Why are people against wendys self service kiosk ?

[SodiumChloride]

Is there a pleasure model?

I have my doubts about the concept.

[Faroth]

Breightbart isn't legit but I don't doubt they are trying to automate the fast food business. I've never been fond of the idea of getting my food from people who hate their jobs so I'm for it in a way.

Still hate to see jobs go away, lots of immigrants got their starts in fast food places, not to mention students.

A local Jack in the Box had the self order kiosk and I used it every time I went in. I'm afraid I have to report.... it was glorious.

[judgementofantonidas]

I don't understand why people are angry about wendys going with ordering kiosks. A kiosk won't give you an attitude or talk about you behind your back. I don't eat fast food anymore but I see nothing but benefits.

a kiosk also won't demand an inflated minimum wage.

[Jibjub]

Go read Player Piano. I'll wait here.

[SodiumChloride]

It's inevitable.

If it can be done cheaper by machine ... that's pretty much the end of your job.

That's Capitalism for you. Supply and demand. If there is a perfect substitute out there for what you do, that is cheaper than paying you, ... no more job. :x

[Jibjub]

Oh. And just wait for when cars (trucks) can drive themselves. Our country isn't ready for automation. Education is getting worse and unskilled labor is getting phased out. Not a good formula.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

Not long until robots are "cooking" the food too. And I say "cooking" because thats barely whats being done now.

Wendys is a little different than McDonalds, to be fair.

[akris15]

a kiosk also won't demand an inflated minimum wage.

A kiosk only won't help turn customers quicker during lunch. There will always be that person who has issues within a credit card or that old lady who takes 10 minutes to order a coffee. A supplementation of kiosk and employee is amazing l, making it kiosk only is just asking for issue during a rush period is asking for trouble. I could see it past dinner rush from the 7-10 hour though but that is minimal overhead vs the overhead during the day


You can see how this will play out in action right now with Kroger checkout during the 2-5 hour.

Edit:actually I take that back past 7 there are only 5 employees (grill, sandwich, coordinator/manger, Order taker, front). Order taker is already cleaning the back and based on previous experience at Wendy's they wouldn't have enough time in the evening to do front and back.

[zenkai]

So there's only 2 cashiers in this place? Sounds like a bodega, not a supermarket.

1 cashier per 4 selfcheckouts to oversee them. I estimate it has 2 express checkouts and 8 others. The self checkouts are usually backed up when it's busy, I find it faster to go through the regular checkouts.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

A kiosk only won't help turn customers quicker during lunch. There will always be that person who has issues within a credit card or that old lady who takes 10 minutes to order a coffee. A supplementation of kiosk and employee is amazing l, making it kiosk only is just asking for issue during a rush period is asking for trouble. I could see it past dinner rush from the 7-10 hour though but that is minimal overhead vs the overhead during the day


You can see how this will play out in action right now with Kroger checkout during the 2-5 hour.

My Kroger just opens more self checkout lanes when that happens. Never an issue.

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well i'm not sure about the source, but you will find a lot of people also avoid self checkout at grocery stores. people desire human interaction, and i suppose in a so-called restaurant it helps preserve the illusion that it's lovingly cooked just for you instead of being part of a machine churning out reheated frozen food.

Citation needed... self checkouts in my area always have a line.. while the ones with humans... not so much.

[vaeevictiss]

Wendys is a little different than McDonalds, to be fair.

true, one has square patties and the other has round patties.

[akris15]

true, one has square patties and the other has round patties.

One is actually beef too. Say what you want but Wendy's at least is actual beef. Quality of the beef is up to your opinion though.

[vaeevictiss]

A kiosk only won't help turn customers quicker during lunch. There will always be that person who has issues within a credit card or that old lady who takes 10 minutes to order a coffee. A supplementation of kiosk and employee is amazing l, making it kiosk only is just asking for issue during a rush period is asking for trouble. I could see it past dinner rush from the 7-10 hour though but that is minimal overhead vs the overhead during the day


You can see how this will play out in action right now with Kroger checkout during the 2-5 hour.

Edit:actually I take that back past 7 there are only 5 employees (grill, sandwich, coordinator/manger, Order taker, front). Order taker is already cleaning the back and based on previous experience at Wendy's they wouldn't have enough time in the evening to do front and back.

this can be easily fixed. have lines just for the elderly, another for the stupid, and another for the well educated. You can now rehire the cashiers for less pay to be line monitors. If they see an elderly person they will direct them to the elderly line. If they see someone staring at the screen for more than 30 seconds they direct them to the stupid line. eventually the problem will work itself out and everyone in the citizenry will know which line they should be in without line monitors.

[ItachiZaku]

This won't stop some jabroni from putting more than just "heavy ketchup" on my got damn burger.

[akris15]

this can be easily fixed. have lines just for the elderly, another for the stupid, and another for the well educated. You can now rehire the cashiers for less pay to be line monitors. If they see an elderly person they will direct them to the elderly line. If they see someone staring at the screen for more than 30 seconds they direct them to the stupid line. eventually the problem will work itself out and everyone in the citizenry will know which line they should be in without line monitors.

I know you are trolling but I would love to see someone flip out being forced to go to the "special" line. That's like some free entertainment for your dinner

[vaeevictiss]

I know you are trolling but I would love to see someone flip out being forced to go to the "special" line. That's like some free entertainment for your dinner

funny story. A coworker and i were in LA for some work and we're pretty close to hollywood around lunch time. We decide to stop into a taco bell for a quick lunch and there were those metal security doors on it and inside there was a security guard. now we were still in a nice part of town so we laughed to each other like...why do they need a security guard here?

so we get our food and were sitting down and this guy comes in really looking impatient as fuck...may have had some mental issues but he was in line and there were about 5 people ahead of him. He wasnt waiting very long and all of a sudden he yells "oh jesus fucking christ hurry the fuck up! i gotta get back to work god dammit!" we look at each other trying not to laugh and my buddy says quietly "this guy doesnt have a job" and literally when he finished saying that this other guy in the back of the restauraunt goes "Whatever, you dont have a fucking job" (now i agreed with both as the way this guy was dressed, he clearly didnt have a job, or at least not one that would have cared if he was a couple minutes late).

