McDonald's put in self-service kiosks and the average order went up by about a third.
The story everyone tells about why is wrong. It wasn't speed, and it wasn't the upsell prompts, the little "make it a large?" screen. Those help at the margin. The real reason is dumber than that: nobody is watching.
When you order the second burger and the McFlurry from a teenager behind a till, there is a person there, and that person clocks you. For half a second you are the guy ordering two burgers and a McFlurry at 11pm, and some quiet part of you doesn't want to be that guy out loud. So you don't. You get the one burger and you feel vaguely virtuous about it.
Take the human away and the brake is gone. There is no one to be the guy in front of. So you order what you actually wanted the whole time.
The kiosk didn't create the appetite. It revealed it.
The Shame Was Doing the Work
Here is the part that should bother you. The only thing holding your order down was shame. Not health, not restraint, not some considered decision about what your body needs. A stranger's passing judgment was the entire mechanism, and the second it was removed, the order went up.
So the restrained version of you was never the real one. The real one wanted the McFlurry. The restrained one was a performance for an audience of one bored cashier. Remove the audience and the performance stops.
That is what "reduced friction" actually does, most of the time. We talk about it like it's a favour to the user: shave the steps, cut the hassle, be kind. Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time the friction we're proudly removing wasn't a flaw in the process. It was the only thing standing between you and the worse version of yourself, and now it's gone, and the number went up by a third.
Run the Experiment Everywhere
Once you see it you can't stop seeing it. Nearly every friction we've stripped out in the last twenty years has run the same experiment on us, and the results keep coming back the same way.
Self-checkout: theft went up. Not from career shoplifters, from normal people, the ones who'd never look a cashier in the eye and walk out with an unscanned avocado but who will happily do it to a machine. The cashier was never stopping theft with security tags. They were stopping it with a face.
Dating apps: no one would walk into a bar and coldly rank forty strangers off a single photo, reject thirty-nine, and never speak to any of them. It would feel deranged, because a room full of actual people applies friction. The app removes it, and out comes a version of us that treats other humans like a feed to be scrolled, because it turns out that was in there the whole time, just waiting for the friction to drop low enough to let it out.
Comment sections, anonymity, the quote-tweet: the thing you'd never say to someone's face is not a milder opinion than the one you hold to their face. It's the same opinion with the friction taken off. The face was the filter. Remove it and you find out what the person was actually thinking the whole time they were being polite.
We Had a Flattering Theory
We all carry a flattering theory of ourselves. It goes: I'm fundamentally a decent/reasonable/good person, and it's the circumstances, the friction, the hassle, that stop me being my best self. If only things were easier, I'd finally be free to be who I really am.
Self-checkout is that theory put to the test, at national scale, with receipts. We reduced the friction. We made everything easier. We handed millions of people the exact conditions where "who they really are" gets to walk out unsupervised.
And what walked out was: order more, steal more, rank harder, say the worse thing.
The friction wasn't oppressing a good person who was trying to get out. It was containing a junk one. "Be your true self" is not the liberation it's sold as, because for a lot of people the true self, the one that shows up when nobody is watching and nothing is hard, is worse than the one that gets held in place by a bit of shame and a bit of hassle.
That's the uncomfortable bit. Not that a corporation worked out how to sell more McFlurries. That they worked it out by removing the one thing that was making us behave, and it turned out to be so small. One bored teenager at a till. That was the whole civilising force, and it was load-bearing.
The kiosk isn't selling you a McFlurry. It's showing you who orders the McFlurry when there's no one left to see. It's you. It was always going to be you.
