East Texas Fast Food Chains Could Soon Track Your License Plate
Want a side of surveillance with your chicken nuggets? Several fast food restaurants are working on technology that would involve recording your license plate to help track your order history.
If you order the same thing every time you go through a fast food drive-thru and the restaurant sees you coming, it might help speed up the process of getting your order to you. Anticipating the grilled chicken sandwiches helps the line move faster. Fast-food chains are looking to deploy cameras that recognize license plates to help identify customers, speed up the line, and make digital menus more personal.
What if you pulled up to the digital menu and it flashed the option of your custom cheeseburger with no onions and extra pickles? It sounds like technology might be coming where options 1 through 8 on the menu are all things that we've ordered in the past, or at the very least digital menus will be making recommendations once it figures out our tendencies.
Vice.com said 70 percent of fast food sales come through the drive-thru window, and the average wait time is four minutes. Since we've got the patience of a firecracker, they're looking for ways to reduce our wait even more, which would help them increase hourly sales too. Most likely we would have to opt-in to have our license plate recorded.
Is this going to be a good thing? If we're driving a new boyfriend's car, we might learn about his food preferences in a hurry. And if we're driving a rental the recommendations that pop up on the menu could explain the french fry smell in the back seat.
If you decide to skip the drive-thru and go inside, orders at the counter take just under four minutes, making the walk-thru option a little faster than the drive-thru. Even if you do have to read through the entire non-personalized menu.