Tech Check is a regular column on restaurant technology by Senior Editor Joe Guszkowski. It's also a newsletter.
I have been traveling for the past week, which has given me the rare opportunity to eat multiple meals in airports.
That, in turn, has allowed me to test an idea that has become conventional wisdom in our industry: The idea that consumers don’t want to interact with another person when they’re ordering food, particularly fast food.
It was mentioned numerous times at our Restaurant Leadership Conference last week. Flynn Restaurant Group CEO Greg Flynn even made the bold prediction that there will be no human order-takers in QSRs in 10 years.
“I think guests love not talking to people in that context,” he said, pointing out that banks and airlines have largely done away with this undesirable friction. “And it’s gonna save our P&Ls,” he added.
Ignoring for a moment that banks and airlines aren’t exactly role models for hospitality, there is data to back up Flynn’s contention. According to a survey by the National Restaurant Association, consumers are quite open to using things like mobile phones and kiosks to order food. Seven in 10 adults said they would use a mobile app to order and pay, while 65% would use a self-service kiosk. Younger consumers, especially millennials, were more likely than older ones to say so.
All of this makes sense. The pandemic showed us that it’s possible to use a restaurant with zero human interaction, and how luxurious that experience can be. For operators facing a labor crunch, the idea that every customer could have a POS in their pocket is equally appealing.
It sounds like a win-win. But my travels suggested it’s not necessarily playing out that way.
I started my journey last Sunday at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, where I went to McDonald’s for lunch. The location had two kiosks and no human order takers. My fellow customers were clearly unhappy with the situation. There was a lot of grumbling and wrestling with the ordering interface, and when it was finally my turn I could see why: The screen was so large that you had to take a step back to read everything, and when it came time to checkout (the most important part of the transaction), it was not completely clear how to do that.
I’m certain two human cashiers could have knocked the line down faster—and left those customers happier—than the kiosks did.
My second brush with humanless ordering was more of a non-experience: The ordering kiosk at O’Hare’s Tortas Frontera was out of order. Tech-averse customers were spared from using it, but the restaurant wasn’t getting any benefit from it, either.
But the starkest indication that digital ordering could be in trouble was at LaGuardia in New York, where I stopped at Dunkin for coffee before my morning flight. The line was out the door, but a woman leaving the restaurant told me there were kiosks near the front and that it was much faster to order that way.
I checked it out and discovered there was no one using the kiosks. The dozens of people in line had chosen to wait for a human cashier rather than order themselves on a computer.
It was a real-life incarnation of this meme:
(The Dunkin kiosk, by the way, was much easier to navigate than the one at McDonald’s. I’m glad I used it.)
This is all to say that restaurants should think long and hard about the implications of shifting the ordering burden to customers. I understand why they want to do it. Costs are rising, staffing is hard, and a machine never forgets to ask if you’d like fries with that. But let’s stop pretending it’s what consumers want, because in my experience, that’s arguable at best.
Of course, I don’t expect the industry to turn back now. But I think the all-out push toward frictionless service will create opportunities for restaurants that choose to abstain. In a world where the front-of-house is run by computers, the option to order from a human could be worth lining up for.