I will say, there is a Wendy’s near me that is piloting an AI drive-thru experience, and I prefer it 10-to-1 to the human version. It had a clear voice, it didn’t disappear randomly, it understood what I meant the first time (even though I was speaking naturally - I didn’t know at first it was AI), and it asked me for feedback (“what sort of sauce?”) in a very understandable way. Drive-thrus are famously a bad experience - I’m happy to see improvement here.
I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy.
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.
you've hit the nail on the head here. AI rollout has this hilarious consequence where "lower" departments have for a long time insultated the c-suite against their worst excesses and worst mistakes. Now that barrier is slowly crumbling due to AI-first, giving the c-suite an incredibly rare opportunity to discover how bad some of its ideas are in practice and there's less opportunity to blame those outcomes on others.
I'm optimistic that the ease of enforcing rules like this and better customer data (maybe via the apps) will lead to a better format. The annoyance grows from the rules causing us to be prompted to do or respond to things we don't want or need. When the taco bell guy asks if I want to add sour cream for the third time, I am getting pretty annoyed. I don't like sour cream, period. But every time they hit me with "would you like to double the chicken", even if I wasn't a yes upon driving to the window, I cave when they ask and both parties are probably happier for it. Management isn't totally wrong here because there are upsells that all of us would take when presented at the right time. It's a bit like ad targeting. Its just happening in realtime at the window.
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
I’ve always wondered if that battery spiel paid off. Do you have any stats? I never once was at Radio Shack and was like “yeah let me get some of your batteries” when they asked. Maybe I’m a fringe case.
Works when you actually have that option. Usually the only time I ever go to fast food places are late at night when everything else is closed. Most open-late fast food joints in smaller cities and towns will only have the drive through open, not the restaurant area.
I've used the Tacbo Bel AI drive-thru and came away with the same thought. I kind of groaned at first but it was very accurate, even when making adjustments.
There’s a StarBucks near me that takes about 3-4 minutes per car at the drive thru. Frequently there would be 3-6 cars in line. Yes, people literally wait 15-20 minutes in line before they can even order, much less get their order.
Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
I feel like we watched different videos.. Seemed like the AI (or other monitoring system) recognized a problem with the 18000 cups of water order and quickly transitioned to a real human. That instance looked pretty production ready to me.
I interpreted it as the AI system added something strange to the order, and when someone saw it, that’s when the system was cut off. Otherwise the next word sounded like a confirmation
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
This is solved easily by one additional sanity check API call to a different AI. I’m not sure why people think these bugs are like, complete showstopper insurmountable things. It’s a quick fix.
If Anthropic couldn't achieve that with Project Vend [0], why do you seem to think that everyone else could?
> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
Taco Bell knows and controls it's own menu and the valid options are already directly encoded in their POS system, including purchase limits. Why would you call out to a different non-deterministic model instead of validating against the complete and deterministic data you have? Taco Bell can afford 1-2 engineers to manage that
This would be better off if the LLM was used for the human interface but traditional logic was used for the ordering API and its sanity checks. I.e. let it be fine the LLM can bug out on occasion, but keep rigorous boundaries around the amount of risk that's associated with.
I remember the McDonalds in-store touch screen ordering systems when they were first introduced, which were also astonishingly badly designed.
Using unreliable voice as an input, then not allowing you to cancel/correct, or not supporting it in a robust fashion, is a massive fail. If there is no person there, then I guess you just have to give up and drive away.
As far as I can tell, _most_ recent examples of 'AI' inflicted on the public have been rolled out on scale without testing, or at least the results of testing have been ignored. It's generally incredibly shoddy stuff.
500 stores isn't really "scale," that's only about 6% of their locations.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
If they want to do automated voice ordering, then using multiple choice A/B/C/cancel (with feedback on screen) would seem less error prone than LLM open ended natural language with some kind of intent interpretation.
Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!
I don't understand the appeal of drive throughs?s?
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
For me the appeal of drive through is 100% solely just that I get to listen to my own podcasts or music. I don’t carry headphones with me outside of the house so if I get to keep my podcasts going - that’s good enough reason for me.
