Vending machines with chairs
I think I posted a link to a bit on Pete Wells, the New York Times’ restaurant critic, retiring a while back. He has another farewell piece today (free link), more elegiac in tone—a long lament about the dehumanisation of restaurants.
In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.
Restaurants used to be one of the few places where you could have an experience that was completely human.
No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.
Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs.
That last line struck me hard because of my last visit to … McDonalds.
Don't you judge me. I had my reasons, and they were good. It was six in the morning and I was on the freeway to Ipswich to help a mate get his old man out of the retirement home for the day. I needed a quick coffee and some protein and figured on getting a sausage McMuffin.
I hadn’t been inside a Maccas for many years, and I was a bit flummoxed to discover the minimum wage kids on the counter had been replaced by touch screens where you entered your order and (I think) you payment deets. Of course, my screen didn’t work, and the payment process was broken. The McMuffin, when it arrived, was genuinely terrible - and the McMuffin used to be a paragon of reliability. But it was that personalised robo-ordering system that really put the zap on my head.
I’ve seen something like it at plenty of bars, which kept their QR code ordering systems from Covid but, unlike Pete Wells in NY, I hadn’t seen much like it in restaurants here. I guess it’s coming. Along with a heap of other stuff that has already crept in here, like ghost kitchens, Uber Eats and Open Table.
Anyway, get off my lawn, you damn kids.
The first time i had to use a QR code at a restaurant it was at one of those horrible franchise ones that are mexican themed that come with a throw away microplastic hat, next door to a german themed one that i'm assuming come with a throwaway microplastic lederhosen (yes up in Brisvegas). My first thought was "jeez imagine the grumbling my parents would make about this, they'd never figure it out" and of course since then it has filtered to all the restaurants and its everywhere now.
The maccas screens are a horrible experience. The last time we were in there the old lady cleaning helped us out because we got stuck in some rabbit warren menu that had "world destruction options". (she kindly stopped us from selecting 100ft tidal wave with an extra side of survivor enslaving horror from the deeps, and guided us back to the almond milk options for the decaf coffee)
In the last 20 or so years, I've only crossed this line to get caffeine when I am on the road and real coffee places have filled their machines with ammonia or are just plain shut. I avoid the screens and walk straight up to the pimply ones and order in person. They haven't refused me so far.