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

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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 .

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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.

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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.

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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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触摸屏自助服务终端、自助结账机和二维码菜单都只是为了提供帮助。

最初的设想是，这些自助服务技术能为麦当劳推荐我们想吃的食物，也能加快CVS的结账速度。但结果却是，当我们只想买个汉堡的时候，自助点餐机却提供了太多选择。自助结账机总是提示打包区有我们意料之外的商品。而且，我们实在厌倦了在晚餐时还要低头看手机来选择主菜。

消费者已经厌倦了那些让线下购物和用餐失去意义的科技。许多人怀念与咖啡师和其他人短暂的交流。我们对科技的集体不满随处可见：人们在酸奶店排队数小时只为与人见面，外出就餐时却把手机锁起来。对面对面交流的渴望也解释了电影院、购物中心和Chili's餐厅的复兴。

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快餐连锁店、餐厅和零售商如今纷纷放弃无休止的自动化和屏幕，转而使门店更具人性化，以吸引员工。他们多年来大力推广的自助服务技术反而疏远了员工。

十年前，星巴克的咖啡师与顾客之间有着密切的个人关系。哈佛大学研究服务型企业与顾客互动关系的工商管理教授瑞安·布埃尔表示，在星巴克工作的吸引力之一在于，你会觉得自己是顾客生活中的一抹亮色。

但星巴克转型成了一家外卖店。顾客们无需和咖啡师交流，就能从网上订购咖啡和冰柠檬水后直接取走。销售额大幅下滑，许多员工感觉自己变成了机器人。他们开始组织工会。

星巴克增加了员工，并斥资 10 亿美元用于购置扶手椅、植物和书籍，以使咖啡店重新焕发咖啡店的氛围。

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布埃尔表示，公司正在“将员工和客户体验从崩溃的边缘拉回来”。

快餐连锁店向来缺乏人情味，如今却因服务更优质的餐厅而生意惨淡。他们现在希望为顾客提供更多选择，而不仅仅是点击屏幕点餐。

据《华尔街日报》报道，麦当劳正在培训员工，强调热情待客之道，例如用“祝您用餐愉快！”和“再见！”等语气向顾客问好。汉堡王则正在招聘6万名新员工，并在门店设立了“顾客至上专员”这一客户服务岗位。

&pizza是一家提供可定制长方形披萨的连锁店，近年来，它引入了更多触摸屏自助点餐机和人工智能语音点餐系统，希望以此加快点餐速度并鼓励顾客加点其他产品。

Latitude Food Group（&pizza 和 Tijuana Flats 的母公司）首席营销官塞尔吉奥·佩雷斯在接受采访时表示，自助点餐机造成了员工和顾客之间的“隔阂”，而语音人工智能则“抹杀了任何待客之道”。该公司最近已从旗下门店撤下了自助点餐机和人工智能点餐系统。

佩雷斯说：“我们当时太专注于数字化带来的前景，以至于忘记了餐厅。”

自助结账原本也是为了帮助商店节省人工成本，让员工腾出时间从事其他工作。

但顾客对自助结账机频繁出现的故障感到沮丧。结果，通过自助结账盗窃的商品比人工结账时被盗的商品更多。

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沃尔玛、塔吉特和好市多拆除了一些自助结账机。亚马逊关闭了其无人收银的Go商店。

德雷克塞尔大学的研究人员在2024年的一项研究中发现，与自助结账机相比，由人工收银员结账会让顾客感到更有成就感，并“受到更多重视”。研究还发现，人工收银员会提高顾客的再次光顾意愿。

主要问题是，企业为了寻找人们从未遇到过的问题而发明解决方案，而不是寻找改善客户体验的方法。

德鲁大学社会学家、著有《过度劳累的消费者：自助结账、超市和自助经济》一书的克里斯托弗·安德鲁斯表示，他们提供了更新、更便宜的订餐和结账方式，然后试图说服顾客改变做法。

他说：“我们现在看到的，是本末倒置。”

CNN的乔丹·瓦林斯基对本文亦有贡献。