If you weren’t already aware, there’s fecal matter all around us. When you smell a pungent turd in a Love’s truck stop, that’s literally caused by turd particles from a trucker’s greasy microwave burrito wafting in the air and making their way into your nasal canal.
Olfactory orgasm.
What’s caught the attention of pearl clutchers recently, however, has been the overwhelming amount of fecal matter piling up on restaurant kiosks. Poor McDonald’s has the misfortune of being a large target for articles like these (because Bob’s Bistro has no money to pay off class action attorneys).
No doubt this comes as the use of kiosks is growing. From airports, to hotels, and now restaurants, the war of the kiosks is real.
The first reason for kiosk adoption is simple labor savings. Humans get burned out with mundane tasks – it’s why we’ve outsourced manufacturing to Pac-Asia, where 9 year-olds are ecstatic to make $0.27 working 18-hour days snapping plastic arms on He-Man dolls.
Taking orders from customers is not exactly the most cerebral task either. A machine can do this more reliably and faster, for a lower cost. When legislators argue that this type of work deserves $15 an hour or higher, point the business owner in the direction of a kiosk, any kiosk.
Second, kiosks are better sales people than your $8 an hour employee. When we look at the data we have for thousands of restaurants using kiosks, we notice that the checks generated kiosks are, on average, a little over 20% larger. In other words the kiosk is able to convince the customer to purchase more per order. We don’t know if this is because the customer doesn’t feel judged when they’re adding 9 more patties to their burger on a touchscreen, or if the kiosk is using data to proactively suggest items that frequently sell with the items the customer is already intending to order (Amazon does this really well, by the way).
In either case, it’s impossible to argue with the fact that the machine is producing larger checks than your employee.
The fecal matter-on-kiosk worry is just a red herring as far as we’re concerned; kiosks are only going to grow in popularity due to their economic benefits, and humans probably face more fecal exposure when touching doorknobs anyway.
However, this whole matter does bring two important topics to mind.
First, are we entering a stage in the market where payment devices – EMV, pay at the table, or consumer-facing kiosks – are within the “scope” of the POS manufacturer? We constantly berate POS companies for trying their hand at too many tangential distractions, but this area might be one where POS companies should own the solutions. Online and mobile ordering is only going to grow, and payments solutions needs to interface with the POS extremely closely. Well-capitalized POS companies have already produced their own table side payment devices:
- Global Payments
- Shift4 – SkyTab
- Toast – Go
- Upserve
This won’t be the death of the trend either.
Lastly, is the next phase of ordering and payments doing so right from your own device? Whether you’re outside the establishment or sitting at one of its tables, the ordering and payment experience might be the same. Nigel POS certainly seems to think so. “By the time we would have been approved for EMV the industry might already be onto the next phase of payments” says Jason Mock, SVP of High Touch Technologies, the development shop behind Nigel. “We think BYOD is the next iteration.”
It begs the question what the payments future is moving towards. Certainly the ordering companies would love to collect more of the customer transaction data. We don’t see consumers downloading any new app to get this done, however, and especially not an app per establishment. Maybe the POS companies will finally cooperate and realize the collective data is in their best interest.
Then again, shit happens.
