I'm not lovin' it

(NB - I have been mostly absent from NewGathering for a few weeks now.  There is no better or worse reason for this than that the rest of my life - especially work - has been crowding out such pleasurable activities as reading, thinking and writing.  In fact, as I write this, I'm also sitting on a conference call for work, at 11:30 pm on a Saturday night, which - thankfully - isn't requiring much of my active participation.  I do have a few more blog posts rattling around inside me, and I'll endeavor to cough 'em up as time permits.)

McDonalds has joined the march of retailers replacing humans with computers and robots.

On my own terms, I'm a foodie.  My terms are analogous to the wonderfully democratic principle that Duke Ellington famously applied to music: if it tastes good, it is good.  My wife and I appreciate haute cuisine - the two of us have been known to splurge on dinners out together.  In fact, on a couple of occasions we've spent so much that I've pondered bringing those occasions into the confessional.  But we also believe that good food can be found more cheaply.  We'll do diners, hot dog stands, pizza, taquerias - wherever tasty, well-prepared food can be found.  And we both futz around a bit in the kitchen.

And we're not too snooty for the the big fast food chains, either.  There is a sub shop chain called Potbellies which I think makes very good sandwiches, and their oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are to die for.  And I found myself hankering for a Whopper the other day, for the first time in years, and a couple of days later, had an opportunity to scratch that itch.  It was delicious.

But I don't like McDonalds.  I mean that in a casual, unthoughtful sense.  I don't boycott McDonalds because of the wages their franchisees pay the workers (although see more below on the workers), nor because of the nutritional and health issues with their menu items.  When I say "I don't like McDonalds", I just mean that, by and large, I don't like their food.  When our kids were young, I'd drive through the local McDonalds and bring them back Happy Meals.  But that was on evenings when my wife and I were going out to a restaurant for dinner.  I never, ever choose to go to McDonalds for lunch or dinner for myself.

Except .... I do like a couple of items on their breakfast menu.  The Egg McMuffin and the Egg and Sausage McMuffin are pretty good, albeit gut-bombs.  And - in spite of my profession of food proletarianism the first paragraph, I find myself a little ashamed to admit this - I like their egg and sausage burritos.

For better or worse, McDonalds now offers their breakfast items throughout the day.  So the other night I was driving home from choir rehearsal, and found myself craving protein.  And McDonalds was right on the way home.  So on a whim, I pulled in, at about 9:30 pm.  I had intended to drive through and then eat in the car on the way home, but the drive-through lines were surprisingly long - there were a half-dozen or so cars ahead of me.  So I parked and walked in.

And immediately, I was disoriented.  This particular McDonalds is about a mile from my home, and I had been inside it many times over the years.  But it had changed.  Previously the order counter had stretched the width of the front of the store, punctuated by three or four order and food delivery stations.  Customers had an open view of the operations on the other side of the counter.  That side of the counter was always a hive of activity, with a dozen or more workers pulling out baskets of fries, taking drive-through orders, assembling burgers and so on. In other words, the counter area had looked just like that of every other McDonalds I had ever been in.

But no more.  Walls, high enough to block customers' views and prevent their interaction with workers, have replaced half or more of the former counter space.  What remained of the old counter had only a single point-of-sale system.

But in front of where the rest of the counter used to be, there were now two electronic kiosks.  I pulled out my cell phone and took a picture of one of them  - it's at the top of this post.  The kiosk consists of a very large video touch screen for placing orders, as well as a keypad and credit card swipe subsystem to transact the payment.  I tried out the kiosk to place my order.  It was sufficiently intuitive and bug-free that I was able to figure out how to order an Egg McMuffin and a burrito without a problem.  It accepted my debit card, and then spit out a hard copy receipt with my order number on it.  A video screen above the abbreviated counter tracked the progress of my order and the half-dozen others that were in-process.

The transaction worked fine, as far as it went.  I ordered the food, paid for the food, and got the food, and the food was the same as always.  Still, what would have taken less than two minutes to transact with a human - place the order, pay for the order - took considerably longer with the interactive touch screen.  The screen gives you pictures of everything McDonalds offers.  You have to find the picture of what you want, and touch it.  Then you have to tell it what size you want.  Then you have to tell it how you want it customized in some way (e.g. no pickles).  Then you have to specify what quantity of each item you want.  Then you go through the whole rigmarole again for the next item.  If I had to do this for our family of six, we might die of starvation before completing the order.

