Tag Archives: mcdonalds kiosks

McDonald’s kiosk

is the platform and company which influences and drives the self-service self-order QSR kiosk market. In the U.S. they have done many pilots over the years. In Europe, they have moved ahead with self-service. Now it’s big here in States.    Coupling kiosks with in-lane line-busting order, drive-thru optimization, curbside pickup and lockers seems to be the multi-pronged approach.  AI has entered the realm of McDonalds Kiosks with 10 stores now testing.

Self-Order Kiosk – McDonald’s invests over $550 million

Fast-food chain McDonald’s spending $557 million to add self-order kiosk for self-service to restaurants in Germany.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

72 “restaurants of the future” to launch.  By end of 2019 McDonalds figures on having most of its 1400+ sites done. New gourmet burgers are making inroads and McDonalds is losing customers and share.

 

In the US it is estimated self-ordering kiosks in the U.S. number 600 which plans to expand that to 1,000 by years end.

Order Terminals – Minimum Wage Kiosk Fast Food Impact Last Five Years McDonalds

Minimum Wage Kiosks and Kiosk Self-Order From Marketwatch an article referencing new study on Minimum Wage impacts  — nice article from Marketwatch looking at the results from 2021 Princeton study on the effects of raising minimum wage. The usual most vocal critics are people like Andy Puzder back in the day that he ran Carl Jrs.  Labor costs… Read More »

Wrestling with Wages – Restaurant Kiosks

man versus machine

The effect of recent minimum-wage increases isn’t yet clear, but increased use of automation technology is likely to be a result. By Richard Slawsky for Kiosk Industry Group   As California and New York each prepare to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour, operators of quick service and fast casual restaurants as well as other small… Read More »

Top 10 Kiosk stories of 2017 per KMC: Self-order food kiosks dominate reader interest

Self-order kiosks in restaurants dominated reader interest in 2017 as several national foodservice chains announced kiosk deployments.

Source: www.kioskmarketplace.com

Writeup on most read stories on KMC this past year by Elliot Maras. 

 

1. best read story in 2017 was a summary of self-serve kiosk introductions at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago.

 

2. The second best read story addressed disability access lawsuits, an ongoing issue that continues to dog self-service technology. 

 

3. Redbox announced plans to add 1,500 kiosks. 

 

The usual “we are going to launch” PRs. 

 

KFC to launch 5,000 kiosks with facial recognition to predict customers’ orders in China. Interesting that they have partnered with Baidu (BIDU).

 

Subway and McDonalds of course.

 

I think here in December a lot of buzz for Taco Bell and YUM has been percolating.  One might think they have issued an RFP…

McDonald’s hires more staff since installing automated kiosks

The Winter Garden location has increased from 50 employees to almost 70 since the kiosks were added two months ago.

Source: www.orangeobserver.com

“I would say that, for the employees, it’s actually allowed them to interact on their terms,” Watson said regarding how it has benefitted the employees at his store. “It’s a little more of a personal experience. We used to have a 6-step process on greeting customers, like robotic, you (did) these steps over and over again. … Now it’s more personalized (because) we allow the employees to engage with the customers and greet them within reason. So a younger employee will greet a younger customer with ‘Hey man, what’s up?’”

Bluestar and Zivelo Announce Distribution Partnership

Bluestar and Zivelo Partnership News FOR IMMEDIATE USE Scottsdale, AZ (October 2, 2018) – World-class kiosk manufacturer ZIVELO (best known for providing kiosks to McDonald’s across North America) is proud to announce the completion of a Distribution Partnership with BlueStar to streamline the company’s ability to meet increasing demand. Founded in 1929 with a network of over 12,000… Read More »

Diebold Kiosks McDonald’s – Innovation Stores Chicago – NRA Update

mcdonalds kiosks pyramid

McDonalds Kiosks Update From Chicago and NRA Josef Schneider(Entrepreneur / Tech Geek) • Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.“  Team Pyramid Computer GmbH North America checking out McDonald’s innovation stores near Chicago prior to National Restaurant Association show. Always great to see kiosks at… Read More »

