How Many Burgers Will The Robots Eat, Part One

Notes on automation, capital, and demand generation in Clown World

bitch, i said a full eight ball, you’re not much good to me alive, are you?

About fifteen years ago, I did something that has paid near-infinite dividends in the years since: I asked a young McDonald’s employee to show me how she took my order in their touchscreen system. I almost always get exactly the same McOrder — Quarter Pounder meal, large sized, only cheese and ketchup, Coke for the drink — but the accuracy of fulfillment had declined precipitously as of late, across every store I visited. My first wife put this down to “they’re hiring even bigger idiots now” but I suspected an underlying process change…

…and I was right. The newest generation of McDonald’s order computers had made a significant change in the order flow. Prior to 2008 or thereabouts, the cashier punched in the meal number, added any special requests, then inquired about the “size” of the meal. They were encouraged to ask the buyer if they wanted to “super-size” it; if the customer said “no”, they were supposed to ask about “large-sizing” it, and so on until the customer either agreed to an upsell or they got stuck with the small fries and drink.

This practice received a lot of negative attention thanks to the activist film Super Size Me, but I don’t think that’s why McDonald’s changed the order flow. The price of food rose significantly during the late Bush and early Obama administrations; not the miserable skyrocket to poverty we have now but enough to make people notice. So while SuperSizing was profitable, it was also noticeable to the customer’s bottom line. McDonald’s started to worry that they were losing momentum to lower-cost providers like Rally’s. There was also the not-so-minor issue of the average McDonald’s cashier not really being willing or even able to follow the script the way the Vice Lizards wanted them to.

Therefore, enter the new order flow. The customer now asks for a meal, by name or number. The cashier selects the meal and is prompted: “Small, Medium, or Large?” They can then repeat this question to the customer and get their answer. They are then prompted for the drink selection. And once they do that, well, that’s it. The system then wants the next meal order.

So my order flow was something like this:

“I want a Quarter Pounder meal, with ket—”

(Interrupting) “What size?”

“Large. With ket—”

(Interrupting) “What to drink?”

“Coke.”

“What else?”

“I need that Quarter Pounder meal with only cheese and ketchup.” So the cashier must then cancel the meal and start again. Which presents three problems:

0. They’ve forgotten what I ordered;

1. If they remembered that, they’ve forgotten the size;

2. If they remembered that, they’re absolutely forgotten the special order.

Please resist the temptation to have contempt for these cashiers, or to condescend to them. It is a loud, stressful, physically annoying job, one in which you are constantly being harassed, interrupted, and asked to perform side tasks. I know because I’ve done it. The only way to survive it is to kind of withdraw into the back of your mind and just observe your body go through the motions, which is not in any significant way different from the process described to me by survivors of recurring sexual abuse. I know this confuses some of you who don’t eat at places like that. Sure, the waiter at Le Bernardin remembers your order perfectly; he has four tables and each one will comp him north of $100 for his time. So he has massive incentive to remember. That doesn't mean he is any “better” than a McCashier who takes forty-five orders an hour, eight hours a day, (often) six days a week.

Rather than expect any more out of these folks, therefore, I built my own process to make sure I got what I wanted. Once I understood the order flow, I simply presented all of my meals via the same steps, and using the same language, that came up on their screens, pacing my order with the motions of their eyeballs and/or pauses in speech. This dropped my error rate from almost two in three to below one in ten, where it remains today. (Fun fact: I also learned the order flows in French, Spanish, and German, for overseas travel. The German systems as recently as 2018 could only remove items, rather than build from plain, so I phrase my request as ohne rather than mit.)

More interesting than my decision to basically manipulate McDonald’s cashiers into following my order flow the way the parasitic liver fluke does an ant: the way people react when I tell them about it. Ten percent say “Oh, that’s neat”, meaning “let’s not discuss it further, you’re creeping me out.” Forty percent say “You have a serious problem,” which is not news to me. But the remaining fifty percent will say something along the lines of, to quote Rodney, “Why the fuck would you spend any time making things easier for McDonald’s cashiers?”

“Strictly speaking,” I always reply, “I am making it easier for me, because I don’t have to get the order corrected after the fact. And it costs me nothing to phrase things a certain way.” At that point my conversational partner and I will engage in a tennis-match game of peel-back-the-onion until we come to their core point: Working at McDonald’s is supposed to suck.

In fact, the suck-ness of working at McDonald’s is such a fundamental assumption of our culture it is omnipresent even where you don’t expect it, from Delicious Tacos to Coming To America to Big Daddy Kane once famously telling a reporter, “I gotta invest my money so I don’t end up working the counter at McDonald’s, having some [brother] tell me ‘Get them fries, Kane, and no half-steppin’ with it.’” When cryptocurrency had a bad couple of quarters, the meme-infested corners of the universe overflowed with images depicting “diamond hands” Bitcoin aficionados using those diamond hands to cook French fries. The implication is clear: this work is for losers.

Which worries me at my very core, honestly. I don’t personally think there is any such thing as a contemptible job; there are only people doing contemptible things, or people doing jobs in contemptible fashion. But my opinion is not the generally held one. About a year and a half ago, I drove the Tail Of The Dragon in a group with two insurance executives. We had radios for purposes of coordination, but these two millionaires primarily used them to chat back and forth making fun of all the lower-class homes, cars, and people they saw while driving through North Carolina and Tennessee. That night I had trouble sleeping because of it.

If you’re worth four million dollars, or four hundred million, why would shitting on the desperately poor feel necessary or pleasurable to you? What’s the rationale behind your actions? “Look at that trailer, the door is rusted off the hinges; must be a lot of cousin-fuckin’ going on in there to get it that wet!”

