I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
eco · 19h ago
I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
potato3732842 · 9h ago
It's the speed limit problem.
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
bboygravity · 6h ago
So the solution is more AI: to replace c-suit.
iinnPP · 5h ago
That is indeed a great solution that will never happen.
NonHyloMorph · 3h ago
Let's make sure we're living in a somewhat egalitarian society and our systems are aligned with that, shall we?
Quarrelsome · 9h ago
you've hit the nail on the head here. AI rollout has this hilarious consequence where "lower" departments have for a long time insultated the c-suite against their worst excesses and worst mistakes. Now that barrier is slowly crumbling due to AI-first, giving the c-suite an incredibly rare opportunity to discover how bad some of its ideas are in practice and there's less opportunity to blame those outcomes on others.
Ruphin · 4h ago
I am pretty certain that if you are in an org where c-suite shifts reasons for negative results to external sources, they will find a way to do the same in the age of AI.
Jordan-117 · 19h ago
That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.
mapt · 7h ago
Big box retail here.
One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".
That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.
mildlyhostileux · 3h ago
I'm optimistic that the ease of enforcing rules like this and better customer data (maybe via the apps) will lead to a better format. The annoyance grows from the rules causing us to be prompted to do or respond to things we don't want or need. When the taco bell guy asks if I want to add sour cream for the third time, I am getting pretty annoyed. I don't like sour cream, period. But every time they hit me with "would you like to double the chicken", even if I wasn't a yes upon driving to the window, I cave when they ask and both parties are probably happier for it. Management isn't totally wrong here because there are upsells that all of us would take when presented at the right time. It's a bit like ad targeting. Its just happening in realtime at the window.
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
blibble · 19h ago
seems they took Dude, Where's My Car as an inspiration?
I'm very curious as to whether it'd listen or it's design even let's it listen to you if you tell it to stop upselling at the onset.
fouc · 14h ago
I would hope you can actually skip that automatically by ignoring the follow-up and immediately driving off to the next stage.
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
Mistletoe · 17h ago
I’ve always wondered if that battery spiel paid off. Do you have any stats? I never once was at Radio Shack and was like “yeah let me get some of your batteries” when they asked. Maybe I’m a fringe case.
conductr · 17h ago
Their battery business was strong even towards the end though, the "even if you're only buying batteries" part of the GP post subtly telling
redwall_hp · 13h ago
I've had minimal contact with drive-thrus in the past decade, because ordering ahead online is superior in every way.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 13h ago
Works when you actually have that option. Usually the only time I ever go to fast food places are late at night when everything else is closed. Most open-late fast food joints in smaller cities and towns will only have the drive through open, not the restaurant area.
justinrubek · 6h ago
In no way does this refute the usefulness of ordering online relative to voice. Maybe those food places don't have online ordering, but that isn't a fundamental limitation.
ssharp · 6h ago
I've used the Tacbo Bel AI drive-thru and came away with the same thought. I kind of groaned at first but it was very accurate, even when making adjustments.
No comments yet
PapaPalpatine · 20h ago
I have never heard someone describe drive-thrus as a “famously bad experience.”
BobbyTables2 · 19h ago
There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
EZ-E · 14h ago
I've always been puzzled that Starbucks drive through is a thing, and even has long queues. It's coffee, do people really drive there just to get a cup? I understand if it's along the highway but otherwise. You pay the premium of the brand without getting to see or enjoy the facilities. Just my feeling as european, maybe just a cultural thing.
midnightclubbed · 13h ago
Some people stop every day on the way in to work rather than make coffee at home in the morning. They’re often ordering some caffeine concoction rather than drip coffee. I have known people with $100+ per month Starbucks habits.
maxsilver · 6h ago
(re: drive-thru) You're going to be waiting aorund in a really long queue for Starbucks regardless.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
bee_rider · 13h ago
They make the dessert-coffee drinks that some folks like. Those can be kind of a pain to clean up after, with all the frothed milk and sugar…
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
midnightclubbed · 13h ago
Yeah it’s this, Starbucks isn’t a coffee place; it’s a caffeinated drink place. Their brewed coffee (outside of their higher end tasting room stores) is deliberately undrinkable to push you to their espresso drinks or their sugary concoctions.
dougSF70 · 12h ago
Its a flavored milk business that also sells coffee
fxtentacle · 11h ago
That’s spot on! I really like the chocolate milk at Starbucks. And sometimes I will get one with the optional shot of coffee added.
rightbyte · 5h ago
Getting a coffee, small snack or other beverage might be the only sane thing to order to a car though.