I think there's a deeply-ingrained sense of being in love with our cars, loving to do things in our cars, etc. We made long commutes via car a thing, and I think a part of that was the drive-through - you could get things quickly on your way to/from work.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
I appreciate your scholarly devotion to the language and it's diverse array of punctuation. In the future you may consider reading the letters in between the punctuation, which are often used to convey the thoughts and feelings of the author.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
In a way, we need these "pioneers" who operate at scale to serve the dual goals of giving lessons learned to future developers of AI tech, and proving to us that the technology is just not ready to supplant this kind of work.
Why order when you arrive at the place? Just have people talk to their phones, and make sure the order has some sanity checks and orders something similar to what they can order online? There's less noise talking to your phone, and you can do it without being in line.
Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
Sadly many restaurants already make same assumptions with QR code menu replacements. And the worst thing is they keep them despite everybody hating them.
Well there's a few things that have to go right for that scenario to work. It's not impossible but I'd imagine the number of people that could take advantage of it is small.
If I have a passenger that can use the phone - it will be infinitely easier to have them place an order via app. They can look at the map, set up navigation, read through the menu and handle getting the order in, etc.
The driver needs to know where the restaurant is. A lot of time when I'm getting fast food - I'm on the interstate, I don't really know where I am, I just know I saw a sign saying the next exit has a Taco Bell. If anything asks me to confirm the restaurant location as 123 Main Street or in some city - I have no idea if that's right or not.
Maybe if it integrates with Android Auto and Google Maps so I can place an order and get navigated, that could work.
Another big issue is knowing the menu. I definitely wouldn't want to sit and have a robot read me the whole menu. There are some places where I could order without seeing the menu but - if you don't go very often you probably need to see the menu. And if you're not going very often you probably don't have their app on your phone anyway.
The apps don't take how busy the restaurants are into account. If I get to a place and it's slammed, I'll look around a bit for something else less busy, because I want to get back on the road. So I'm not really all that committed to a particular place anyway.
I also tend to not trust the apps. I can't tell you how many times I've placed an order only to find out they're out of something when I get there. If I order at the speaker I get that feedback immediately and can pick something else (or somewhere else).
Basically you need to have all of the following be true:
* Have nobody else in the car that could operate the phone for you
* Know the restaurant location
* Know the menu
* Have the app
* Ready to commit to any wait
* Trust the app is correct
a LARGE amount of /drive through specific/ food purchases are impulse purchases /as they're driving down the road/. You /don't/ want someone using an app to do that. It misses the mark of what actual customers are doing in favor of "let's do a cool thing because smartphones/AI exist".
still a significant number of people who can't use phones well enough to do this, and a bunch of other people who wouldn't want to download spyware to do so
I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is still ordering by talking into a voice box, regardless of whether it’s a human or an AI on the other end.
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
I’m shocked that anybody with a smartphone is installing tracking fast food mobile apps, creating accounts, giving emails, and even enabling notifications. Another capitalistic hellscape flimsly masquerading as a great deal for you.
Different folks have different levels of acceptable risk. I generally agree, and won’t install an app for every single one-time purchase, but I eat a lot of
Taco Bell. The app makes sense for me. Many other companies also have web interfaces so you don’t NEED to install an app. (Many restaurants/bars that have a Qr Code on the table act this way.)
Well, you know, going to a drive-thru at a fast-food restaurant is already ultra capitalistic, so installing an app on a phone seems maybe just a little bit worse (and a great time savings).
China has mobile ordering to the next level. Every McDonald’s has a set of two sided lockers, you just scan your order QR code and the locker your order is in opens…no human contact what so ever.
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
What was weird was when the restaurant was closed and looked deserted but you could still order online and hope the locker with your order lit up with your food (it did).
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
My experience is different. If my wife goes to the counter and I order electronically, she is always done faster. This is doubly so if I use a phone app, because the app is painfully slow.
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
It seems hard to have empirical data here, but even just the parallelization of it seems to bias in favor of mobile ordering.
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
I have a different experience. For places I order from semi-frequently (Taco Bell, Burger King), I have favorited all the things with the customizations I like from previous orders. Then it is a tap or two away from being re-ordered. Super useful too when I am always doing similar but repetitive modifications every time (eg taco bell, beans for meat, fresco style).
