McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles Technology certainly helped McDonald's process orders faster, but as soon as a computer fault hit, the burger behemoth was shuttled right back to the 90s. The fast food giant has become so dependent on its ordering system that following a tech meltdown, some restaurants simply gave up and shut their doors. Visitors to the …
Because The CloudTM, obviously.
It is impossible today to handle things locally. That's just not how business is done now. You have to have your ordering system, your procurement system and your payroll in The CloudTM.
So, when The CloudTM fucks up, you're out of business.
Personally, I rather like this result.
"Because god forbid anyone would want to verbally place their order with another human in 2024."
I don't go to McDonalds very much now, but every one I've been to in the last 6 months is laid out in such a way where there is no one to speak to in order to place an order. They all want you to use those crappy stand up massive tablet screens. There is a counter but no one is ever at it (or looks to be at it) unless they're there shouting out the order number for collection.
"Astonishingly, McDonalds now offer table service."
They've done that for ages (6-7 years?) here in France. End result? Fewer staff needed (the only till is now usually [*] for those annoying people paying in coins) and the various McWaitresses have been dehumanised into biological robots. I can't imagine there's much in the way of job satisfaction in that. At least they finally copied The Crown Place and put little chips in the number widgets so the staff know where you're sitting instead of walking in circles trying to read all the numbers to find the right one (and memorise some of the others for next time) - it was the anticipated level of utter chaos during the busy periods.
"I am quietly impressed"
I'm usually impressed when they can get your order delivered in under ten minutes when there's nobody else there. Some McDos understand the "fast" in fast food, but most of them are so lackadaisical that they'll get the chips made and stuck in the chip holder quite quickly but by the time everything else is ready the chips are not just cold and icky, but damn near fossilised. And the burger that took so long to prepare? Colder than a corpse in a coffin. They need to stick a microwave in the corner for those of us that like our peculiarly processed proteins something resembling warm.
* - They do make exceptions for older people ordering coffee and croissants if they figure said old person wouldn't have a hope of getting on with the pokey-proddy device.
Did you previously have that same downer on waiting staff in other restaurants? Maybe you should try talking to the McDonalds "biological robots" you despise so much, perhaps that would bring in some job satisfaction for them? Is it, in short, just possible that you are the problem, rather than being the solution you so obviously think you are?
<wanders off, shaking head>
GJC
Are you sure you prefer the touchscreens?
Poo found on every McDonald’s touchscreen tested
Mmm, finger lickin' good.
It has been a long time, but McD's used to be a fun place for the family to go, with colorful characters, etc. Birthday parties at McDonald's were real bragging rights to kids. Now it may as well be a Soviet blockhouse cafeteria. Eventually we'll just be getting in line to accept our 1 McMeal per person per day. There will be no menu.
And that's because all those McDonalds employees demanding $20/hour to stand behind a register and shovel crappy food to the customer didn't consider the consequences of actually getting that $20/hr. As a result franchisees installed those kiosks and terminated most of the counter staff as an unneeded payroll expense. At least that's what happened here in the United States. Not sure about what happened in the rest of the world.
McD's don't pay so high in the US, they only get paid slightly over the federal minimum wage which hasn't risen in over a decade... but their jobs are getting automated away anyway. They do get paid $22/hr in Denmark. Source
By the way, Denmark has no minimum wage.
Even when the "human resources" are cheaper than automated systems, automated systems will come everywhere. Greed above all. And greed is something different than wanting to have a living wage, which somewhat needs to raise when prices keep on rising.
What corporations dont seem to understand (reference to "making money", Terry Pratchett) is that their workers also are their customers, be it directly or indirectly and that whats called "money" in these times is worth nothing at all when staying static in much too greedy pockets. It needs to circulate to have any semblance of value and you need a lot of people to actually believe this has value. After all, the only important difference between "legal tender" and the stuff in a monopoly box is firm belief that one paper should have value while the other is for playing around.
As it seems there are a lot of people in the "financial industry" who dont get that distinction right.
Back to the article, really bad design. One cloudy outage taking down payment and ordering worldwide is a perfect example why one should keep everything necessary to keep running on prem and abuse "the cloud" only for synchronization and maybe backups instead of internal harddisk.