mrweasel · 7h ago
Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order, made me think that maybe the drive thru isn't that great of an idea during rush hours. The staff needs to handle orders in a very specific sequence, to get the cars moving, meaning that they'll need to priorities drive thru orders. Wolt/DoorDash impose the same problem to an extend. I've notice that orders from in restaurant customers is frequently seems to be de-prioritized to get the drive thru line moving or to get the deliveries out.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
maxsilver · 6h ago
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
---
It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
tomjakubowski · 7m ago
I observed the same thing around the time online ordering became more popular. It used to be that at a lunch spot, cashiers or phone operators could restrict the order flow a bit to keep the kitchen from getting overwhelmed with orders. DoorDash et al. have no interest in that, they only want to take as many orders as possible, as quickly as possible; they have an incentive to obfuscate the real wait time from customers.
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do think though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", it might help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
Atotalnoob · 3h ago
There is a Starbucks in downtown Chicago that is always empty, but has a 30 minute wait due to online orders.
It is incredibly frustrating cause you have to wait while they fulfill online orders.
They should have priority queues to ensure that certain order types take priority
jonbiggums22 · 4h ago
McDonald's around here have designated wait spaces with numbers. I've had them direct me out of line and an employee then brings the bag out to me when it is ready. So they do seem to have solved that problem.
jonathanlydall · 6h ago
I don't know how true this is, but I recall hearing many years ago that McDonalds operating model is to anticipate orders during heavy periods as opposed to making on items only on demand.
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order
Oh, mine lets you order online and then pick up in the drive through.
mrweasel · 4h ago
Mine does that as well, but it's like a five minute walk or two minutes on a bike, and I'd feel silly walking through the drive thru.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
boogieknite · 12h ago
if youve ever been inside to listen to these kinds of orders these people WILL find a way to still take 3-4 minutes to order from an AI. if an AI can get those numbers down i want copies of those transcripts so i can learn how to do this myself
bell-cot · 6h ago
Sadly true.
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
kotaKat · 8h ago
I got trapped in a Burger King drive thru for half an hour. Car parked in front of me, cars stuck behind me, concrete barrier on the right keeping me from pulling away.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
At least my bank won the chargeback.
jonbiggums22 · 3h ago
What is the deal with trapping you in anyway?
kevin_thibedeau · 14h ago
Most Wendy's without a kiosk have the cashier's chronically ignoring customers at the counter as online orders queue up from the receipt printer. I'm on a personal boycott for this shit tier service.
jgalt212 · 7h ago
People are "famously bad" at correctly valuing their time. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone spend $x of their time making a business case to purchase something that costs $y, where x > y.
lbreakjai · 1h ago
Thats only if you can get $x for every minute of your time. On paper, it'd be cheaper for me to hire someone to empty and fill my dishwasher, but in reality the time I spend doing the dishes isn't time I would be spending earning money.
bell-cot · 6h ago
Some similar experiences here, and not just at Starbucks. Counting heads, I've too-often noticed that the busy-looking employees outnumber the customers, and still the service is dead slow.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
tstrimple · 11h ago
Honestly sometimes sitting in my car away from everyone for an extra 20 minutes without actually having to interact with anyone is exactly what I am looking for. No other demands on my attention. While waiting for my over priced sugar coffee concoction I can just relax for a bit.
MangoToupe · 12h ago
I find it hilarious how painful starbucks has made the process of ordering coffee. I only drink drip coffee and think we deserve a distinct queue. This phenomenon has, a little distressingly, spread to places like dunkin donuts. People love to drink their sugary milk with a splash of coffee, I guess. I don't begrudge them this but I do question paying $7 a day for what must be a significantly-increased chance of getting diabetes. Curiously, these same people often turn their nose up at equally-sugary soda. You'd think people would just learn to make this at home with a moka pot and a milk skimmer that costs less than what they paid for a single drink...
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
grues-dinner · 7h ago
> inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.
acdha · 20h ago
They’re usually a lot slower than going inside and people have been cracking jokes about the quality of the speakers since the 80s.
PapaPalpatine · 20h ago
Yeah... that's just not the experience with drive-thrus in Central Ohio.
acdha · 20h ago
Maybe they’re less busy there but everywhere I went in California it was faster to park and walk inside if there was anyone in line ahead of you, which was almost always the case. The problem is that you’re limited by the slowest order ahead of you but the same place usually has multiple registers inside and the people who are waiting for pickup don’t block you from ordering. (Head of line blocking in real life)
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
cardiffspaceman · 37m ago
Starbucks allows you to order from home, and drive to the store. The ones I go to usually have my Americano waiting for me when I get there.