So now the guy in line looks at the guy that said it and yells "oh fuck you asshole!" so finally the security guard grabs him and says "ok buddy, youre done here" and shoves him outside. half the place busts out with laughter and applause and im like "well fuck, that just made spending money here so fucking worth it"

[Baconeggcheese]

It's a threat nothing more. Like I said supplementing automation is great but how Wendy's is structured they can't eliminate that front position due to the other job responsibilities for that employee

What might those be? Having worked fast food I'm not sure what you think they're doing that can't be replaced by automation / shuffled around to other people (robots)

Minimum wage spikes are going to also render minors all but unemployable for this reason, especially in any job with tasks that labor law usually won't allow them to do (and in restaurants there are several), because they are able to provide even less value per hour worked than someone 18+.

I think the politicizing of the minimum wage topic kind of distracts from the fact that this technology is inevitable and not at all limited to or pushed by low wage work. If anything white collar and other high wage work is the largest motivator for automation as opposed to minimum wage jobs.

I've had such conversations with my extremely conservative stepfather who likes to attribute the automation entirely to the rising minimum wage costs, but he seems to not realize that humans were never going to be able to compete with robots (in the same way that US workers were never going to compete with factories overseas who pay their employees pennies) or that minimum / low wage jobs aren't the only things on the cusp of being automated. The tech for self driving cars for instance eliminates how many good paying transportation jobs? And that tech is not at all limited to cars, which potentially eliminates that many more non-minimum wage jobs.

I enjoyed that "humans need not apply" video from a couple years back, but at the same time the things it talks about are quite scary. People act as though its simply low wage work that's on its way to being replaced (which is still a staggering amount of the work force that will become unemployable) without realizing that this push is much much broader than that.

The tech is already capable, its simply a matter of it becoming cheap enough to compete with workers of all kinds. Which is an inevitability in the coming not so distant future. Its going to be a lot more than just minors becoming unemployable.

[Fugus]

It doesn't. Cashiers do ordering PLUS bagging right now. Instead they will only be doing bagging but more of it. Same amount of people, this doesn't change. Thus far it hasn't at any places I've seen it implemented at. The thing kiosks do is make the ordering process significantly more efficient *once* people learn how to use them. Same with websites and mobile apps. Let me tell you how many job losses there have been since the Pizza Hut implemented their website where I don't need to call: 0. ZERO (zero). None. McDonalds? None. Taco Bell? None. Your argument is an out-right *lie*.

What I have seen is understaffed places that implemented it. They were always slow and understaffed and this was long before "kiosk" was word in your vocabulary. Kiosks have nothing to do with this.

Truth is I think people are upset the minimum is going up so they want to find ways to "stick it to the poor person" because they feel cheated or some stupid emotional shit.

You trying to relate kiosks to the industrial revolution is being intellectually dishonest and I can't tell if it's on purpose.

Now once we go to more than kiosks then you have an argument but until then you don't.

In all seriousness -- have you ever even worked in a custom robotics and software field?

I have. When it comes to much larger projects (bigger than your house gantry robots) it costs *some* jobs but it *creates* jobs too. Often times you end up paying the same in salary but you gain in productivity. Robots don't cost you jobs -- they make you money. You still have to pay people to maintain, run, and handle the robots. Most of this isn't difficult either so you're not eliminating entry level jobs either. You're raising the minimum bar *either way*, whether you like it or not.

edit: I've been corrected. Often times the salary goes up for those employees because they can't afford to have that robot down.

Yes, it does. And I related to the industrial revolution in that all that automation did eliminate jobs. Which is what the Kiosks do as well. If the workers have other jobs they can retrain for or not is beside the point for this analogy. When you increased the productivity of the people, you also reduced the number needed for the same amount of work which does eliminate jobs in that regard either by reducing the newly excessive labor or by eliminating future hiring for the workers they now will not need to hit the increased productivity.

And they have reduced the workers with such measures when fully deployed. You might not have personally seen it because you are not keeping count on the back end. But most places I have seen typically have 2 to 3 cashiers up front and another person off to the side bagging them as the orders come out and handing them up front. With the Kiosks, it can reduces those 2 to 3 cashiers down to a single one regardless of if they are the one bagging the orders or not.

And then when it comes to places like grocery and department stores, I have seen plenty of jobs eliminated. At the local Walmart, when they included 4 self-checkout kiosks there. They now have 1 person watching over all 4 of them (The customer bags their own stuff here) and those kiosks now remove 3 workers per shift who are now replaced by that 1 person watching the 4 self-checkout kiosks. That along is replacing a minimum of 9 workers total throughout the week between all 3 shifts.

Even these small things do eliminate jobs in the grand scheme of things. But as I said, I do not see this as a bad thing, I see it as the march of technology and innovation and welcome it. The only thing I see issues with is how we are refusing to adapt to it as a people and instead are trying to punish the working class trying to force them into a situation with a mindset that no longer reflects the world as it is anymore.

[akris15]

The best Wendy's story I have is the night where some guy high on drugs ran into the bathroom while he was being chased by the police. The best thing about this is for some reason he was naked. So that alone isn't bad enough but when he was being arrested or whatever happened in the restroom he managed to somehow get away and they finally subdued him in the restaurant dining room.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

true, one has square patties and the other has round patties.

That, and they actually cook their patties, and their meat arrives fresh daily.