Photo: LWY
Here’s something may be a shock to you: when you pull up to a fast food, you might be talking someone in a call center thousands of miles away! It turns out numerous fast food chains have been experimenting with this over the last five years. If you are at a Wendy’s you might be talking to someone in Delaware, Jack in the Box to the Phillippines or Texas, or McDonald’s to India.
These companies claim the benefits are shorter wait times and less mistakes due to a further division of labor where each person can focus on one menial task. Well, maybe they don’t say it quite like that. It is hard to tell the extent to which this system is currently deployed in the United States – after a flurry of news stories about this experiment 4-5 years ago, the fast food companies have not informed the public how it has gone. My suspicion is that they strategically expanded the program nationwide to select franchises, specifically ones with multiple drive thru lines or notoriously hard to understand operators.
It can only be a matter of time before it is completely automated. Most customer service interactions are already like this for huge companies anyway. Come to think of it, 10 years from now nobody will even need to be working at a McDonalds. Fast food boils down to an assembly line of processes to where a machine could certainly cook and assemble my burger according to my specifications…
They can do that today so why don’t they? I think it is sometimes harder politically to replace humans with machines than it is technologically. Airplanes are a perfect example – autonomous planes are arguably safer than pilots who are susceptible to human error. And yet, I don’t think we will be getting rid of pilots on commercial airlines in my lifetime.