I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end.
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is installing tracking fast food mobile apps, creating accounts, giving emails, and even enabling notifications. Another capitalistic hellscape flimsly masquerading as a great deal for you.
Different folks have different levels of acceptable risk. I generally agree, and won’t install an app for every single one-time purchase, but I eat a lot of Taco Bell. The app makes sense for me. Many other companies also have web interfaces so you don’t NEED to install an app. (Many restaurants/bars that have a Qr Code on the table act this way.)
The sad side effect of these apps is that everyone else who don’t have it (by choice or by circumstance) pay even more because they don’t get personalised discounts.
I know because I didn’t know there was a McDonalds app until my brother got me something one time and he paid decently less than what was on the “offline” menu.
It’s a win-win for the companies. They get to extract more money from a majority of their occasional customers, while getting very accurate tracking and behaviour metrics of more dedicated customers.
Yeah, and at least on iPhone you can limit location tracking to when you're in the app and disable notifications. My email address isn't particularly secret, nor is the fact that I grab a coffee and an Egg McMuffin every now and then.
Well, you know, going to a drive-thru at a fast-food restaurant is already ultra capitalistic, so installing an app on a phone seems maybe just a little bit worse (and a great time savings).
"capitalistic hellscape"
get a grip lmao
When buying a taco without installing the tacocorp app is treated as a weird edge case, we have reached capitalistic hellscape. We are pretty close.
Oh no not the tacocorp app.
China has mobile ordering to the next level. Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
This was a thing in the US back in the 20s (and a bit before): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
What was weird was when the restaurant was closed and looked deserted but you could still order online and hope the locker with your order lit up with your food (it did).
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
Like using a vending machine? Having worked at McDonald’s for 4 years before I started my long tech career, why do you think you’d known anyways after the food goes from grill to front counter via a bin? Double that via drive thru, there is always a division of labor anyways…it’s fast food after all.
Having had unhoused neighbors steal my order at Starbucks, I find the system they use in China reassuring.
Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.
Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.
I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
I’ve never seen un in the USA and it is pretty ubiquitous in China. Anyways, it would be cool if American companies would adopt them but it is probably horribly expensive to source them here vs in China.
It's way more effort to order with a phone app than to just roll up and tell someone what I want. That's all there is to it, really.
My experience is different. If my wife goes to the counter and I order electronically, she is always done faster. This is doubly so if I use a phone app, because the app is painfully slow.
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
It seems hard to have empirical data here, but even just the parallelization of it seems to bias in favor of mobile ordering.
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
Some places, like ChikFila, seems to optimize their drive thru experience. That said the trick that I do with them is say that I’m at the restaurant well before I get there so I don’t have to wait.
I have a different experience. For places I order from semi-frequently (Taco Bell, Burger King), I have favorited all the things with the customizations I like from previous orders. Then it is a tap or two away from being re-ordered. Super useful too when I am always doing similar but repetitive modifications every time (eg taco bell, beans for meat, fresco style).
It depends on the establishment, but some of us (actually I sort of doubt it’s a minority) rather enjoy speaking with other humans, even strangers, and even if it’s over an intercom.
I enjoy talking with humans, but not the part where I’m reciting an order and making them record it.
I agree — but prefer to stand across a counter from them rather than talk through a grille.
You can’t pay in cash via an app.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
Buy a gift card across the street at CVS. Literally had to do that before.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days. Additionally, the ability to pay in cash isn’t needed for buying coffee, it’s needed for paying for legal defense, publishing, transport, and a bunch of other things. The issue isn’t that Starbucks is cashless; the issue is that when all of society goes cashless (because places like Starbucks did) then we are all capital-f Fucked.
Imagine a world without investigative journalism, new political organizations, labor organizing, or a million other things that rely on privacy and anonymity to be able to exist.
>You can’t buy gift cards without soft ID these days.
This is 100% false. I do gift card reselling and buy 6 figures worth of gift cards per year. Sometimes places like Dollar General require ID, but CVS, Staples, Grocery Stores, etc. almost never ask for ID. When they do it is to match to the name on the credit card to prevent people buying gift cards with stolen credits cards, not to enter into any sort of tracking database. You can easily buy hundreds of dollars of gift cards in a single transaction with no ID check if using cash.
They (CVS) require a phone number.
I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.
Most people are, because they don’t realize that when all transactions must be done without privacy and only at the pleasure of the state, the free society that you have come to take for granted will cease to exist.
I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:
https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
That’s certainly a possibility. But no, I don’t think a lack of cash will cause society as I know it to cease to exist.
Makes me wonder how fast you would change your mind you would get locked out of your cashless method of payment.
Yes, I it happened to me and it wasn't pleasant.
Not me. Around here is spreading a 3-4% surcharge when paying with a card. Everything from a sandwich to car repair to rent. I still use cash and checks when necessary. Originally, cards were used to entice customers to a store with the promise of convenience and ease of short term credit. Now we pay for the "convenience."
What about international travelers who don't have an internationally accepted payment card because their home country was mostly isolated from the banking system in a mostly futile attempt to punish its government?
I don't think cash is saving anyone from the knock-on effects of international sanctions on their citizens. The same people who don't have access to a Visa because they're citizens of a sanctioned country aren't in a position to easily turn their local currency into USD, and the ways they'd start to earn money outside of the sanction bubble overlap the ways they'd get an internationally accepted payment card.
You can freely exchange Russian rubles to US dollars and back. Many people I know travel like that.
the number of places that beg me to install an app is ridiculous. if i installed an app from every single place that begs me to my phone would probably shut down in protest from the thousands of apps i’d have cluttered everywhere.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
Yes, it's exhausting. I mean I get it, having higher prices for people without the app is the same as member cards with swingeing prices for non-members. It's a surcharge on the unaware (including non-native speakers, the elderly, tourists, etc), the unprepared or time-pressured (who don't have time to fiddle with their phones to install the app at a given shop) and, they hope, the people rich enough that they don't want to fuck about with this today.
"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".
Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
I tried to use a coupon recently at a major drug store chain, one they had just given me for getting vaccinated, and despite the fact that the coupon said nothing about this requirement, they wouldn’t take it without also using a frequent shopper card.
At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.
With mobile ordering it's hard to tell where you are in the queue or where you will be I guess. In the drive thru, at least you can see how many people are in front of you and they're making orders chronologically.
Chick-fil-A is the best at this: you mobile order but they make the order once you’re in line, so the food is made chronologically.
... Except while you're on your way to the line (or waiting to get through it), other customers' mobile orders are being accepted and you still aren't sure of the order in which they're being prepared.
Well, Starbucks for example has separate areas for preparing mobile orders so they're not being mixed in with others. My point was that (generally) you have an idea how long you'll be waiting when ordering the traditional way and your food will be somewhat fresh.
Mobile ordering could mean an unexpected 20 minute wait or your food sitting there long before you arrive.
if you drive down the road and decide on a whim to pull into a restaraunt, you shouldn't be looking down at your phone as you order. fast food is for impulse purchases.
I prefer the days of the automats.
The apps that are deliberately designed to lure you in with deals/coupons so that they can more accurately track you and likely sell this data to data brokers?
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
I said mobile ordering and you transmogrified it to “apps”, but I’ll play along with the strawman.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
Death by a thousand opt-outs.
App notifications, on iOS at least, are opt-in, not opt-out. When you open the app it has to prompt the system to ask "do you want to allow this app to send you notifications". And if you don't hit "yes", it doesn't get to.
You're right.