Human Connection in a Kiosk World

My husband and I frequent fast food restaurants on an embarrassingly regular basis. Post pandemic, with the rapid rise of ordering kiosks, it has become more and more difficult to order from a person at a register and pay cash for our lunch. We have found that at certain times of the day, if we hang around the register looking like hungry people of a certain age, someone will appear from the kitchen area and take our order the old fashioned way. Since we are regulars at one McDonald's, we tend to see the same young girl emerge from the kitchen to help us. On one visit, after an ordering glitch on the counter register, my husband teased her and said he bet she was wishing we had used the kiosk. She looked at us wide-eyed, slowly shook her head and silently mouthed the word “No!” We all laughed, finished the order and we went on to our table, she back to the kitchen. My husband and I spent lunch speculating on what her emphatic “No!” meant. Had we saved her from some unpleasant task in the kitchen? Did kiosk ordering create more problems behind the scenes than a register order? Or perhaps the very existence of her job depended upon people such as us, hanging around the register looking hungry and kiosk-avoidant.

My husband attends a men's group at another McDonald's where only kiosk ordering is available at the early morning hour they meet. Since he usually orders only coffee, he balks at ordering on the kiosk and paying for one coffee with a credit card. He instead goes through the drive-thru, orders his coffee, talks to a real person who accepts his cash and hands him his coffee. At that hour, the drive-thru is a well-oiled machine and the employees are still fresh on their shifts, and are friendly and happy to serve. My husband then parks his car and carries his coffee inside the restaurant to meet up with his group that has ordered their breakfasts via the kiosk, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

These are just two examples of the last remnants of people-to-people connections that we used to take for granted. True, we probably didn't have meaningful in-depth conversations when ordering past Shamrock Shakes, but we did interact with a real person. Self-checkouts at the library have eliminated the interesting conversations I used to have with the desk clerks about books they read and recommended or questions they had about books I was checking out - “Oh, I read her other book. It was a great read!” “You fly fish!!!??” “I think we just got a new book in you might like.” Self-checkouts at the supermarket and ordering apps on phones also have diminished the number of times a weeks we physically interact with others.

Part of the original Luddite rebellion was due to the fact that the mill owners lost sight of the people they employed, ignoring their concerns and their needs. The Luddite weavers were used to an apprentice-style learning model where people would come alongside others to teach and model what a skilled craftsman should do to produce a quality product. The mill owners were interested mainly in rapid production and cheap overhead and would hire those who could work fast but not necessarily work precisely. They looked at the product rather than the producer. What are some of the Luddite-like questions we need to ask today, when faced with a kiosk, an app, a self-checkout? What are we losing in simple human interaction in this machine-dominated workplace? What are some things we can do to not lose the connection we as human beings are meant to have with each other, even if they are just fleeting moments in our day? To return to Thomas Carlyle's quote from my first post in this series, how have we “grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand?” What choices can we make to change that?

Despite being people of a certain age, my husband and I do, in fact, know how to use an ordering kiosk, a self-serve checkout and the scanners at the library. And, as both of us are high on the introvert scale, it is easy for us to be tempted on some days to avoid the human interaction. The machines around us allow us that option, but it doesn't mean it's good for us. We can choose the traditional checkout, even when they are few and far between. We can interact with librarians and store clerks. We can choose to spend more time looking at people's faces than looking at our screens. We were created to know one another, to interact with the people around us. Some we are called to know in depth, to really know. Others we connect with oh so briefly and superficially, but we are called to that as well. At best we do it all imperfectly, but we were made to do it, to look each other in the eye, to smile, to exchange pleasantries, and on occasion, to shake our heads slowly and mouth an emphatic “No!”