Self-order Terminal at My Local McDonald's

And the incessant attack on human interaction continues. This thing just got installed at my local McDonald's and people, including regulars, are happily using it. Because who wants to look another human in the eye? And the smiles, that are famously free at the golden arches, have long been concealed by the masks that went up during COVID and never came down. The staff still takes orders at the regular cash register, but I have a sneaking suspicion that as usage of the self-order terminal increases, the customers coming to the regular register will subconsciously be treated by the staff, distracted from their other duties, as a nuisance, and by these subtle behaviours all eventually funnelled into the self-order flow.

It is perhaps interesting to note that Japan always had a subset of restaurants with no cash registers, powered by self-order ticket machines. Small ramen shops, the proprietor too busy to switch between cook and cashier, are a classic example. But so are most teishoku restaurants, many of them parts of large chain, with a considerable staff in the kitchen. I never reacted strongly to those, never felt like they were dehumanizing the world. Is it simply that they've always been there, as opposed to popping up now, during the "rapid transition". Maybe it's a matter of penetration. When they were few and far between, or only limited to a particular type of food, they were easy to accept, kind of quaint, part of the culture. And now, when the trend is spreading like cancer, with the clear goal of eliminating all retail service jobs and the human interaction that comes from them, it's suddenly far more difficult to stomach.