Reverse Case Study – Outdoor Drive-thru Menuboards at McDonalds

McDonalds Drive-Thru Menu Board Failures

McDonald’s Drive-Thru Outdoor LCD Failures Worth noting the noting of this isotropic screen failure at McDonalds Drive-Thru in California (Sep2020).  Further investigation points to a Samsung OH55F, which given the specifications, is surprising. Our guess is the vendor supplying these is Coates and we have sent a query to them asking about this. August 2022 Update Another example… Read More »

Coffee Kiosk McDonald’s counters Fight for $15 with automation

mcdonalds mccafe kiosk

Calls for a minimum-wage hike nationwide and in Illinois are increasingly met with businesses’ use of technology to cut costs.

Source: www.illinoispolicy.org

The Fight for $15 campaign plans to target McDonald’s on April 14 as part of a new pre-Tax Day tradition, led by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. 
 
Chicago is one of 300 cities worldwide where strikes and protests are scheduled. SEIU has spent $70 million on its Fight for $15 campaign. The union’s Local 73 represents more than 28,000 government workers in Illinois and Indiana.
 
Protestors may want to stop by the McDonald’s at Adams and Wells to meet their replacement – an automated McCafé kiosk.

The store, which is anticipating Chicago’s minimum-wage increase to $13 an hour by 2019, is testing out coffee kiosks in the restaurant instead of having employees serve it. The kiosk features a touch-pad for ordering and paying. The screen also prompts customers to answer questions about their kiosk experience, giving the impression this is something that could be adopted as an alternative to hiring. This kind of automation, which replaces a human employee with technology, is one of the unintended consequences of Chicago’s minimum-wage increase.

It may not just be a coffee machine either. Other McDonald’s locations have used self-service kiosks with touch-screens for paying. And while self-serve kiosks don’t seem too unusual, San Francisco-based Momentum Machines has created a robotic hamburger-making machine the company claims can produce 400 high-quality burgers in an hour with minimal human supervision.

Wendy’s Serves Up Big Kiosk Expansion As Wage Hikes Hit Fast Food

Wendy’s will make self-service ordering kiosks available to all of its franchises later this year as minimum wage hikes help market push labor costs.

Source: www.investors.com

6,000 plus restaurants getting selfservice kiosks. Adoption rests with the franchisees. Most have been raising prices. Most of minimum wage is phased in years from now and virtually unchanged in California.

 

  • New York went from 9.00 to 10.50 (on way to 15)
  • CA went to $10 this from $9.00
  • Company owned Wendy stores number is 5% of total stores.
  • Wage inflation seen at company stores is 5%
  • More customers hit bottom line at 3.6% same store sales increase for last quarter

 

Wendy’s President Todd Penegor said, “wage pressures have been manageable both because of falling commodity prices and better operating leverage due to an increase in customer counts. Still, the company is wary about both wage hikes and a possible recovery in commodity prices and is “working so hard to find efficiencies” so it can deliver “a new QSR experience but at traditional QSR prices.”

 

In addition to self-order kiosks, the company is also getting ready to move beyond the testing phase with labor-saving mobile ordering and mobile payment available systemwide by the end of the year. Yum Brands and McDonald’s already have mobile ordering apps.

 

McDonalds kiosk – Evolution of fast-food. More people + automation . 

McDonald’s is simply responding to competition from other chains that have offered “enhanced burgers,” said Hilda Fahey, a company representative who was in Simcoe to help with the changeover to the new services at the Queensway East restaurant.

Source: www.simcoereformer.ca

“We have 35 different people we didn’t have before,” Maskell said on a Wednesday afternoon while preparing for an opening that night for the new services.

 

More people are needed in the kitchen, he explained, to service the customers out front.