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
Larrikin · 15h ago
When I worked at McDonald's in high school, the drive thru times were tracked (for manager shift bonuses) and the in store orders were not. Drive thru was always prioritized over in store if there was a possible wait on anything.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Regardless, I'm not gong to eat out of my lap in a car. Or sit there needlessly running the car engine while waiting to move 10 feet forward.
I suppose the best thing about drive-thru is that there is plenty of parking now at these "restaurants" when I run in to eat.
Spooky23 · 15h ago
It’s worse now because fast food isn’t fast, and you end up committed with online ordering. You need to online order or pay a big premium, then you discover the drive through line is a trip to narnia only when you arrive.
micromacrofoot · 18h ago
people rather sit in their car for 15 minutes than walk for 1 to save 10
RogerL · 17h ago
Or because their kid or dog is in the car. Or because they have difficulty walking. Or because they just want to decompress and scroll their phone or listen to the news for 10 minutes. Or they hate crowds. Or they are immune compromised and don't want to be mingling with a bunch of people around a counter. Or they have social anxiety. Or they have a cold and just don't feel like getting out of their car. Or they are expecting a call from the baby sitter. Or they are having a fight with their spouse which they don't want to export into the public.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
micromacrofoot · 16h ago
people are allowed to make broad generalizations without listing caveats for every exception, this kind of pedantry is exhausting
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
midnightclubbed · 13h ago
I think your parent made a perfectly good point. Going into the store is a whole lot less pleasant than staying in my car and waiting a couple extra minutes in an environment I enjoy.
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Don't disagree with your generalization of the interiors of fast food restaurants, but I can't say I prefer the interior of my car either.
micromacrofoot · 18h ago
oh central ohio, well in that case it's definitely everyone else that is wrong
PapaPalpatine · 16h ago
Or maybe you and everyone else is of a certain age that y'all need to get your hearing checked more frequently.
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
right again! logically we all need hearing aids specifically for drive-thrus
PapaPalpatine · 3h ago
Do I win a prize?!
MangoToupe · 11h ago
Interesting. I've found going inside to be much slower because the cashiers are so busy with the drive thru. I guess this probably varies from brand to brand, if not store to store.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Definitely "Dunkin" (as it's called now) can fuck right off. (And don't let this old man get started on store employees that allow a caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them.)
Aurornis · 19h ago
The poor quality of drive through communication is a common joke because it’s such a universal experience.
goalieca · 19h ago
Hasn’t been the case since the 80s. Speaker tech works really well these days.
kadoban · 15h ago
Speakers work well if they're set up well, maintained well and used correctly. Most drive thrus sound like shit because none of those are true.
dawnerd · 11h ago
So the ai here isn’t what’s improving anything, it’s the companies forcing themselves to upgrade.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Never mind background noise of traffic, etc. Location of the drive-thru, time of day, is important as well.
loloquwowndueo · 18h ago
I disagree. First, there’s a 40-year chasm between the 80s and “these days”. Next - anecdata? I have found horrible drive thru audio systems in the past decade, let alone in the last millennium.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
collingreen · 15h ago
This is a crazy claim. I still routinely get bad speakers or mics, 40 years after your claimed cutoff. Where do you live? I expect you must have really great drive throughs pretty much everywhere near you in order to make this bold of a refutation of the comment above.
wheelerwj · 20h ago
Do you not know anyone who has been through an American drive-thru?
PapaPalpatine · 20h ago
I drive through them at least once a week. Ordering is not hard. Talking the order is a lot harder -- I've done that too.
jameslk · 19h ago
When the AI gladly accepts orders that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or 18,000 cups of water, it’s probably not production ready
I feel like we watched different videos.. Seemed like the AI (or other monitoring system) recognized a problem with the 18000 cups of water order and quickly transitioned to a real human. That instance looked pretty production ready to me.
jameslk · 19h ago
I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
Dunedan · 10h ago
I suspect the human worker still had a headset to listen in to the orders at the drive-through and just intervened when she heard that order.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
Regardless, looks like you can't replace everyone with A.I. just yet.
sneak · 19h ago
This is solved easily by one additional sanity check API call to a different AI. I’m not sure why people think these bugs are like, complete showstopper insurmountable things. It’s a quick fix.
shakna · 7h ago
If Anthropic couldn't achieve that with Project Vend [0], why do you seem to think that everyone else could?
> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
Taco Bell knows and controls it's own menu and the valid options are already directly encoded in their POS system, including purchase limits. Why would you call out to a different non-deterministic model instead of validating against the complete and deterministic data you have? Taco Bell can afford 1-2 engineers to manage that
zamadatix · 6h ago
This would be better off if the LLM was used for the human interface but traditional logic was used for the ordering API and its sanity checks. I.e. let it be fine the LLM can bug out on occasion, but keep rigorous boundaries around the amount of risk that's associated with.
saagarjha · 7h ago
AIs are not resilient against deliberate attacks, even if you use multiple different models.
diamond559 · 3h ago
Maybe they shouldn't work w/ customers then, retail workers have to deal w/ hostile customers all the time.
zamadatix · 1h ago
The net result would surely be retail workers only get to deal with hostile (or just difficult, even) customers while the LLM deals with the easy ones. That's what has happened with every other technology introduced to retail - less "business as usual" and "overhead" work and more "oddball" handling. E.g. the electronic PoS and intercom system already have the same kind of effect.
jameslk · 19h ago
It seems so, and yet here we are
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
HarHarVeryFunny · 20h ago
Mind boggling that they would roll it out at scale without testing.
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
beerandt · 19h ago
The follow up question (not quite mc) was actually what put it in a loop for me-
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
filearts · 1h ago
As is often the case, reality imitates satire. This reminds me of the "and then" scene from Dude, Where's my Car. https://youtu.be/iuDML4ADIvk
HarHarVeryFunny · 5h ago
I remember the McDonalds in-store touch screen ordering systems when they were first introduced, which were also astonishingly badly designed.
Using unreliable voice as an input, then not allowing you to cancel/correct, or not supporting it in a robust fashion, is a massive fail. If there is no person there, then I guess you just have to give up and drive away.
rsynnott · 8h ago
As far as I can tell, _most_ recent examples of 'AI' inflicted on the public have been rolled out on scale without testing, or at least the results of testing have been ignored. It's generally incredibly shoddy stuff.
sokoloff · 7h ago
I would wager a lot of money that they did test it at an even smaller scale before expanding the testing program to these 500 locations.
mark_l_watson · 20h ago
I agree, that would be just under 6% of all taco bells. The should have done a few in each region.
HarHarVeryFunny · 5h ago
I can't imagine that people having fun messing with it, putting in ridiculous orders would be region specific.
Has anyone here tried it and know how it works ? If I order 6 large pizzas with a topping of rocks, will that come up on the screen ?
mark_l_watson · 5h ago
I have worked on NLP systems for decades, the usual pattern is converting a request into structured data, and sanity checking the structured extracted data. If you ordered a pizza with rocks on it, the ‘toppings’ filed would be checked against a datastore of available toppings.
HarHarVeryFunny · 5h ago
Makes sense, but then where would the fun be in putting in ridiculous orders, and I wonder how the Taco Bell system is responding when people order completely off-menu items like pizzas ?
dangus · 14h ago
500 stores isn't really "scale," that's only about 6% of their locations.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
HarHarVeryFunny · 7h ago
If they want to do automated voice ordering, then using multiple choice A/B/C/cancel (with feedback on screen) would seem less error prone than LLM open ended natural language with some kind of intent interpretation.
Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!
ares623 · 7h ago
Deep down the PMs know that’s just a touch screen but with voice. So no one’s getting a promotion for that.
imtringued · 18h ago
Having a cat robot deliver food to your car in the parking lot would definitely be more efficient than drive through.
gdbsjjdn · 6h ago
I don't understand the appeal of drive throughs?s?
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
cool_dude85 · 6h ago
Do you have kids? They cause about a 5-10 year period where getting into or out of a car is a 10 minute project.
gdbsjjdn · 5h ago
I don't have kids because I value the 5-10 minutes I save when getting out of my car to interact with people face to face in a restaurant.
RDaneel0livaw · 6h ago
For me the appeal of drive through is 100% solely just that I get to listen to my own podcasts or music. I don’t carry headphones with me outside of the house so if I get to keep my podcasts going - that’s good enough reason for me.
gdbsjjdn · 5h ago
It seems very lonely to live such a hermetic existence.
trenchpilgrim · 5h ago
What's hermetic about listening to music you like?
gdbsjjdn · 2h ago
There is a joy and psychological benefit to having minor, positive social interactions. If you are mostly seeing your partner and coworkers, or even working from home, you may not realize how little human interaction you have.
