How to use Hungry Jack's Brekk-E-Tag1:05
This is how you use your new Hungry Jack's Brekk-E-Tag that's only available at Hungry Jack's Tumbi Umbi. Courtesy: Hungry Jack's
In the age of the smartphone, this technology breakthrough is a very dumb idea.
The justification is convenience and, as a motive, it’s easy to understand.
Each day I use the Skip app on my phone to order my coffee, so by the time I cross the street from the office to the local cafe the barista is there with my flat white in hand and ready for our morning chat — usually about how well I’ve judged the timing in my walk to collect my pre-ordered coffee.
Sure, it lets me beat the queue but it also lets me pay for my coffee through the app and keeps track of how many coffees I buy (I get a free coffee after every five purchases).
It’s like getting in the express line at an airport gate because you’re a frequent flyer. Everyone gets on the plane so the end result is the same but those who board in the short queue feel a little special along the way.
But there is a line to be drawn as we seek the easy life through a quick tap of a button. And this is the place to draw it.
Hungry Jack’s have embraced the queue-jumping idea but in the wrong way.
Here’s the pitch: there are a lot of people whose lifestyle choices include a daily routine of going through the drive-through of their favourite takeaway outlet, in this case Hungry Jack’s. They drive up to the window, give their usual order, and drive ahead to the next window to collect their meal.
This technology removes one of those steps.
The step people should remove is the daily habit of grabbing breakfast in a fast-food drive through.
This is “sometimes” food, people, and sometimes it’s OK. It should not be everyday food.
But that’s not the step this technology targets. Instead it’s the human contact.
In the vision of a better way that Hungry Jack’s has developed, you cut out the bit where the customer has to ask someone for their fast food kickstart for the day.
In a trial in the New South Wales town of Tumbi Umbi, regular breakfast drive-through customers at Hungry Jack’s have been issued with a Brekk-E-Tag. It’s like the e-Tag you have in the car that beeps when you drive through an electronic toll booth, except this beep indicates you’ve just done your regular order of a Sausage and Egg Muffin and a Hash Brown which you program through an app on your phone.
So, you still have to drive past the window where you normally make your order. You just don’t have to speak to anyone before moving on.
The first time you have to open your mouth is when you fill it with food.
Science fiction writer Douglas Adams once imagined a race of people called The Golgafrinchans who sent all of their telephone sanitisers into exile for being useless, and then went on to describe how The Golgafrinchans were wiped out of existence after a plague spread through contact with unsanitary telephones.
Somehow I suspect Adams would see the Brekk-E-Tag as a sign that our civilisation, dealing with an obesity issue, is on the slide towards the wrong way.
Hungry Jack’s says the device is aimed at the regular breakfast customers, which it says includes mums on the morning school run, tradies, and those folk who are not morning people and are far too grumpy to indulge in normal human interaction at an early hour.
In this age of services like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Foodora, which deliver restaurant quality food to your door, the traditional fast food merchants have to innovate to keep up.
New ideas can be good, but not all new ideas are equal. Automated fast food breakfast should not be the routine way to start a day.
Originally published as Open your mouth to order before you stuff it with food