Well, those horrible touch screen are on the march - you'll find the same in several other fatty food outlets. Even more troubling, the other half encountered these abominations in a Marks & Sparks cafe. Clearly M&S don't know their customers very well.
Smiling? In my case they'll be looking at the pictures and thinking "wow, that angry oldster looks like he's going to tear somebody's head off and shit down their neck! Look at those throbbing neck veins, and how he's punching the machine and shouting abuse because the ordering interface is shite, the touch technology is erratic, and the whole thing doesn't work quickly or effectively."
"and the whole thing doesn't work"
I used to get the ones in my local burger slinger (about five years ago when I frequented such establishments) to speak to me in Japanese.
Why? You can get surprisingly far if you can read katakana, and if not there are always pictures. But the main reason is that it amused me no end that the system was clearly neither thought out nor actually ever tested - because it would happily print your receipt.......as line upon line of nothing but question marks.
And, yes, I'm exactly the sort of annoying bastard that would hand over such a receipt to pick up my "get it later" hot chocolate.
Hey, ain't my fault if you don't bother to test your ordering system...and, anyway, why are you idiots not providing the collection receipt in user language and local language for the employees that will have to read the thing? Didn't think this through did you?
Icon for obvious reasons.
I used to love getting the tills to print out their takings, entering it into a ledger, using a calculator, and then into a Husky device (this, by the way, was after closing, so, literally, in the small hours) only for the Husky to report an error, and you'd have to start all over again. The youth of today have no idea just how good they have it.
Anon because of some of the antics we'd get up to...
This post has been deleted by its author
Every dollar that minimum wage goes up (along with all the related taxes) makes automation more feasible for companies.
The "living wage" crowd have pushed this to the point where the jobs will be automated.
Young people will lose an opportunity to learn the work ethics that come from these types of jobs
The focus should really have been on helping people get better education and skills that allow them to earn more than minimum wage...that would be an actual investment.
Does anyone here remember "drive-in" restaurants, where you would drive your car up and park in a covered space, and the waitresses -- "car-hops" -- high-school girls in short skirts and on roller-skates -- would skate up to your car window to take your order, and then later, skate back with a car-tray with your food? (The tray had rubber-coated hooks which went over the glass of your mostly-open car window.) That was service!
Now your "fast food" is not fast, and "drive-thru" means, "wait in line, inside your car, burning gasoline as you do so."
There is still a chain called Sonic Drive-In like that in the US. You order through a speaker (it's always been that way), but they still bring it out to you. Sadly not pretty girls or guys in skimpy clothing, but they still wear skates. The company even has skating competitions for "top carhop".
Be glad that Greggs exists for those scummy plebs you look down on. That way you don't run the risk of any of them accidentally mistaking Pret a Manger as an alternative and trying to chat with you while you queue up to buy an obscenely overpriced cheese sandwich before you rush back to your desk job.
"a couple of times in thirty years. On both occasions without managing to buy anything. Both times I fancied a cheese burger but was greeted with "Sorry sir, we are only serving the breakfast menu at the moment." So I went elsewhere."
With a shotgun, IIRC. I've seen the movie, think it was Michael Douglas played you.
However, you missed out - the sausage and egg muffin is pretty decent, comes with the same "cheese" as a the alleged cheeseburger, but tastes much better. Still junk, but a very satisfying form of junk.
I'd just got off a ferry and was famished. McD was handy and I wondered if, after my experience two decades earlier, they had relented in their strange menu restrictions. Turned out not.
The earlier visit to McD's was etched in my memory as the guy behind the counter, presumably the franchise owner, got quite angry when I said, "No problem, I'll get one from the burger van twenty yards away in the market." He was livid that someone else dared to sell burgers within proximity to his outlet.
> their strange menu restrictions
Supposedly it's impractical to have the kitchen set up to deliver different types of food/menus at the same time (e.g. extra space required, the need to have separate ovens/grills at different temperatures for cooking eggs and burgers, etc).
They could probably do it, the question is whether it would be worth the additional cost and disruption (to a setup that works best when it's kept simple) for the occasional unemployed former defence engineer who wants a breakfast item at lunchtime- or, in your case, vice versa- is open to question.
Conversely, the burger van guy probably doesn't do enough business to make it worth *his* time to even bother with separate menus, so that happened to work out for you.
