Fast-food restaurants spent years teaching us to order from an app, tap a kiosk, grab a bag and leave without speaking to anybody.
And now some of the biggest chains appear to be looking around and going, wait. Maybe the humans were part of the restaurant.
McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Starbucks and Burger King are all putting fresh attention on hospitality, staffed counters or more welcoming stores as restaurants try to figure out how much technology customers actually want between themselves and lunch.
I have to admit: this plot twist is funny.
McDonald’s is reportedly making a major hospitality push
Industry reporting says McDonald’s is preparing one of its largest hospitality pushes in years, while Wendy’s is also working on service-focused training.
This does not mean the kiosks are disappearing.
It means chains are confronting the obvious problem with turning every restaurant into a giant touchscreen: efficiency and hospitality are not the same thing.
Sometimes I know exactly what I want and would like to order it without a conversation. Perfect. Give me the screen.
Sometimes the kiosk has decided that adding pickles requires a graduate degree.
Burger King is literally moving the kiosks aside
Burger King’s newer restaurant thinking is especially interesting because the chain has shown a prototype that places kiosks off to the side while keeping staffed counters prominent.
That is such a tiny design choice, but it changes the message of the whole room.
The counter says: a person can help you.
The kiosk says: good luck, soldier.
Starbucks has been trying to make stores feel like coffee shops again
Starbucks has also been redesigning stores with a greater emphasis on making them feel welcoming rather than purely transactional.
Which makes sense. Starbucks became enormous partly because people treated it as a place, not simply a caffeine distribution system.
If every visit becomes mobile-order pickup from a crowded counter, you lose some of the thing people were originally paying extra for.
The kiosk probably isn’t going anywhere
I do not think this ends with restaurants ripping out screens and pretending apps never happened.
Digital ordering is genuinely useful. Mobile ordering is useful. Kiosks can be useful.
The better version is probably choice.
Let the person who wants zero human interaction order in 14 seconds. Let the person staring at a menu and wondering what comes on the chicken sandwich ask an employee.
Technology should remove friction. It should not make asking for ketchup feel like you have breached the system.
Maybe “customer service” was not obsolete after all
The interesting thing here is that restaurants are not suddenly becoming anti-technology. They are realizing that the experience around the technology matters.
There is a difference between giving customers another way to order and making a screen feel like the only door into the restaurant.
So yes, apparently the next big innovation in fast food may be… somebody standing at the counter.
Everything old is new again.
