The ones I've seen (yes, at McDonalds specifically) are terrible, take forever to use, are abusive in attempting to push crap on the user and make some (what I'm sure are higher-margin) items easier to buy than others, and are yet another case of pushing labor onto the "consumer" and calling it automation(?!), like "automated checkouts" at grocery stores—a fucking lie, the buyer is doing almost as much work as paid workers used to, "automated" would be if you could just let go of your cart and a machine took care of the rest while you waited.
Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)
Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit.
I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)