McDonald’s Are Getting More Futuristic

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Touch-screen ordering Daniel Gerzina/Eater Chicago

Elizabeth Rivera, Staff Writer

McDonald’s has implemented new technology in a bid to further what the future of restaurants will look like. At the start of 2020, it was decided that all McDonald’s in the U.S. were going to have kiosks.

The touch-screen kiosks are a new way to provide menu and ordering options for self-service. There won’t be any more employees on cashiers and that may seem that fewer employees are going be hired, but McDonald’s claims something different. They say that the employment rate will not be affected by the touch-screen service since they can still do table-service, cleaning, delivering, and preparing the food.

Kiosks are there to help speed up ordering and give people the control of customizing their food with less mistakes from human error. It is also reported that this will boost McDonald’s sales by 5%- 6% for the first year of remodeling, according to Cowen analyst Andrew Charles, who is a research analyst that focuses on the restaurant sector.

There have been psychological studies that touchscreens create the physical experience of touching the products. When the customer is likely to increase buying by the screen, researchers call it the “hedonic” purchase. The meaning of hedonic it that there are items that are unnecessary, but make the buyer feel joy or pleasure. According to the author of the study, he stated that “when a consumer uses a touchscreen device, the novelty and fun generated by finger movements create experiential and affective feelings, in alignment with the playfulness and emotional nature of hedonic products.”