Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.
Because there’s been a decline in experience across so many fast food and fast casual restaurants over the last ten years, regardless of when they were founded, it seems like something industry wide (maybe data is part of that) rather than a business cycle.
On the other hand, fast food places around me have large digital touch-screen kiosks for ordering. You can always go up to the counter to order, but it seems like everyone prefers the kiosk if one is available. For good reasons too -- you get to see what the food looks like, you don't feel rushed, etc.
I'm not so sure the experience (of talking to fast food employees?), if you can call it that, matters all that much to people who want to grab a quick bite with their family.
To me the biggest change in restaurants is the norms/expectations of service personnel. e.g. I'll walk into a restaurant and the young hostess might stare at me until I go "Uh, for two please". Or the waiter at a restaurant might make it feel like he's only standing in for his friend and never was a waiter before in his life before I release him back to the waiter social circle going on in the corner. But I can't blame that on "data".
As a customer who hasn't worked at a fast-food chain, I think the reason I accepted the order-screens so readily is because it seemed like they freed from the human staff from something dehumanizing, being forced to act like a machine with a tedious rote-script doing data-entry.
I could be wrong: Was register-work a welcome reprieve from the Potato Salt Mines of something even worse or more-stressful?
They’re waiting for a notification to appear at the top of their visual field.
You’d get better service if a glowing neon sign appeared above your head that said:
“A customer is standing in front of you. Tap here to begin.”