Fast Food Just Admitted The Kiosk Experiment Is Failing
The kiosk was supposed to make ordering faster. At a recent lunch stop, it did the opposite. An elderly couple working one of two ordering kiosks at a Wendy’s spent roughly ten minutes putting in an order for a burger and fries — a transaction that should have taken ninety seconds with a person behind the counter. Meanwhile, a five-part custom Diet Coke built at the restaurant’s Freestyle machine took under a minute. Same store, same visit, two very different outcomes from two different pieces of technology.
That gap has caught the attention of the industry’s biggest names, and the Wall Street Journal reports they’re now spending real money to close it. McDonald’s global chief people officer has said that while price and food still matter, experience has become a bigger factor than it used to be. The company is retraining more than two million restaurant workers worldwide this fall and will begin grading franchisees partly on hospitality. It has also dropped a requirement that employees push the mobile app on every customer interaction, after finding the mandate got in the way of basic service.
Other chains are making similar moves. Burger King is requiring staffed counters and order-accuracy checks, and its new restaurant prototype pushes kiosks to the side of the lobby rather than placing them front and center. Wendy’s is reviewing its own AI drive-thru trials to determine whether the technology is genuinely helping customers or just adding friction. Starbucks is putting fresh money into training and the in-cafe experience.
The lesson isn’t that technology is the enemy. The same visit that produced a ten-minute kiosk ordeal also produced a complex drink order assembled with a speed and precision no human counter worker could match. That’s technology removing friction. The failure wasn’t the presence of automation — it was a self-service screen left to handle a task on its own when a customer needed a hand. Chick-fil-A, which consistently ranks highest for service in Technomic’s research, offers a useful contrast: part of its approach is putting employees with tablets out in the drive-through line, pairing a tool with a person rather than swapping one for the other.
For operators, the takeaway isn’t to rip out kiosks. Digital ordering isn’t going away, and for many transactions it genuinely speeds things up. The point is to watch the dining room the way this columnist watched that Wendy’s — tracking where technology is actually saving customers time and where it’s quietly costing them time that nobody is measuring. A kiosk sitting unstaffed with a confused customer stuck at it for ten minutes isn’t a convenience. It’s a liability.
The broader signal from McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Starbucks is that the industry is recalibrating after several years of digital-first expansion. Technology’s job, as this recalibration suggests, is to remove friction from the customer relationship, not to replace it. The tools that win going forward are likely to be the ones built to work alongside a person rather than instead of one.
Paul Molinari is Founder and Principal Consultant of Popcorn GTM, a fractional CMO and brand strategy consultancy for restaurant technology and hospitality. He hosts Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants. paul@popcorngtm.com | 781-733-0592
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