promptly drove to the chick fil a right next door

That's... not better, you know that right? The owners of chick fil a have funded some pretty horrendous anti-LGBQT organizations

Yeah. They literally could upgrade the system to broadcast to the car radio, or, just upgrade the audio ..

Using that Tandy Radio Shack speaker and headset combo!

Same. It pisses me off that you have to order online if you want to get any kind of “affordable” food at most restaurants, but McD is even worse because you can’t order online, gotta get their shitty app.

I don’t install junk apps like that so I stopped eating there all together.

This is for the drive-thru, so you aren't punching in what you want. You are looking out of your car window and saying what you want into a microphone for someone to jot down. This is trying to replace the employee taking the order.

Speech to Text -> NLU -> Ordered summarized -> human for review (we hope?) -> order placed. They are using these to reduce the labor demand on the human portion, and I presume at some point the "to human for review" will just go away, if they get the accuracy dialed in.

The shitty part is, it's not like they are saving much money, since those jobs pay shit anyways. I have to wonder what the ROI is on replacing the electronics and hooking all that up, plus the R&D that went into the system itself, is.

Okay, we are a union of networked instances now. What can we make for you, comrade?

The reason I stopped going there was their terrible app shunting my order to a location 10 miles away from the one I was standing in, the new one which I had never eaten at, then telling me in the help documentation that they offer the helpful solution of allowing me to fix it myself by putting in a whole new order at full cost. They didn’t even start making the food until I said I was there, so there’s no reason they couldn’t transfer or cancel the order. The audacity to pitch “just give us even more money” as a solution was more than I was willing to accept for all time. I drove my ass the ten miles while fuming, and never went back.

Also they cancelled the snack wrap.

Every time I’ve seen them in the news in the last ten years has just made me more secure in my decision to boycott. It’s like they find the food purchasing customers inconvenient to their real estate business.

Does this mean you installed a McDonald’s mobile app? Why?

I hate the kiosks BECAUSE they removed a key feature that the POS can do: substitution at no cost. If you order a McGriddle, sausage egg and cheese, at the POS, you say “substitute” whole egg (the white and yolk instead of the folded egg), and it’s the same price. At the kiosk, at least 4 years ago when I last used one, when you want to do this, you need to add the whole egg for a cost, then remove the folded egg at no credit.

At chick fil a, when you remove ingredients on a sandwich, that amount actually gets removed from the cost of the sandwich. Fuck chick fil a’s profit spending, but their ordering system is the best for customers.

Yeah, the kiosk means I can browse the whole menu, and take my time deciding what I want. Definitely the better option.

I prefer the kiosks too, but if they're going to be hiring fewer people as a result, prices should be reduced to account for their cost savings.

That kiosk exists to push specific parts of the menu toward you, while minimizing your interaction with loss leaders, and if linked to your rewards account, collect and use all of your spending habit data. It's a consumer manipulation tactic that is meant to seem convenient, while providing an excuse for the company to hire less workers/pay workers less.

Source: Am fastfood worker at a company that refuses to do this.