This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is also a skill you have to practice or it becomes hard to do.
ryandrake · 55m ago
This seems like simply a personal preference, which will be different from person to person. I WFH now, and I can go (and have gone) months without seeing another human being besides my family. I don't feel like this has been "bad" for my brain or for my personal joy or psychological wellbeing.
GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago
in a sense (no pun intended), you're sealing yourself off from "the real world" when you listen to podcasts/music on headphones in public.
i used to be a major headphone user but as i've gotten older, i really don't like to isolate myself like that when in public. i've started to enjoy just living in the moment a lot more than when i was younger, and i don't like to appear as antisocial as i often feel, because i actually feel a lot better about myself when i interact with the people around me instead of gliding through life trying to avoid notice.
jprjr_ · 5h ago
I think there's a deeply-ingrained sense of being in love with our cars, loving to do things in our cars, etc. We made long commutes via car a thing, and I think a part of that was the drive-through - you could get things quickly on your way to/from work.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
IAmBroom · 6h ago
The question mark ("?") is used in English to denote the end of a question.
gdbsjjdn · 5h ago
I appreciate your scholarly devotion to the language and it's diverse array of punctuation. In the future you may consider reading the letters in between the punctuation, which are often used to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author.
dfxm12 · 5h ago
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
gdbsjjdn · 5h ago
This makes a lot of sense and as you said probably accounts for fewer than 10% of drive through users.
supertrope · 2h ago
Americans' cars are extensions of their bodies.
ugh123 · 19h ago
In a way, we need these "pioneers" who operate at scale to serve the dual goals of giving lessons learned to future developers of AI tech, and proving to us that the technology is just not ready to supplant this kind of work.
testing22321 · 19h ago
Exactly. Identical to early self-checkout at the supermarket and a million other examples.
gerdesj · 19h ago
"Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta:"
lordnacho · 18h ago
Why order when you arrive at the place? Just have people talk to their phones, and make sure the order has some sanity checks and orders something similar to what they can order online? There's less noise talking to your phone, and you can do it without being in line.
autoexec · 17h ago
> Why order when you arrive at the place?
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
jameslk · 18h ago
Some assumptions it seems you’re making:
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
euLh7SM5HDFY · 7h ago
Sadly many restaurants already make same assumptions with QR code menu replacements. And the worst thing is they keep them despite everybody hating them.
redwall_hp · 13h ago
Yes, I would like to go to this restaurant that sets higher expectations of its customers.
pluto_modadic · 13h ago
a LARGE amount of /drive through specific/ food purchases are impulse purchases /as they're driving down the road/. You /don't/ want someone using an app to do that. It misses the mark of what actual customers are doing in favor of "let's do a cool thing because smartphones/AI exist".
micromacrofoot · 18h ago
still a significant number of people who can't use phones well enough to do this, and a bunch of other people who wouldn't want to download spyware to do so
akerl_ · 19h ago
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.
nickthegreek · 19h ago
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.
stephenlindauer · 19h ago
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.)
ares623 · 7h ago
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.
smelendez · 19h ago
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.
computerdork · 15h ago
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).
Daz1 · 13h ago
"capitalistic hellscape"
get a grip lmao
hamburglar · 10h ago
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.
kjkjadksj · 1h ago
Oh no not the tacocorp app.
seanmcdirmid · 19h ago
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.
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
seanmcdirmid · 4h ago
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.
reaperducer · 19h ago
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?
seanmcdirmid · 13h ago
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.
bigstrat2003 · 19h ago
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.
rstuart4133 · 17h ago
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.
akerl_ · 19h ago
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.
kenjackson · 12h ago
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.
myvoiceismypass · 5h ago
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).
twodave · 19h ago
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.
akerl_ · 19h ago
I enjoy talking with humans, but not the part where I’m reciting an order and making them record it.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
I agree — but prefer to stand across a counter from them rather than talk through a grille.
pluto_modadic · 12h ago
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.
hypeatei · 19h ago
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.
akerl_ · 19h ago
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.
BHSPitMonkey · 12h ago
... 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.
hypeatei · 55m ago
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.
toofy · 18h ago
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.
grues-dinner · 6h ago
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.
macintux · 7h ago
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.
JKCalhoun · 6h ago
I prefer the days of the automats.
sneak · 19h ago
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.
bluedino · 19h ago
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.
sneak · 19h ago
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.
