The Coffee That the Kiosk Couldn't Make
When a kiosk fails at 'black coffee,' the real lesson isn't about the kiosk.
I was in a McDonald’s near a train station outside Lisbon, by a highway overpass and a bus depot.
The kiosk had a picture of coffee. A photograph of a coffee. But none of the buttons said “black coffee.” There was a button for a latte. A button for a cappuccino. A button for something called a “McFlurry Coffee” that I did not want to understand. I pressed latte, then tried to customize it to just coffee and nothing else. The screen asked me if I wanted whole milk, skim milk, or oat milk. It asked me if I wanted a flavor shot. It asked me if I wanted whipped cream. I declined all of it, and when the order appeared, it was still a latte. I abandoned the transaction.
The man next to me was maybe fifty, wearing a polo shirt and the expression of someone who has been asked to solve a problem he did not create. He had the same mission: a black coffee.
“I just want coffee,” he said to no one. The kiosk buzzed cheerfully.
A worker came around from behind the counter with a headset still hanging around her neck. She looked at the kiosk, looked at him, and did not ask what he wanted. She walked to a register that was dark (the kind that sits unused because the kiosks are supposed to handle the front lobby). The drive-thru was where she was needed. Cars cannot operate touchscreens, so the drive-thru still requires humans, and she had been up to her elbows in those orders before she saw him standing there. She tapped the screen a few times. A cup came down from the stack.
“Just coffee,” she said. Not a question.
“Just coffee,” he said.
She rang it up on a register she was not supposed to be using. Took his cash. Handed him the cup. A short transaction that bypassed the entire system that was supposed to handle it. The whole thing took thirty seconds. The kiosk had been trying for five minutes and had not managed it.
That interaction is a parable about technology in 2026. We built a system that works great for the complicated order and fails at the simplest one. If you want four custom burgers with no pickles, extra cheese, and a specific ratio of ketchup to mayonnaise, the kiosk is faster than any human could be. If you want a black coffee, the machine becomes a puzzle.
This pattern shows up everywhere. The self-checkout at a grocery store demands that you “place item in bagging area” and then freezes when it cannot weigh an avocado. The automated phone system asks you to “say or press 1” and then cannot understand the thing you said. The airline check-in kiosk offers fourteen options before it lets you print a boarding pass, and by that time the human at the counter has already checked you in, tagged your bag, and smiled. In each case, the machine handles the complex use case better than it handles the simple one. The straightforward request becomes a bug.
The kiosk at that McDonald’s was not designed for the man who wants a black coffee. It was designed for the median order. The 80th percentile. The customer who wants a customized latte with oat milk and a flavor shot. The Gen X guy at the front of the line is the edge case that got optimized out of existence. The person who wants one thing, plain, without options, does not fit the interface. There is no button for no.
I thought about this again when McDonald’s had its global system outage in March 2024. Stores across Australia, Japan, and the UK shut down or accepted cash only because the network went dark. The kiosks froze mid-transaction. The app stopped working. Suddenly, the only thing that mattered was the person behind the counter with a register and a pen. The machines were bricks. The humans were the only option.
The worker who walked to that dark register and rang up the coffee by hand, she is the safety valve. The human override. She exists to catch the edge cases the machine cannot handle. That is fine until companies decide the override is too expensive and remove it. They will frame it as efficiency. Fewer people on the floor, more automation. The kiosk handles 80 percent of orders. Why keep paying someone to stand at a register all shift? But the 20 percent the kiosk cannot handle includes the simplest request in the restaurant. A black coffee. No customization. No upselling. Just coffee.
Take away the override and what happens to the man with the polo shirt? He either learns the machine or goes somewhere else. If enough people like him go somewhere else, you have a business model problem dressed up as a technology success.
I ordered my coffee from the same woman. She remembered me from watching the man before. Saw me hang back. Saw me waiting. She poured it black, handed it over, and said something in Portuguese that I took as friendly. I sat by the window and watched the buses arrive and depart. The kiosk blinked its menu at an empty lobby.