Fast-Food Chains Move Toward Self-Service
You've likely dealt with self-service kiosks at airports, movie theaters, and some grocery and discount stores. Now you can look forward to it at the chain burger joints:
"Restaurants are dealing with labor issues and the need for cost savings, and at some point their customers get fed up with incorrect orders and say, 'Give me a machine,'" Winston said.
Jack in the Box and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf have positioned themselves as early adopters of the technology.
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2 Comments:
when i lived in nj years ago, the wawa by my work had these machines. you would follow the sequence of screens, as if you were confirming an e-ticket for a flight, and a receipt that you ordered printed out for you, and another for the people behind the deli. but sure enough though, even though the exact specifications of my order was right in front of them, the sandwich makers would inevitably get my order wrong. this happened 4 out of 5 times, so i decided to stop going there. the machines may help speed up the ordering process, but i don't think it will help minimize getting the orders incorrect or mixed up.
purplesachi at 9:40AM on 12/06/06
I hear ya, Purplesachi. I first saw such technology at the Sullivan's Gulch Fred Meyer in Portland, Oregon. For self-checking groceries, they're fairly fast, since the customer is the only human involved. Still, there's a learning curve, and I noticed that the wait times were often longer at these machines as people got used to them. (After a while, they become like ATMs, in that you can almost do the button combinations in your sleep to get the desired result.)
At the grocery store, a cheat my friend always did on produce was to pick something like a fancy organic apple with a higher price per pound but then put in the PLU (price lookup code) for a cheaper Red Delicious.
Adam Kuban at 11:31AM on 12/06/06