542354234235 · 5h ago
>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.
sneak · 4h ago
They (CVS) require a phone number.
akerl_ · 19h ago
I’m pretty ok with cash ceasing to exist.
dogman1050 · 6h ago
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."
sneak · 19h ago
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:
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.
grishka · 19h ago
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?
akerl_ · 18h ago
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.
grishka · 18h ago
You can freely exchange Russian rubles to US dollars and back. Many people I know travel like that.
justsomehnguy · 18h ago
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.
throwaway314155 · 19h ago
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.
akerl_ · 19h ago
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.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
Death by a thousand opt-outs.
akerl_ · 4h ago
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.
The AI answering systems I've had to speak to are brutally bad as far as accuracy goes. Basically I'm always called back to validate the info.
diamond559 · 3h ago
Yeah I used this and it couldn't get my order right after 5mins we gave up, the "future" everyone...
michaelbuckbee · 6h ago
This feels like a very knee-jerk reaction to this and not what's actually the case: a new system with weird bugs.
It just seems very similar to the sort of articles that came out when online ordering or touchscreen ordering first appeared.
Like one of the big knocks on the Taco Bell AI ordering was that it let people ask for a 1000 waters on their order, which yeah is dumb, but it's the kind of thing the humans actually making the food are going to catch.
dfxm12 · 5h ago
I don't want to do your job and test your buggy system. I just want a double stacked taco.
wodenokoto · 11h ago
I feel like the article skips over all the interesting stuff. How did user out weird the AI? In what ways did they troll it?
rideontime · 5h ago
The article, and other text on the website, is itself AI-generated. Very bizarre.
JKCalhoun · 5h ago
Some examples in the comments here.
electric_muse · 20h ago
What’s wild is that drive-thrus are one of the few places where humans actually expect and even forgive a little chaos. You get muffled voices, wrong items, and confusion, and nobody is shocked. Dropping AI into that environment is less about tech maturity and more about customer psychology.
hoherd · 5h ago
The best thing about this is learning that aidarwinawards.org exists.
jrowen · 16h ago
I'm gonna be that guy - was this article written by AI? Where were the actual clever/funny/bizarre anecdotes that the (IRL) Darwin awards are known for?
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
nutanc · 12h ago
This is just a glimpse of the future. The real future is when your self driving car talks to the Taco Bell AI and gets your Taco.
bluefirebrand · 5h ago
Sounds like hell
Animats · 20h ago
Anyone involved in fast food automation should see this movie about AMFare in 1956.[1]
I wonder why those failed. Just too extensive for no benefit? Too much things getting stuck all the time?
nextworddev · 20h ago
They clearly hired the wrong consulting firm / AI agent stsrtup
gerdesj · 19h ago
Possibly, but they did manage, without consultants: "Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta".
That's a high score.
bitlad · 18h ago
I guess the company it is a Voice AI company went from 0-10M ARR in weeks and boasted about it in linkedin.
ww520 · 19h ago
Have they heard about staging roll-outs and A/B testing or Multi-Armed Bandit testing?
joshdavham · 19h ago
So AI will replace software engineers but not fast food workers because that work is too complex for AI?
hackable_sand · 18h ago
Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.
Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.
But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).
Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.
What is that worth?
toofy · 17h ago
i definitely prefer to order from a person. for a few different reasons:
1) i kinda like people.
2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.
3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.
3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.
4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.
5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.
we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.
anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”
people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.
autoexec · 17h ago
I don't really like people or interacting with them, but I know that the wage slave taking my order doesn't give a shit about me and will forget about me the moment I leave. A company using AI will be far more likely to be collecting my voice print, analyzing my speech to build a psychological profile on me, A/B testing everything from their word choices, inflection, and sales pitches to get me to spend more, etc.
The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial
toofy · 17h ago
yeah this should have been on my list as well.
just let me buy an order of fries without the fries having some creepy behind the scenes motivations. just let me order an oreo shake and i’ll give you $4.
the restaurant should focus on making their oreo shake better than the other restaurants, not the stack analyzing my order history.
No comments yet
hackable_sand · 14h ago
Makes sense to me.
The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.
It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.
I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
toofy · 12h ago
> I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
absolutely. the things you learn/absorb in that kind of atmosphere are entirely different than what we learned in school social activities. you learn how to deal with coworkers having a bad day, shitbag bosses, how to differentiate if a customer is a true unempathetic dbag or just a regular person having a bad day.
and one of the most valuable lessons you learn to the absolute core, you absorb this to be one of the great truths: one nice person can take one of the worst hellfilled days of your life, and with a single snap of their fingers your day turns around. from one quick interaction with a nice person. and it happens regularly because at the end of the day, an absolute fuckton of people are kinda awesome.
the things you pick up about the world and about other people are invaluable tools that a lot of people are lacking (and it shows.)