It depends on the establishment, but some of us (actually I sort of doubt it’s a minority) rather enjoy speaking with other humans, even strangers, and even if it’s over an intercom.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
the number of places that beg me to install an app is ridiculous. if i installed an app from every single place that begs me to my phone would probably shut down in protest from the thousands of apps i’d have cluttered everywhere.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
Yes, it's exhausting. I mean I get it, having higher prices for people without the app is the same as member cards with swingeing prices for non-members. It's a surcharge on the unaware (including non-native speakers, the elderly, tourists, etc), the unprepared or time-pressured (who don't have time to fiddle with their phones to install the app at a given shop) and, they hope, the people rich enough that they don't want to fuck about with this today.
"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".
Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
I tried to use a coupon recently at a major drug store chain, one they had just given me for getting vaccinated, and despite the fact that the coupon said nothing about this requirement, they wouldn’t take it without also using a frequent shopper card.
At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.
With mobile ordering it's hard to tell where you are in the queue or where you will be I guess. In the drive thru, at least you can see how many people are in front of you and they're making orders chronologically.
... Except while you're on your way to the line (or waiting to get through it), other customers' mobile orders are being accepted and you still aren't sure of the order in which they're being prepared.
if you drive down the road and decide on a whim to pull into a restaraunt, you shouldn't be looking down at your phone as you order. fast food is for impulse purchases.
The apps that are deliberately designed to lure you in with deals/coupons so that they can more accurately track you and likely sell this data to data brokers?
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
Readit News
A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.
It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).
Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.
Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkdyU_eUm1U
So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.
If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.
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It's also parallelized instead of having a single queue.
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Sure, maybe they’re just inefficient and shouldn’t be rewarded. However the people there are indeed working feverishly (and paid poorly).
Going inside and ordering isn’t any faster.
I’d put this in the “famously bad experience” category.
https://youtube.com/shorts/FDZj6DCWlfc
https://www.tiktok.com/@90daygrinder/video/75355084374472983... (another example from a different chain)
That said, this is not the only video floating out there of these type of systems not handling edge cases elegantly
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> Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
> Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-becam...
There’s other videos out there (not just of Taco Bell’s implementation per se) of these systems bugging out
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Using open ended natural language to make a multiple choice selection (choose a taco) seems like a way to massively complicate a simple problem.
What next - have a humanoid robot bring the food out to the car?
Looking forward to more "AI Darwin Award" stories!
It kept asking 'what kind of drink?' After apparently interpreting engine noise as asking for one.
Wouldn't respond to 'none' or any other response I gave, except to repeat the q.
Using unreliable voice as an input, then not allowing you to cancel/correct, or not supporting it in a robust fashion, is a massive fail. If there is no person there, then I guess you just have to give up and drive away.
To be honest, if LLMs are good at anything, this is the exact kind of thing they are good at. It really isn't dumb that Taco Bell tried this.
I could also imagine how great it could potentially be for people to be able to view the menu and/or order in any language.
I think long ago I actually read an article posted to HN that essentially argued that most businesses don't take enough risks and that frequent risk-taking is statistically advantageous.
Of course most customers would prefer to interact with a person, but I don't think "vibe ordering" tacos is going to be the same!
Has anyone here tried it and know how it works ? If I order 6 large pizzas with a topping of rocks, will that come up on the screen ?
In my area there are dozens of people idling for 10-15 minutes in the Starbucks drive through even though we have a municipal "no idling" bylaw to reduce emissions. The line is so long it interferes with traffic on the street. It also seems like sitting in your car inhaling CO from other people's tailpipes for 15 minutes is bad for you?
Many of the local fast food places have also switched to "drive through only" at night, which means they can get away with not having public washrooms (which are required by law when serving food). On a recent road trip my friends and I spent an hour driving place-to-place at 10pm on a Saturday trying to find a place to get a late dinner and use the toilets.
Drive-throughs also create an insane, perverse incentive for customers inside the store. Between online ordering and drive through staff are completely ignoring the actual walk-up counter traffic, because that's the only traffic where corporate doesn't track service time. I've stopped going into a lot of locations on impulse because I know they'll be understaffed and you have to book your shitty lunch 20 minutes in advance with an app. On the flip side these companies are doing promos with free delivery, where a taxi drives a burger to my house for no extra cost.
