Investigating a Local Rumor

I have a special fondness for Taco Bell. For many years I had turned my nose up their offerings, preferring the bland meat-and-potatoes farm fare that had long been my routine. One day when she was in her early teens my daughter wanted to go there for lunch. I reluctantly agreed with a shudder, but asked her to show me what I would be willing to eat, having never visited one. We went.

I asked if she liked the hard taco shells, but she gave her own shudder. She thought that I would probably like the soft taco supreme. We had those and quesadillas and probably a soft drink. I was amazed. Those things are really good. I thanked her and since then I have enjoyed an occasional visit to Taco Bell, where I always get the same thing. She has even taught me to construct the taco bar at home on fun occasions. Recently I built my own quesadillas at home and wow are those good! Hot cheddar on a flour tortilla grilled in a pan. What’s not to like?

So it has been for many years. I almost always go inside at Taco Bell and other places because I’ve had some bad experiences with busy drive-thru windows. If I’m in enough of a hurry to go to the drive-thru, I don’t want to have to go back in to straighten out my order, so I just go in to start with. Also for many years I have stepped up to the counter, spoken my requests to the uniformed employee there, and paid. Then comes my soft taco bliss.

A couple of years or more ago, in the aftermath of the COVID economic disruptions, I began to hear rumors that major fast food chains (which everyone understands are not actually fast any more) would add ordering kiosks inside their stores so that the hip tech crowd could continue their cashless and otherwise bleak lifestyles by ordering there and paying with their phones or tap cards or whatever. No problem. If people want to trust their credit and bank information to faceless corporations who can debit an account in less than a second, I guess that’s okay, as long as I don’t have to. Want to show something on your phone to someone from Mumbai or Manila so you can get your quarter pounder and fries? Okay. That’s on you. I’ll just stick with my greenbacks or occasional plastic. It works for me.

Then about a year ago the rumor began to circulate that efforts would be made to “encourage” customers to use the company app to buy their MickeyD stuff. Six months ago I went to a McDonald’s drive through because I was in a hurry. When I was ready to order I got a question about using the app. No thanks, I said, I just want some fries. They helped me, but I learned that there were better deals to be had if I used the app. That annoyed me. I don’t really like it when companies begin telling me how to spend my money. I can make up my own mind just fine, thank you very much. I decided not to go back to that place if an app was a requirement. Since then I have been able to walk inside and order at the counter without too many insults, although that kind of ordering takes longer now because there are so few employees inside.

I told friends that if the fast food places went to kiosk-only ordering or if I had to have their app to buy something, I would walk out and just never go back.

A couple of weeks ago the word began to circulate in the nearby small town (pop. 2200) that the Taco Bell had gone to kiosk-only ordering. This town is on crossroads of two rather heavily traveled state highways, but it’s the county seat of a rural county. It has a Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, Pizza Hut, four sit-down diner/restaurants, several pizza places, food trucks, two coffee shops, etc. We also have a top-notch independent supermarket with a great deli serving the best chicken ever. In other words, it’s not a monopoly food town. There are many choices. I was skeptical that the Taco Bell had really made this transition, so I went there on Saturday to see for myself.

No one was in sight when I went in just before noon. There was no one seated in the dining area. The kiosk was there with signs all around to place orders at the kiosk. The signs all shouted that they accept cash. I walked the two steps to the counter and waited. In less than a minute a very nice person whom I took to be a shift manager came up and offered to help. She walked past me and over to the kiosk, turned around and said she’d be happy to put my order in at the kiosk since they weren’t busy. 

Okay, I said, I’d like three soft tacos. She looked at it at the rather awkward angle (to accommodate handicapped as well as others, I surmised) and began to tap my order. She was pretty fast. She went to the last stage and asked me if I would be using a card or cash? Cash, I said. She looked back, tapped a couple more things, and it went haywire. Uh-oh, she said. I messed up. Amused, I said nothing. She had to clear it, put it all in again, then total. 

Then she walked over to the counter, took my greenback, and typed in the amount tendered. The drawer malfunctioned. She shut it and started the order finale again. Then she pulled out the change the register called for, checked the figure again partway through, then handed it to me. She was pleasant the whole time.

So I commented that it was a good thing she had been there to operate the kiosk. Before I could finish the sentence, she interrupted me and said with a little laugh that even she had trouble with it. I said that if I had tried to operate the kiosk on my own I would have taken much longer and probably failed anyway. She had failed too, but knew what to do to salvage the operation. I would not have known how to do that. I would have walked out because the company was not willing to make it easy to spend my money there.

To me the irony was that after placing the order at the kiosk she still had to go back to the register, call up the order, and count change. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have just tapped the order into the register screen in the first place? Perhaps that would not have been possible. I didn’t get to see the register screen, although there was a huge gap in the counter that would allow anyone to waltz right into the kitchen area. My tacos came up quickly and they were good when I ate them outside in the truck.

If the order cannot be placed on the register screen, what happens when the sole kiosk decides to have a break? What if it had been busy? When I first heard that Taco Bell had done this I also heard that the person reporting it had seen four people come in when it was busy, refuse to order at the kiosk, and walk out without ordering anything. It makes me wonder why a big corporation like that would be willing to turn away customers rather than accommodate them? How does that work? With all the choices even in this tiny burg in the Heartland, why not try to snag every possible customer? Is the corporate vision that much better than the wishes of ordinary customers who go their to spend money and get things they want?

I’m seeing this same mentality at other corporate stores. We’ve seen the self-checkouts at WalMart and Kroger and other places. I noted with interest that Dollar General tried to go the self-checkout route very recently. Within a few months they pulled those machines out because they were losing so much money. When DG put a new store in near me this past fall there were no self-checkout machines. They had already learned that it wasn’t a good idea. Apparently it will take Kroger and Walmart and some others much longer to figure out what customers prefer. They could just ask the customers, but there’s not an app for that, apparently.

The genius of the capitalist system is that it demands that individuals and companies provide goods and services that customers want and will pay for voluntarily. Coercion is not permitted because there are others who will compete for our dollars. It does allow stupidity, however, even when practiced by billion-dollar corporations who think they’re so big and so irresistible that they can tell the customers what they have to do instead of offering the things they actually want.

One of these days somebody at corporate will wake up, fire the imbeciles who are doing this, and try to save what’s left of the customer base. Then there will be another big name on the laugh list along with new Coke, electric semi trucks, and the Edsel.

There must be some pretty smart people at Dollar General, but so far my promises to never return do not seem to worry the corporate honchos at Taco Bell and Kroger and McDonalds, or at least they don’t let on that it worries them. There are other places I like better. Heh, heh. We’ll see who blinks first.

Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II,  may be ordered from Indiana University Press.