…apparently i just entirely and verbosely over analyzed why i like to order my fries in person?
“and that my dear fellows is why it’s important to always order your milkshake in person. i now cede back any remaining time.”
ares623 · 14h ago
The more people behind the counter, the less people outside starving or looting
imtringued · 18h ago
>Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.
What is manufacturing.
hackable_sand · 15h ago
Food food
smnplk · 19h ago
They were smart and didn't upload their process to github, didn't write any books or tutorials on fast food ordering process. So AI could't learn the craft. ;)
joshdavham · 13h ago
I’m sure Taco Bell must’ve had a bunch of training data, at least!
MehdiHK · 17h ago
Moravec's paradox
micromacrofoot · 18h ago
> deliberately trolling the AI with absurd orders that would make even experienced drive-thru workers question their life choices
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!
kissgyorgy · 7h ago
One can only hope this would bankrupt companies doing this and other companies would learn not to push AI into every fucking thing.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".
That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkdyU_eUm1U
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
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Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
Might as well wait in line in a comfy/cosy car where a barista will hand you your drink, than walk inside into a hot, loud, crowded environment and stand around awkwardly in a tiny corner, listening for a mangled version of your name to be yelled.
Starbucks in 2025 isn't Starbucks of 2010. There is no 'premium brand facilities' anymore, just premium pricing.
Of course, probably shouldn’t have one every day anyway!
Coffee-to-go can make sense if the place already has a pot going, I guess.
It provides an awful experience for other customers, and the drive thru is still going to be slowed down, if someone has a weird or large order, because they frequently can't move that customer to the side, so now everyone has to wait.
In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?). In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text callback or whatever, for the 'next available table') and you can make a decision. (is it worth the long wait, or not?).
DoorDash and the like, knows about (but intentionally hides) whether a restaurant can actually handle your incoming order -- they never admit if a restaurant is busy or falling behind, because then a human might use that information to decide not purchase.
So, DoorDash implies to humans that restaurants are open and ready, orders stack up indefinitely far beyond what a real-world restaurant normally would take, and real-world restaurants have to magically 1.5x to 3x their capacity out of thin air.
---
It's not a systems-based issue -- no combination of "moving orders" or "separating orders" or "more apps / AI" could solve it. It's a fundamental capacity issue -- restaurants (especially drive-thru places) don't staff enough people to handle making more than a certain number of orders at a time, and shuffling that capacity from window to counter to drive-thru is just obfuscating that fact.
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do think though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", it might help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
It is incredibly frustrating cause you have to wait while they fulfill online orders.
They should have priority queues to ensure that certain order types take priority
If this is true, then they don't have to worry about the order in which they process orders.
Oh, mine lets you order online and then pick up in the drive through.
It's not my impression that online ordering for pick-up is massively popular here. We do it, because out side rush hours we can order, walk straight over and our food will be done a few minutes after we get there.
In theory, you could move both the ordering and payment processing into an app, so there's only a pickup window. That'd let the no-attention-span ditherers take their 15 minutes to order without holding anyone else up. Obvious downsides - electric bill at the AI DC, barrier to new/occasional customers (app required), and the C-suite probably loves holding customers mentally "hostage" in the drive-through line.
No clue what they were holding on, no apology once they got to the window, nothing. Emailing RBI got an empty response back on top of refusing to provide a refund for the order or any kind of customer recovery.
At least my bank won the chargeback.
Maybe that's part of the experience they're selling? - "you're a VIP, just look at the legion of minions rushing to serve you!" - but I find it a distasteful waste of time, and avoid going back.
Between this and the inexplicably high cost of hot black coffee, i've just given up ordering from "coffee shops" and buy it from wendys and mcdonalds instead. The coffee is both cheaper and delivered faster and it could taste a lot worse.
My guess: if the prices reflected the marginal costs of the product inputs, amortised machine wear and ingredient storage and handling and the labour to make, black coffee would be so much cheaper that it would attract too many people away from higher-priced, higher-margin options.
Prices are based on analysis of the effect on demand rather then as a representation of the cost of the item to produce relative to other products.
McDonald's for example has cheap black coffee, because it's an incentive to get you to buy some overpriced food at the same time. Whereas a coffee place is primarily just selling the drinks.
This used to be worse when everyone was paying cash and you’d be stuck behind someone counting out quarters or dropping their change.
