the entire order.
Works for me in Germany. I wonder if it's some overzealous bot protection that's cutting off humans again, in this case from what looks like a government website, but without further testing that's hard to say. You could check if it works from another network, or if other people on your network range have the same issue (like if you're in 13.37.0.0/16 then maybe someone else at the ISP is also in that range and could check if it got blocked outright)
This shifted the race of trainees, but it doesn't seem to have changed the more important metric of how many people were actually hired. The author claims it had an effect, but as far as I can tell he's never quantified it.
HN has some peculiar medical fixations. It comes in waves. For a while there were a lot of submissions about intermittent fasting. 15 years ago people were excited about polyphasic sleep. 10 years ago it was all about modafinil. Enthusiasm about ketamine for depression was big, but it seems to have finally fizzled out.
Yes, sorry I didn't get to this when the article was on the front page. The problem is that HN's title limit is 80 chars and it's not obvious how to shorten that one.
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