McDonald's Is Getting Rid Of Store Cashiers As Walmart Brings Them Back

Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

McDonald’s has certainly gotten more high tech recently. At least, as far as taking orders and getting paid anyway.

The cashiers and burger flippers have always been at the heart of a McDonald’s restaurant. Cashiers took the orders and the burger flippers fulfilled them. There were also a few helpers between that sped the process up a bit too.

These days, burger flippers remain at the core of the McDonald’s process, but cashiers have lost their significance. More and more McDonald’s restaurants have replaced their cashiers with ordering kiosks where people can place their orders. McDonald’s haven’t confirmed for sure just how many restaurants have ordering kiosks – and no cashiers – but I found them in just about every McDonald’s I stopped in while visiting New York State.

This is a major difference to how things were just a year ago, when these ordering kiosks were first introduced in Europe on a trial basis.

Has the change been influenced by increases in the minimum wage? That’s tough to say. These kiosks also make things more convenient and make ordering faster, which has always been at the heart of McDonalds as a fast food company.

An interesting contrast is that the change comes as Walmart has recently given up on replacing human cashiers with machines.

Apparently, swapping human cashiers didn’t work for Walmart. It didn’t work for their customers, hasn’t helped operating margins, and may have contributed to the drop in customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction with Walmart is still at record lows, even after the change. The below table shows how Walmart’s operating margins have stayed steady over time:

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Read Again https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2018/06/03/mcdonalds-is-getting-rid-of-store-cashiers-as-walmart-brings-them-back/

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