Why retail automation is finally revolutionizing quick service restaurants

Restaurants such as McDonald’s and Panera Bread are leading the charge toward automation in the quick-service food industry, which offers an important example of how the labor market is transforming.

Source: www.zdnet.com

Nice article by ZDNet. “The $15 per hour wage talks spooked a lot of fast food companies and forced them to look at ways to cut head count and augment labor costs,” said Frank Olea, CEO of Los Angeles-based kiosk manufacturer Olea Kiosks. “This technology has been available to restaurants for years, but price was high and labor was cheap. Now it’s getting to the spot where brands can see the ROI.”

Kiosks killing jobs? Some Say So, but the facts otherwise?

Several restaurant chains are using kiosks and other technology that allow orders to be placed more rapidly and efficiently. Kiosks are fostering fears about job losses, but in reality, kiosks are serving to reallocate labor from the front to the back of the restaurant and in some cases, add jobs.

Source: www.qsrweb.com

Good writeup. The Rensi/Puzder misinformation drives me crazy. What McD needs is to sell more stuff. Just like Paneras is now doing thanks to adding self-service, expanding their kitchen, and yes, hiring more people…it’s lazy journalism catering to the controversial.  

Automated Retail Kiosk News – Will automation take away our jobs?

Here’s a paradox you don’t hear much about: despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn’t human labor become redundant and our skills obsolete? 

Source: www.ted.com

In this talk about the future of work, economist David Autor addresses the question of why there are still so many jobs and comes up with a surprising, hopeful answer.

Order Kiosk – Review of McDonalds Kiosk Ordering

They are gigantic touch screens that let you customize your burger with toppings like guacamole, grilled mushrooms, onions, and bacon.

Source: www.businessinsider.com

Good point on the oversize smartphone.  Writer says the units are expensive but never notes a cost.  Looking at them with the Verifone “wart” I personally think they are in the B- range when it comes to design, which usually equates to cheaper.  

 

They are gigantic touch screens that let you customize your burger with toppings like guacamole, grilled mushrooms, onions, and bacon and sauces like sriracha mayo. But the kiosks have drawbacks, like not working in the drive-thrus that provide 70% of McDonald’s revenue and being relatively expensive.

Taco Bell Kiosk – Restaurant Tech News

First digital dine-in kiosk from Taco Bell.

Source: www.behance.net

To illustrate the long cycle of development to deployment, consider this “post examination” of Taco Bell self-order kiosk UX from January 2014.  Last week TB pushed out a bit of news that it actually may be actually going to do it.  I wonder if the original engineers are even there…More likely they rewrote  using this as style model.

McDonald’s – Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks

McDonalds Kiosk Raises Earnings Expectations by Analysts Cowen says McDonald’s will upgrade 2,500 restaurants to its “Experience of the Future” technology by year-end, which includes digital ordering kiosks. The firm raises its rating on McDonald’s to outperform from market perform and price target for the shares to $180 from $142. Same store sales estimate for 2018 raised to… Read More »

Fall River McDonald’s among first to get kiosk service

FALL RIVER — Fast food robots have arrived.
Self service ordering kiosks are in place and in use at the President Avenue McDonald’s.
They are the first in the area, but they won’t be the last.
Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald’s, announced a year ago that ordering kiosks would be installed in all 14,000 McDonald’s in the country. He promised the change would provide quicker and more comfortable service for patrons.
“McDonald’s is raising the bar on

Source: www.heraldnews.com

China growth strategy could drive success for McDonald’s in US

Fast-food chain among businesses that have benefited from growth of mobile internet payments and e-commerce in China

Source: www.scmp.com

Last year, deliveries accounted for a quarter of the sales in tier one cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Overall in China, sales from delivery grew by 81 per cent last year, said Zhang, adding that these growth rates were on the rise in 2018.

 

Zhang Yichen, the Citic Capital chief executive and chairman, told the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong on Monday that the use of digital marketing, combined with delivery services, had been an important growth driver for the Chinese market.