New Tim Hortons self-serve kiosks brew up a fuss

Well, judging by their increased prevalence, self-checkouts clearly make fiscal sense, too. More companies are adopting them and, now, they could be making their way into your most sacred hangout: the local Tim Hortons.

Tim’s has unveiled two new self-order kiosks in the GTA (one in the city’s west-end, the other across from the coffee shop’s Oakville headquarters) and they’ve already sent people in a tizzy the way I imagine most seniors would react if Shoppers announced they’d no longer carry bags of Werther’s Originals.

The kiosks, which Tim’s says are in the experimental phase, are meant to make orders “more efficient and with less human contact than ever before,” according to the Toronto Star.

While you can understand Tim’s reasoning for trying to get on the self-serve bandwagon, there sure seem to be a few wrinkles to iron out before spreading the kiosks across Canada.

First, the machines only accept Tim Cards or MasterCard as payment so, if you don’t have a Tim Card (or are one of the 40 bagillion people who use Visa and not MasterCard), you’re screwed. You might as well line up with the rest of us suckers.

Second, as the Star points out, it leaves a lot to be desired in the way of custom ordering. While it can’t for now, do future versions of the Tim’s self-serve kiosk plan to allow you to hold the tomato on your sandwich, or have just a little bit of cream in your coffee instead of the whole carton? This, we’d like to know.

And third, perhaps most importantly, it appears that after placing your order in the self-serve kiosk and beating the line, in order to get your food or drink you have to … jump in line to get it. Uh, what? How does this make sense? This would be like forking over an annual fee for a 407 transponder and then gleefully hopping on the 401 everyday during rush hour. Isn’t the idea of the self-serve kiosk to speed things up? Where exactly is my incentive to use it, then, if that isn’t the case?

Of course, veteran Tim Heads are all up in a fuss about the new checkouts and, sure, it’s fun to debate this way or that about the state of customer service today and “the way things used to be.”

But maybe there’s also a larger picture here to be concerned about. If Tim’s is serious about getting these self-serve kiosks out there, what’s this to mean about the number of employees the chain will need to run its stores? If anything, companies losing money have to be looking for any excuse to trim staff while they ride out the recession, and this sure looks to be a dandy reason to do so, doesn’t it?

Whether or not the kiosks actually make it mainstream while the economy stinks may not even matter. Still seems like a relevant issue going forward, regardless.