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
The only time management gave any priority to in store would be the case where a bus load of kids would show up before or after a school trip. That was just to get them out as quickly as possible before they can make a mess.
I suppose the best thing about drive-thru is that there is plenty of parking now at these "restaurants" when I run in to eat.
IMO, drive throughs are great, I hate crowds and queues (yes, the car line is a queue, you know what I mean), and it is much kinder to my bad discs in my back (transitions from sitting/standing is just murder, steady state is much better). It would take a egregious queue to get me to go in in most cases. But sure, I'm lazy or just reaaally bad at math. edit: I also find it hard to hear in high volume rooms with lots of reflections (like an in-n-out), and yes, the drive through can have it's own sonic issues, but it is generally smoother for me.
Sorry, but I get tired when people take the most uncharitable read, especially when they blanket apply it to everyone.
people on the whole are lazy and bad at math, yes some people are not... that's not who we're talking about
If I’m in a hurry then yes maybe I can shave a few minutes by going in, but if I’m getting fast food I probably don’t feel like interacting with people, and listening to crappy piped music while standing in an artificially lit corporate chain restaurant waiting for my order.
But all of the chains around me have upgraded their drive throughs years ago and they’ve been great, outside of the recorded pre-sell they do. That’s caused me to just go inside and pick up my mobile orders.
I usually prefer to park the car, go and order to go inside.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-becam...
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
Using unreliable voice as an input, then not allowing you to cancel/correct, or not supporting it in a robust fashion, is a massive fail. If there is no person there, then I guess you just have to give up and drive away.
Has anyone here tried it and know how it works ? If I order 6 large pizzas with a topping of rocks, will that come up on the screen ?
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is also a skill you have to practice or it becomes hard to do.
i used to be a major headphone user but as i've gotten older, i really don't like to isolate myself like that when in public. i've started to enjoy just living in the moment a lot more than when i was younger, and i don't like to appear as antisocial as i often feel, because i actually feel a lot better about myself when i interact with the people around me instead of gliding through life trying to avoid notice.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
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 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.
get a grip lmao
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.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
Having had unhoused neighbors steal my order at Starbucks, I find the system they use in China reassuring.
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?
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.
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.
Mobile ordering could mean an unexpected 20 minute wait or your food sitting there long before you arrive.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
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.
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.
I did a talk about this very topic at the CCC some years ago:
https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp11-4591-financing_the_revolutio...
Yes, I it happened to me and it wasn't pleasant.
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065391 - Aug 2025 (186 comments)
It just seems very similar to the sort of articles that came out when online ordering or touchscreen ordering first appeared.
Like one of the big knocks on the Taco Bell AI ordering was that it let people ask for a 1000 waters on their order, which yeah is dumb, but it's the kind of thing the humans actually making the food are going to catch.
This feels like a regurgitated summary of a run of the mill story...Taco Bell tried out AI ordering, and it didn't quite work (some people even trolled it!), and they had to rethink it. So crazy lol!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY
I wonder why those failed. Just too extensive for no benefit? Too much things getting stuck all the time?
That's a high score.
Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.
But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).
Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.
What is that worth?
1) i kinda like people.
2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.
3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.
3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.
4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.
5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.
we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.
anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”
people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.
The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial
just let me buy an order of fries without the fries having some creepy behind the scenes motivations. just let me order an oreo shake and i’ll give you $4.
the restaurant should focus on making their oreo shake better than the other restaurants, not the stack analyzing my order history.
No comments yet
The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.
It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.
I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.
absolutely. the things you learn/absorb in that kind of atmosphere are entirely different than what we learned in school social activities. you learn how to deal with coworkers having a bad day, shitbag bosses, how to differentiate if a customer is a true unempathetic dbag or just a regular person having a bad day.
and one of the most valuable lessons you learn to the absolute core, you absorb this to be one of the great truths: one nice person can take one of the worst hellfilled days of your life, and with a single snap of their fingers your day turns around. from one quick interaction with a nice person. and it happens regularly because at the end of the day, an absolute fuckton of people are kinda awesome.
the things you pick up about the world and about other people are invaluable tools that a lot of people are lacking (and it shows.)
…apparently i just entirely and verbosely over analyzed why i like to order my fries in person?
“and that my dear fellows is why it’s important to always order your milkshake in person. i now cede back any remaining time.”
What is manufacturing.
this actually worries me about ai slightly, what happens where people get even more comfortable working abusive language into their customer service interactions- I'm not sure that intentionally dehumanizing human-like interaction is going to have great side-effects!