If you've ever ordered a Domino's pizza from their website, it's a very similar experience.   It works fine, but it takes longer than calling in the order.  That is why I don't use websites to order pizzas (not that I have ordered Domino's since my kids grew up - I have *some* foodie standards) - it saves me 5-7 minutes (at least) to just pick up the phone and talk to a human being.

Technology continues to intermediate more and more of our human interaction.  I work in the corporate world.  In the old days, if I needed to talk to HR, I'd pick up the phone and call my HR rep.  If I had a problem with my computer, I'd dial the extension of the IT guy.  I quickly learned the benefit of cultivating personal relationships with my HR rep and my IT guy: if we were on friendly terms, they were more likely to help me right away and to try hard on my behalf.  (Truthfully, I just like people in general, so I tend to do this relationship-building regardless of whether there is anything foreseeable in it for me.  But there is also an unavoidable transactional nature to these professional and commercial relationships.)

But nowadays in the corporate world, if we have a problem, we don't pick up the phone anymore.  Instead, we open a ticket.  We click on a URL which makes a form appear on our computer screen.  We fill out the form and click a "Submit" button.  If some computer up in a cloud somewhere likes what we entered, it generates a ticket number, and our request gets added to a queue.  And somewhere - it could be anywhere on the planet, and it doesn't really matter where - a person responds to the request, usually by chat/IM or email rather than a phone call.  And it's no longer my HR rep or my IT guy.  It's someone from a pool of HR reps or IT guys.  I get a different person with every ticket.   That person may not actually work for the same company I do; we may have outsourced HR and IT because those are not core competencies for what my company does.

But it's all very efficient, and presumably cheap, and in theory, nothing slips through the cracks.

What I learned the other night is that, to order an Egg McMuffin, I have to open a ticket.  I used the kiosk to create a work order, and eventually my food appeared.  The human interaction was minimal: when my order had risen to the top of the queue, someone handed me a bag and wished me a nice evening.  If McDonalds could figure out a cheap and reliable way to send me a hot, fresh Egg McMuffin on a conveyor belt or via a vacuum tube like at a bank drive-through, it could dispense with the human-to-human dimension altogether.

Because let's face it: human employees are problems.  They screw up - sometimes they put pickles on the Whopper which was ordered with no pickles.  They can be rude, which irritates customers.  They get sick and don't show up for work.  They get pregnant and disappear for months on maternity leave.  They drop things and break them.  They burn themselves in the french fry grease, which creates medical expenses.  They quit, and then their replacement has to be recruited and trained.  They steal.  They have workplace affairs with one another, which causes no end of complications.  Kiosks and conveyor belts no doubt bring their own sets of hassles and complications, but there are absolutely people at McDonalds headquarters with Excel spreadsheets who can put together a model in five minutes or less which answers the question, "Which is cheaper, people or kiosks?"

Technological intermediation is spreading.  Within the last week, I've used a self-checkout station at the local grocery store.  And I've used an app on my cellphone to order an Uber ride.  For the grocery transaction, I didn't interact with anyone.  The Uber driver said fewer than 10 words to me from pickup to drop-off (I am not convinced that he speaks English; some Uber drivers will talk your ear off if you give them to understand that you're open to conversing).  I understand that Uber is in the vanguard of working on self-driving car technology; cf the list in the previous paragraph of some of the problems with human workers. 

Catholic social teaching is both anachronistic and pesky on this question of workers vs. technology.  It insists that workers take priority over capital (a kiosk being a fine example of a contemporary capital investment).  The proliferation of kiosks and self-checkout stations are problematic in a couple of ways:

• It eliminates the jobs of workers
• The cases of McDonalds kiosks and grocery store self-checkout stations (and, if they ever come, self-driving Uber cars) are particularly problematic because the jobs they eliminate are those of the lowest-paid, least-skilled workers, who are likely to have the fewest alternatives for earning a living wage.

My conservative friends have zero patience when I point these things out.  They note that the innovation and proliferation of technology traditionally has been a tremendous creator of new jobs.  There is no doubt this is true.  My own career, such as it is, has been in the high-tech world.  I have no personal cause for complaint: I've been earning a living wage for many years.  But I have a college degree.  I'm reasonably bright.  If I may say so, I am reasonably articulate and look reasonably presentable.  Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm also white and a male.  So I'm brimming with employment advantages.  There are people with gaps in several (or all) of these hard and soft attributes.  What to do about them?  They're also entitled to the dignity of work.  That verb "entitled" doesn't get any traction in conservative politics these days, and I'm not certain that it gets much in liberal politics, either.  We have a long way to go to build God's kingdom.  O come, O come Emmanuel.