Re:U.S. workers have gotten way less productive. No one is s...
by VLM on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @09:22AM
(#33420826)
Market for lemons, or the old saying about bad money always pushes out the good money.
For another example see touch-screen automotive UIs, universally hated by everyone except the bean counters, so we're stuck with them forever.
Also WRT the BK next door, its probably 5 minutes away by car or 30 minutes away on foot, which explains the corporate push toward "Walkable cities" and so forth. At my last onsite office job, there was a deli on the first floor and we were essentially captive customers; in theory there were plenty of places to walk within a half hour walk, but in practice its raining and 40 degrees so we were forced to shop at the company store, so to speak.
This is how the restaurant chain deploying those kiosks sees it.
> the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore
This is self-correcting over time, as more and more places adopt such systems. It's just another supplier-driven market. Fast-food restaurant meals are not really commodities. If I'm in a mood for, say, a McDonald's cheeseburger, there is no other vendor I can get it from[0], so I'm going to suffer through the kiosk experience. It's calibrated to be just about bearable enough that I'm not going to skip the meal because of it.
Everything seems to become more and more like this, in every market - burgers, fridges, cars, phones, webapps, everything. As annoying and abusive as possible without making it a deal-breaker, offered on a supplier-driven market, so the non-annoying, non-abusive alternatives don't exist.
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[0] - Yes, Burger King next door may have similar cheeseburgers, but they feel and taste different enough to be non-substitutable. But even if, guess what, they also have those stupid kiosks.