> We're moving to a world that most restaurants won't have servers taking your food and drinks order. This is already happening in Seattle, multiple spots are now counter style ordering, you order, get a number and someone just comes from the kitchen to deliver the food.

I honestly love this. At my local brewery, you just walk in, take a free table, scan the QR code on the table, order & pay (with apple pay), then your beer and food shows up. When you're done, you get up and leave. Multiple people / weird check-splitting? No problem, each party just scans the code separately.

The local McDonalds, when you walk in, you see 3 large screen order kiosks, and 2, essentially, empty counters. One with a register.

And that's it.

There's no beverage bar, no condiment bar, there MIGHT be napkins, but I can't recall.

You order from the kiosk, which has a cash machine to accept cash, and if its to eat in, grab a table tent and type in the number. Otherwise, you just take the number on the receipt. Eventually someone will bring it out on the other counter without the register and call out your number.

If you're eating in, eventually someone will come to deliver the food -- typically in a bag, just like everything else.

You could order at the counter, but there's no one in sight. You either have to just wait for someone to saunter by or shout out into the void.

Similarly, if you want a refill on your beverage. They'll happily give you one, again, if you can actually track down a worker.

It's quite a sterile experience. At least at the drive through you talk to people.

I understand that its a company wide goal to transition all of the restaurants to this model.

McDonalds kiosks, besides being a harbinger of a future devoid of contact with service workers, is an objectively awful experience.

The menu is gigantic, it upsells constantly, the screen is buggy, and the food delivery folks don't use the numbers half the time.

They were not always so bad. I tried one out when they were just installed (and everyone avoided them); they ran a lot faster, with no upselling or ads. The adware garbage that has long infected the internet has gone right into their kiosks.

Just like how McDs just raised prices endlessly for the past few years, they've also intentionally turned ordering into an adversarial experience.

The biggest issue I have with it is that the touch screen is unresponsive. You press something, and it responds a second later. Completely unforgivable.

Wild to me given the processing power cheaply available that those touchscreens also feel unresponsive and laggy.

On the contrary, I believe they are intentionally laggy to rate-limit the orders, so that people in line can get pissed at the person in front of them rather than the waiter/server taking time to prepare and package the order. Also avoids overwhelming the counter.

If you ask me, tipping more than 0% for counter style ordering where there is no dedicated waiter involved makes no sense.

Even worse are the coffee shops - if you think getting a coffee is just a few bucks and is relatively cheap, note that you get robbed when you end up tipping. $1 or more tip on a $5 coffee. And there is nothing special you get, the baristas are just doing their basic job. Also the looks you get when you select the option "no tip" or the 0% tip, don't make it worth anything at all.

I stopped going to coffee shops a long time ago.

I tip at my local coffee (1-2/wk) because they are always nice, cool when I forget my wallet, get my "usual" w/o prompting, stickers for my kid, give me pro-tips on pastry baking, etc

But if I went daily it'd be like $8/coffee.

Espresso machine at home was the right answer. Pays for itself after only 200 coffees.

I tip at places like coffee shops and delis because the person taking my order is often also preparing it. If they’re just handing me a bag from the kitchen I don’t tip. Maybe this is silly.

I will be honest, this is where I have some conflicted opinions.

In many coffee shops they are different people. There is just the person at the register and then there is the person who made my coffee. Who did the tip go too? I would assume it's pooled, but I have no way to know that.

This isn't the case everywhere, there are for sure places that it is the same people (or one place I go to it is a joint effort, it is a super small place with them regularly both shuffling work like one pouring milk while one brew the espresso).

It is because they are literally just doing what they are paid for. I would love if ever time i hit my sprint goals i got tipped by my employer or better yet what is actually happening is they should tip me at the start of the sprint in order to be in my good favor so i don’t bomb the sprint.

This is the world we live in. Where everyone now feels like they have to give someone extra money just because they showed up to work. Better yet is shitty waiters who have a built in 20% tip. The entire thing pisses me off.

I use to enjoy going to restaurants and would tip easily over 20% because i would get awesome service. Now you are paying that in hopes they don’t spit in your food next time you show up.

I stopped going out to eat because the entire industry is full of assholes now who think they deserve your money. I still follow a lot of people who work in the industry on social media from 5 years ago when i would frequent a lot of nice restaurants. The kind of shit they post is just completely toxic “why are you even coming out to eat if you don’t tip over 20% type crap”.

It's exactly the same service at the deli counter at my grocery store. They make sandwiches to order. Yet there's no tipping at all there. No jar, no tip line on the receipt.

>> because the person taking my order is often also preparing it

This was intentionally designed like this to encourage customers to tip (by making you feel like you have a waiter)

$1 tip per prepared drink seems OK, tipping bartenders a similar amount is pretty standard.

Same going to a coffee shop is now a luxury reserved only for vacations, or if I want to meet someone outside home.

Starbucks has become my goto, because of their app, ubiquity, and consistency. Coffee culture, similar to wine culture is blown out of proportion. I drink an Americano and Starbucks is just fine.

When you tip your server you might not know who gets it either. There are things like tip sharing and even tip pooling.

If I order standing up I’m not tipping. It’s that simple.

> We're moving to a world that most restaurants won't have servers taking your food and drinks order. This is already happening in Seattle

Seattle isn’t the world, it’s not even representative of the USA. Like California they have enacted regulations and policy which resulted in widespread crime and homelessness, the shuttering of small business, and population decline.

The reason you have stuff like robots taking orders or kitchen staff waiting tables isn’t because the progressive utopia has been realized, it’s because there is no such thing as free lunch and those people got fired and kicked to the curb while the remaining employees were forced to do more work.

I think shuttered businesses are fine. If they can't provide services that are worth the wage of employees they're just dragging the economy like a parasite. I think we're too quick to blame regulations for business failures. This kind of move for businesses feels like trying to cut losses not identify new revenue streams. This should have seemed inevitable when Starbucks opened on every streetcorner that they would eventually have to cut wages and resort to app ordering. The problem with this is it's lowering consumer expectations and new businesses have the infrastructure and financial need to follow their lead, leaving vulnerable service workers in the dust.

You have a kernel of an idea that I agree with but 80% of your post is irrelevant culture war nonsense that can't be taken seriously and doesn't fit with your main point. If you picked some random Seattle person on the street I'm sure they'd agree with you that management underhires and keeps people overworked.