“You said it! That family tree doesn’t branch!” How dead do you have to be inside in order to do that, again and again, for hours? Not that I was above being unpleasant, mind you; I spent the entire drive complaining to my passenger that these two dudes were the biggest pussies known to man and that a 600-horsepower sports car on MPSCs should be able to outrun a Honda Accord coupe down a twisty road, something it was clearly not doing. Oh well. As the late Mac Miller once said, "I’m just being me.”

All of the above was on my mind when I read about the automated McDonald’s that just opened in Texas. I’ll save you from clicking the link and give you the money shot:

The test restaurant uses enhanced technology to make ordering and pickup more seamless than ever before, but there is a significant human component. The concept is not fully automated. We anticipate this restaurant format necessitating a comparable number of team members to a traditional store based on initial testing: there is an interaction between customers and the restaurant team when picking up orders via the food and beverage conveyor, and the restaurant team may also support guests using the self-order kiosks.

Here’s what’s interesting about this: for as long as I have been alive, the vast majority of “optimization” at fast-food restaurants has been aimed at the back of the house. When I worked at Wendy’s in 1988, the closest thing we had to automation was the fry timer — and the more I think about it, the more I am fairly certain that I worked at least one fast-food job without a fry timer. In the (gulp) thirty-five years since, billions of dollars have been spent to streamline the cook-and-prep tasks. If anything, the cashier’s job has gotten slower and more complex because she now all but programs the tasks for the back of house. When I was a grill cook at Wendy’s I was expected to remember the orders as they came in…

I’m putting down a double with cheese and mustard and pickles, followed by two singles, one with everything, one plain…

Now they have a screen that keeps track of every burger, where it is on the grill, and what has to be done to it. All programmed by the front of house. Let’s be real: a lot of this is because the cooks don’t speak English.

(Side note: The employees of my local fast-food restaurants here in Nowhere, Ohio are surprisingly similar to what they were when I was a kid working in the ritzy suburbs. Gorgeous, fresh-faced teenaged girls up front, sullen Bumbles like your humble author toiling and laughing and cursing on the grill. It’s like going back in time.)

This push towards automation has been fairly effective; I now regularly see low-traffic Burger Kings and the like running with two people or even one person on the premises, whereas when I was a kid you needed five people minimum to take an order and fulfill it. So I always thought that the relentless march of bloodthirsty capital through the fast-food institutions would end up with having just a cashier who programmed a machine that made the food. It’s the logical endgame of the automation push.

Except this “automated” McDonald’s ain’t that. Instead, they’ve removed people from the interactive roles, while keeping them in the back. Ordering is now a private matter between the customer and the interface, who must now master the interface if he wants to eat. There is no other option. It’s part Beater Button, part The Worst Job In The Supermarket. I’ve seen this prototyped elsewhere in the world; I was once at a McDonald’s in the Barcelona airport (I think, might have been Seoul) where you had no option to order any way but via the touchscreen, yet you still received your meal from a person, who was able to address any issues you might have.

The new system eliminates even that Venerable Bede swallow’s flight of in-person contact. Your order is delivered on a conveyor belt. Hope it’s right. If it’s not? Well, there’s no way to get in the store and address any errors with a “manager”; it’s Festung Grimace up in this bitch, locked down and impersonal like a Rally’s but shorn of the walk-up windows. Very cyberpunk, actually.

I’ll save the economic implications of the “automated” McDonald’s for a follow-up post early next week. For now, however, I’m opening the comments to all readers, paid and free. What do you think McDonald’s gains from this? What do they lose?

This is what I want to believe: that working at McDonald’s will get significantly better as a result of this change. Think about it. You no longer have to deal with the public, which is the worst part of any service job. (Ask Waffle House Wendy if you’re confused about that.) You might not even have to wear a uniform. You work to a consistent pace based on what’s on the screen. The customers can’t yell at you to hurry up or abuse you when you make a mistake. It’s the remote work of fast food. If it paid twenty-five bucks an hour you could even kinda-sorta live on the money in some parts of the country.

Since we live in Clown World, however, which I would offhandedly define as “the unprecedented combination of relentlessly predatory capitalism, an O’Brien-esque defiance of reality among the chattering and tastemaking classes, and an omnipresent media consumed in larger quantities than ever before, all seemingly operated on the principles of purest possible evil,” I doubt any of that will come to pass. The real purpose of Festung Grimace probably isn’t to ensure worker dignity; it’s to make spot checks by the INS nearly impossible. Forcing all the cognitive burden onto the customer allows McDonald’s to specifically target low-IQ populations for labor. For all I know, they’re going to beat the employees or chain them to their tables, now that we can’t see what’s happening. Nothing would surprise me.

Mind you, my personal McExperience won’t change much. I already use the touchpanels as often as I can, meaning “whenever I have an alcohol wipe to address the fact that the panels are covered in human shit.” And since another mandatory feature of Clown World is “bifurcation of previously common experiences into poor-people versions and rich-people versions,” I look forward to visiting a upscale McDonald’s in La Jolla or Scarsdale where you can have an authentic in-person experience with a McCurator to ensure that all of your more-legitimate-than-anyone-else’s needs are met. I probably won’t be on any “rich guy drives” with insurance executives anytime soon, but imagine if I somehow got invited to one again…

…and we’re driving through West Virginia or North Carolina…

…and my “friends” see a “regular” McDonald’s…

…and they will be so condescending…

…”Look at that! Guess those people don’t even have their McCurator’s phone number!”

“They couldn’t find anyone who had all her teeth to meet the customers! I bet the screens just have pictures on them… Haw haw Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw. . . Hack hack hack hack hack hack. . . Hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock hock!”

Ah, dear reader, it’s enough to make me grimace.