Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.
In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot.
As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances.
There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
> People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.
This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.
Back in the day people were much less into the e-commerce habit and not using mobile technology so they weren't ordering food on the go.
Another question is "What relationship to people have to fast food?"
I worked at a company that did geospatial analysis such as retail location selection. We had a theory that people chose fast food because they were on the way from point A to point B so the right way to think about it was not about the density of commercial or residential development in an area but rather about the density of trips that pass by a point. I was involved in a pilot project to use touchscreens to collect data at the POS just before the mobile age made it possible to collect trip data directly.
Thus my consumption of fast food is opportunistic: I eat at Taco Bell sometimes because it is in a neighborhood with a Wal-Mart, Gamestop, Petsmart, Staples, an illegal cannabis dispensary (not like I can't get better weed elsewhere), award-winning wine store, etc. I get hungry On most days I would go to the street taco stand on the other side of the parking lot. which has the best tacos I've seen outside Los Angeles but if it is Sunday maybe I go to the Bell. It's not like the scene in Demolition Man where Sylvester Stalone goes to a fancy dinner at Taco Bell because "all restaurants are Taco Bell" in the future.
If I am traveling maybe I am driving down the freeway and see a sign for a Burger King and stop. Maybe I walk out of the Oculus at the WTC site and see both a Chopt and a BK and, even though I have a BK gift card in my pocket, the line looks really long at the BK and I go to the Chopt because it is really fast food.
I can see that Taco Bell wants to develop a special relationship with me but I don't want to develop one with Taco Bell. Really I don't find it easy to install an app (until I broke my old iPad, my old iPad insisted that I log in with my Apple account password whenever I wanted to install an app despite the fingerprint scanner working just fine for everything else. I don't know my Apple account password because I keep it in a password manager and the app store was the one thing that would make me require to use it when I am on the go. When I bought a new iPad this cleared up. I go to the Bell maybe 4 times a year, it is just not worth having another app cluttering up my device making it harder to find the apps that really matter to me.
Speaking of which, we stopped going to fast food burger places because 75% of them can’t make things like “a hamburger with no cheese or any other toppings except ketchup”, or “a cheeseburger with no other toppings”.
I suspect an LLM that supports audio input would outperform most drive through window attendants.
Oddly, I’ve noticed there is no correlation between speaking english as a first language and being able to understand those orders.
(This is why a non-native speaker can do this job well, you don't need to know a lot of the language to parse orders like 芥兰牛肉)
I think this would lead to a lot of really frustrating errors in a food ordering context. In my experience LLM speech recognition is really prone to inserting or removing negation words, which can really shift the meaning. This is a problem in any speech recog use case but there's often sufficient context to understand when the error has occurred. In a list of what a customer does / doesn't want, there is no additional context to fill the gap.
"Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion no tomato" -> "Cheeseburger with ketchup mustard onion tomato" or the inversion
You can correct this to some degree with an order confirmation step but the error rate would mean a lot of customers need to make a correction, which adds time to the process and increases customer frustration.
At that point I'd rather the drive thru have a touchscreen and just let me input the order directly, versus having to argue with an LLM about which ingredients i want included or excluded.
Try:
“A hamburger with only ketchup.”
When you take hundreds of orders a day, circular communications won’t stick.
Once it led to a hamburger bun with just ketchup.
As for app vs website, I agree, website would be similarly good. This could be said about tons of apps.
Saves having to wait on a line at the drive thru. Or on a line inside the store. Nope, can't do that: they don't take orders at the cashier, so you have to use the kiosks which take even longer.
So I use the app to order while at home, drive to the restaurant and grab my food and leave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLIj3pXOKjs
and came to the conclusion that order accuracy is the best if you use the app.
Of course all of that is just the icing on top of the data harvesting cake
Well, they might be now since California passed a higher minimum wage for fast food workers.
> afford not to replace human jobs
There's practically no such thing as replacing human jobs; having a machine replace some of your /tasks/ (taking orders) lets you spend more time on the other tasks (preparing the orders) and makes you more productive.
PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
Depends on demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> PS: $18 an hour in the bay in 2024 might as well be under minimum wage. It’s unconscionably low if one wants to maintain any standard of living.
That wasn't in 2024. It's $20 now.