221–230 of 237 posts
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Death by a thousand opt-outs.
App notifications, on iOS at least, are opt-in, not opt-out. When you open the app it has to prompt the system to ask "do you want to allow this app to send you notifications". And if you don't hit "yes", it doesn't get to.
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What's hermetic about listening to music you like?
There is a joy and psychological benefit to having minor, positive social interactions. If you are mostly seeing your partner and coworkers, or even working from home, you may not realize how little human interaction you have. This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is…
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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.
Mobile ordering could mean an unexpected 20 minute wait or your food sitting there long before you arrive.
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Yeah... that's just not the experience with drive-thrus in Central Ohio.
Maybe they’re less busy there but everywhere I went in California it was faster to park and walk inside if there was anyone in line ahead of you, which was almost always the case. The problem is that you’re limited by the slowest order ahead of you but the same place usually has multiple registers inside and the people who are waiting for pickup don’t block you from ordering. (Head of line blocking in real life) This…
Starbucks also seems to allow store managers to shut down app orders if the store is too busy.
McDonald’s—-I’m a connoisseur—-allows you to order through their app, but they clearly don’t start orders until the customer speaks their order code to one of the outdoor kiosks. The only parallelism is between the customer waiting for the order and them making the order.
I like McDonald’s vanilla lattes but I hate McDonald’s Americanos.
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Standing in line at McDonalds, to pick up an online order, made me think that maybe the drive thru isn't that great of an idea during rush hours. The staff needs to handle orders in a very specific sequence, to get the cars moving, meaning that they'll need to priorities drive thru orders. Wolt/DoorDash impose the same problem to an extend. I've notice that orders from in restaurant customers is frequently seems to b…
I think the big problem DoorDash and the like have, is they obfuscate the capacity connection between real restaurants. In the real world, if you drive up to a McDonalds, and there's a line around the building for drive-thru, you can make a decision. (Is it worth the long wait, or not?) . In the real world, if you go to a sit-down restaurant, and they're full, they simply turn you away (often with a buzzer or a text…
Waiting in line to order your lunch is skin in the game. Even the sight of a long line is enough to help load balance lunch orders between restaurants. I do wonder though that if restaurants could feed back to DoorDash and limit the order flow with online-only "surge pricing", if that would help in the same way to forestall kitchen overwhelm.
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Interesting. I've found going inside to be much slower because the cashiers are so busy with the drive thru. I guess this probably varies from brand to brand, if not store to store.
Definitely "Dunkin" (as it's called now) can fuck right off. (And don't let this old man get started on store employees that allow a caller on the phone to take higher priority than a customer standing in front of them.)
Oh. That triggers one horrific memory.
I was buying some bread at a nice local bakery. I wanted a few items. While three or four of us were in line, someone called in. The in-store employee pulled the last loaf of one variety off the shelf to reserve it for them.
When I complained, the manager told me that that was the correct move and they supported the decision. I suggested that polling the people who were actually in the store - actual, not just potential customers - before giving away the last loaf is probably wiser.
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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 wi…
seems they took Dude, Where's My Car as an inspiration? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkdyU_eUm1U
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What's hermetic about listening to music you like?
There is a joy and psychological benefit to having minor, positive social interactions. If you are mostly seeing your partner and coworkers, or even working from home, you may not realize how little human interaction you have. This is not to say that every McDonald's employee is a joy to be around. But it is good for your brain to smile at a stranger face to face and make a little small talk every now and then. It is…
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It's the speed limit problem. 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 ot…
So the solution is more AI: to replace c-suit.
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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 wi…
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.
We need rules. Yet the infinite variety of reality creates infinite situations in which the rules are counterproductive.
Previously: the ground folks had a brain and bent/ignored certain rules in the interest of getting their job done.
The principle peril of creating a more end-to-end automated, lights-out business is that there is no longer a brain to grease the interface between c-level and reality.
And c-level is never going to admit their own mistakes.
Ergo, you're going to get a lot of command-heavy companies that plow themselves into the ground over the next 10-20 years, because the low-level people they're going to fire were performing an essential function.
(Note: the easiest escape, inasmuch as I can see one, in radically data-driven management, with frequent random shifts between analogous but independent metrics)