In short, I understand why companies would like drive throughs - they can have fewer staff and they game laws around the indoor dining area. Their end game is probably drive-thru only ghost kitchens with no indoor dining at all.
On a personal level I don't understand why consumers prefer drive-through (except for the feedback spiral of in-restaurant experiences becoming shit because of drive throughs). And on a policy level I don't understand why municipalities are permitting ever-larger double drive throughs with longer queues and shorter in-restaurant hours? It creates a hollowed-out neighborhood with no walkability that feels miserable.
There used to be a time where the drive-through was a pretty great deal but - for all the reasons you outlined above it's losing a lot of appeal. I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head - businesses prefer drive-through because it requires less staff, less resources. You also eliminate issues with people loitering in lobbies.
There are places where drive-through/walk-up only may be the only way a restaurant will open due to perceived safety concerns. So that I kind of get but ideally, the municipality would find a way to address the actual safety of the area, or at least the perception. Sometimes areas just look dangerous but are actually fine.
But yeah I think the appeal of drive-through is dying out for a variety of reasons. We no longer see cars as convenient, we desire walkability, we value healthier food over faster food, we'd rather work less and have extra time at home to do things like cook, things like that.
I should point out I'm speaking very broadly, as an American who isn't facing poverty. My view is likely limited and skewed, there are very likely to be scenarios I'm not considering.
If you've got kids/dogs in the car with you, it could be a bigger hassle or not possible to go inside. This is probably a very small number of people actually using the drive through though.
When I'm on my own, I always find it a better experience to go in myself.
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Most of the time if I stop at a fast food place it isn't exactly planned out in advance. I'm usually already on the road or on my way home from some place.
Calling on the phone would also mean taking the time to stop and look up a phone number, and I'm sure most places would rather not take your order over the phone and would push you to use some app that at best will be used to track and spy on you and at worst could be used for discriminatory pricing. They can use the data taken directly from your device to decide what to charge you (iphone users pay 4% extra!) or they can use your phone number/device ID/whatever fingerprinting shit they're using and hand that off to data brokers and consumer reputation services to get detailed info about you like your income level and buying habits and use that to set the prices you'll be charged in real time. Zeta Global says you're rich, so all the menu prices pushed to the app on your phone are 10% more than what they show the guy behind you in line.
* The customer has a phone
* The customer knows how to use the phone to do what you’re expecting
* The customer has cell service in their location
* The customer has the patience or ability to order before arriving at the restaurant
If I have a passenger that can use the phone - it will be infinitely easier to have them place an order via app. They can look at the map, set up navigation, read through the menu and handle getting the order in, etc.
The driver needs to know where the restaurant is. A lot of time when I'm getting fast food - I'm on the interstate, I don't really know where I am, I just know I saw a sign saying the next exit has a Taco Bell. If anything asks me to confirm the restaurant location as 123 Main Street or in some city - I have no idea if that's right or not.
Maybe if it integrates with Android Auto and Google Maps so I can place an order and get navigated, that could work.
Another big issue is knowing the menu. I definitely wouldn't want to sit and have a robot read me the whole menu. There are some places where I could order without seeing the menu but - if you don't go very often you probably need to see the menu. And if you're not going very often you probably don't have their app on your phone anyway.
The apps don't take how busy the restaurants are into account. If I get to a place and it's slammed, I'll look around a bit for something else less busy, because I want to get back on the road. So I'm not really all that committed to a particular place anyway.
I also tend to not trust the apps. I can't tell you how many times I've placed an order only to find out they're out of something when I get there. If I order at the speaker I get that feedback immediately and can pick something else (or somewhere else).
