The humans are rejecting the machines that were supposed to help them

By Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN

New York (CNN) — Touchscreen kiosks, self-checkout machines and QR-code menus were only here to help.

The dream was that these self-service technologies would recommend food we’d like at McDonald’s and speed up CVS lines. But kiosks ended up presenting way too many choices when we just wanted the burger. Self-checkout machines kept announcing there were unexpected items in the bagging area. And we got sick of looking at our phones to pick a main course at dinner.

Consumers are tired of tech that defeats the whole purpose of going out to shop and eat in person. Many miss the fleeting interactions with baristas and other human beings. The signs of our collective frustration with technology are everywhere: people waiting hours in lines at yogurt shops to meet someone and locking up their phones when they go out to dinner. A longing for in-person connection helps explain the resurgence of movie theaters, malls and Chili’s.

Fast-food chains, restaurants and retailers are now ditching endless automation and screens to humanize their stores and attract workers. All the self-service tech they pushed for years alienated their employees.

A decade ago, Starbucks baristas had personal relationships with customers. Part of the draw of working at Starbucks was that you felt like a bright spot in customers’ days, said Ryan Buell, a professor of business administration at Harvard who studies interactions between service businesses and customers.

But Starbucks transformed into a takeout stand. Customers picked up online orders of coffee and iced lemonades without saying a word to baristas. Sales slumped and many of the company’s employees felt they’d been turned into robots. They began to unionize.

Starbucks has added extra staff and is spending $1 billion on armchairs, plants and books to make its coffee shops feel like coffee shops again.

The company is “pulling the employee and customer experience back from the brink,” Buell said.

Fast-food chains, never known for their human touch, have lost business to sit-down restaurants with better service. They now want to give customers the option to do more than tap on screens to order food.

McDonald’s is training workers to emphasize hospitality, with energetic greetings to customers such as “Enjoy your meal!” and “See you soon!” according to the Wall Street Journal. Burger King is hiring 60,000 new employees and creating a customer service position in stores: the “Your Way Champion.”

&pizza, a chain offering customizable, oblong-shaped pizzas, expanded touchscreen kiosks and voice ordering systems using AI the last few years. It hoped to speed up order times and get customers to add extras.

But kiosks created a “disconnect” between crew and customers and voice AI “erased any attempt at hospitality,” Sergio Perez, the chief marketing officer at Latitude Food Group, the parent company of &pizza and Tijuana Flats, said in an interview. It recently pulled kiosks and AI ordering from its stores.

“We were so focused on the promise of digital that we forgot about the dining room,” Perez said.

Self-checkout was also supposed to be a way for stores to save money on labor and free up workers for other tasks.

But customers became frustrated with all the malfunctions they encountered at self-checkout stations. People ended up stealing more products through self-checkout than when human beings rang them up.

Walmart, Target and Costco ripped out some self-checkout stands. Amazon shut down its cashier-less Go stores.

Customers feel more rewarded by a store and “treated more valuably” when they check out with humans than self-checkout machines, researchers at Drexel University found in a 2024 study. A human ringing up customers makes them likelier to revisit in the future, the study found.

The main issue was that businesses invented solutions in search of problems that people never had, rather than finding ways to improve customers’ experiences.

They offered up newer, cheaper ways of ordering food and checking out and then tried to sell customers why they should change, said Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University and author of “The Overworked Consumer: Self-Checkouts, Supermarkets and the Do-It-Yourself Economy.”

“What we have been seeing is putting the cart in front of the proverbial horse,” he said.

CNN’s Jordan Valinsky contributed to this article.

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