"There is a special place in hell reserved for those who invented the bamboo cutlery and the inventors of the paper straws that become unusable before you have finished half your drink that Maccas uses."
I think you have David Attenborough and his producer to thank for that. A staged shot of a turtle in a plastic bag, and first world politicos rushed to outlaw single use plastics, totally ignoring that we've got a pretty decent waste collection system. The inventors were merely trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to fill the gap.
If you're willing to "go prepared", then buy yourself some plastic straws and cutlery, keep them in the car.
Almost every company app is rubbish, IMHO. I think it all starts off with some airhead in marketing saying "Hey everybody, we need to have a corporate app!"
This rule even applies to companies you'd hope would be able to do something competent with technology, such as Sony.
How is pre-cooked food that's been sitting under warmers better? Faster, yes, but I'm happy that most places moved away from that. I went to a famous burger joint in Atlanta a few years ago that still did things like that, just continuously making the same burgers and fries and piling them up waiting for customers to order them, and even though it wasn't sitting for a long time, it was absolutely awful. McD's does obviously still to have many things cooked a little ahead to keep up with demand, but at least they're not pre-assembled so each item can be kept at its own proper temperature, and the items that don't do well when left to sit get made when needed.
Although somehow they still can't make a burger that can melt the slices of processed cheese product, even when straight off the griddle.
Well, I was referring to the ordering system, not the food quality, but it wasn't something I objected to. Much fresher than the home-delivered pizza, and by my preference, better than the bulk-cooked chicken from the warmer at that other franchise.
One of the things McD has done to compensate is they've moved from frozen patties to chilled patties. The product is different, and arguably more "authentic", more like "not from frozen meat", and most people prefer steak from chilled rather than from frozen, but it's not at all clear that chilled ground beef makes better hamburgers than frozen ground beef: many people think the current product is just somehow not as good as they remember, and undoubtably that's partly because the product is more evenly cooked -- less on the outside, more on the inside.
They've only done that for one particular item (quarter pounder), and I do notice an improvement, but I also prefer meat that is more thoroughly cooked (medium is the bare minimum for me; I used to cook everything to leather but got better about it as I got older; it's a neurodivergency thing). Generally freezing meat is considered to have at least a slight effect on quality. And "not as good as I remember" in this case is often just "I'm getting older" where everything tastes better in the past, both due to nostalgia and changes in tastebuds. (Chicken nuggets with dark meat however are absolutely better in every way, in every brand.) But anything that has sat under a warmer for more than a few minutes has started to degrade in quality.
The screens were dark at my local Hong Kong branch yesterday; but even given the language difficulties (I speak little Cantonese), I was able to place my order and get it much quicker than I expected - just long enough to move from the ordering point to the collection point!
This post has been deleted by its author
I order ahead via the app, rather than face (Well listen to) the horrors of the accent of the day at the drive through's crappy speaker.
Arrive, park up & let them bring it to me.
I had one "Karen*" server bemoan to me that the pickup driving spaces were only for delivery drivers not customers (Despite the signage & app saying otherwise), I'm sure her cow-orkers appreciated my passive aggressive retaliation by parking up in the most awkward stalls to walk to in -10 to -30C temps for my next few visits.
*I very much doubt that was her name however.
purely human interaction at least for the first two McDonalds on I90 going west. Have seen McDonalds with the order screens before you get to the counter, and use them at panera, Actually, come to think of it, i think i remember seeing one of these systems installed at the first McDonalds in natick, but it's not there anymore. Seems to me i remember trying to buy a small cup of coffee at one of these, and it couldn't be done.
Mass Turnpike...Natick Mall.... sigh!
True story - I am a Brit, I joined EMC at the turn of the century, back in the days when most of the training was still based over in Hopkington/Milford and so we visited the area frequently. As we were usually billeted at hotels near the I-90 (I lost track of how often I stayed at The Sheraton Castle at Framingham!) I got to know the area fairly well. As someone who had disliked McD's burgers since my early teens, I had my first ever sausage & egg McMuffin over there - and to this day, it is still the only thing that I will ever eat from them. Plus we would always visit Wrentham Mall to stock up on cheap Levis and Bose headphones .... great memories!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