Basically you need to have all of the following be true:
* Have nobody else in the car that could operate the phone for you * Know the restaurant location * Know the menu * Have the app * Ready to commit to any wait * Trust the app is correct
There’s a Starbucks near me that is pickup-only. You mobile order, and inside there’s just a rack where the employees set out drinks as they’re made. Walking inside felt like I’d stepped into a glorious alternate reality.
get a grip lmao
In the USA, McDonald’s app is pretty bad compared to Starbucks at least. Nowhere near where it is in China (well, if you do the wechat plugin). I find it isn’t worth the trouble and will just use the kiosk for the rare times I still go there.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
I found it disconcerting that I couldn’t tell who was making my food, it felt dehumanizing and weirdly off putting
Little Caesar's had this in the States at least as far back as 2016, when I first ran across it.
I wonder if you still order a pizza from the Hut by texting a pizza emoji?
If it was just slow, I might put up with it. But the systems are broken. For example, it's recently changed, but the electronic order screen in the restaurant used to print a receipt with an order number. The bulk of the time the printer was didn't work - out of paper or something else. Then you had to remember the order number, or have an argument with the counter staff, or on occasions both.
The app is anything is worse. On several occasions I've had the app not clear my previous order after collecting it. I didn't notice. The result was a double order the next time around. If I did notice, it would take ages to clear the order because the app insisted you delete the items one at a time and it's takes seconds for each item. On one occasion I drove up, gave my app code to the cashier, only to have the restaurant claim they had no record of the order. I showed them their app on the phone saying it had been paid. They said they could not trust it. It took me 30 minutes on their web site to get the payment refunded.
One restaurant has recently fixed the printer receipt problem. They get you to enter your name now, and they call it out when serving the order. The printer has gone. It took, what, 5 years to recognise the problem and find a fix. I assume the same will happen with the app, but I'd expect another 5 years at least.
The reason the cashier is faster is partially because the app is slow, but also because the UI is different. The user friendly interface displays long lists with nice pictures the user has to navigate by scrolling. The cash register UI is designed for speed. It displays lots text buttons that near respond instantaneously. They could streamline the app interface a little, but you will never be able to hit the speed of a experienced cashier entering the order, or an AI doing the same thing. The app using an AI to process your voice order on the other hand could be just as fast. Maybe that is what we will get next.
Part of the reason I hold this particular opinion weirdly strongly is because of the confusion I feel when I'm sitting in line in the drive-thru behind a van where a family or a group of friends is trying to crowdsource food for 2-4 people live at the window, or rattling off a complex coffee order and hoping the audio quality carries it through.
If you're ordering something different every time, and not anything complicated, and it's just you ordering, and the tech in between you and the person listening is decent, I'd bet that you're right and just telling someone your order is less effort. But as soon as there's any stray variable, mobile ordering handles the complexity much more smoothly.
An alternate reality where nobody can transact without the state seeing it in realtime and having a veto over it (without any burden of proof) is not glorious; that’s called a dystopia.
Just because the capability has never been leveled at you personally doesn’t mean that’s a world in which you wish to live.
I would have just bought food at the CVS but they were closing that location and didn't have much left.
from the different grocery stores, restaurant, to every f’ing gas station, every coffee chain, car wash, home depot, and on and on with everywhere we go in between somewhere is begging us to install an app. it’s creepy af.
just begging us. how bout just let me buy my gas, please. just let me buy a shake please. i shouldn’t have to beg to just let me buy this loaf of bread and gallon of milk. it really has gotten stupid.
honest to god i’d rather deal with the begging of walking down a street full of homeless than the incessant nonstop pressure begging of corporations to install their app.
"Special offers" also really fuck me off. If I want to buy, say, peanut butter today, there's a statistical upcharge because I'm not carefully synchronising my purchase to a secret schedule of when it will cost 20% less. Whenever I see a special offer now, my immediate thought I'd not what it used to be ("wow, that's great"), it is "ugh, these scammers and their constant games".
Charitably, you could call it an elaborate game to make things cheaper for people with less money who can spend the time, privacy and energy (because poor people always have time and energy...?!) to get the best prices. Realistically it seems like mind games to get you used to overpaying most of the time and overbuying some of the time and handing over the data always.
At some point I have to assume I’ll starve to death because I can no longer buy food, raw or prepared, without a card or app.
I'm shocked that anybody with a hacker news account is still making comments this naive.
Yes, those apps. It turns out it’s pretty easy to just turn off notifications for them.
Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45065391 - Aug 2025 (186 comments)