iCoke?
This past weekend we took a family trip to one of our favorite drive-ins in Heber. They have burgers and milkshakes all enveloped in a theme of trains. In our family we just call it The Train. It’s official name is Dairy Keen. It is an institution in Heber and worth the stop.
One of the long time draws, at least in our family, is their fountain drinks. They have what we call the “good ice” (e.g. pebbled, not cubes) and they always have bottles of cherry and vanilla syrup on the counter next to drink machines so you can easily turn your Coke into a hand-mixed Cherry Coke. It always seems to taste better when you add your own cherry syrup to your Coke.
But the future has arrived. In place of the standard self-serve fountain machines they used to have and bottles of cherry syrup, they have installed 3 of what have to be newest version of a Coke machine that I have ever seen. Instead of a row of dispensers lined up across the front of the machine, there is a big tall silvery gray machine with a hole in the front, ideally sized to hold a cup. Inside the hole you can dispense ice into your cup. There is also a single fountain dispenser.
The logistics are this:
- Push your cup against the ice dispenser at the back of the machine
- Fill your cup with the desired amount of ice
- Put your cup down under the lone fountain dispenser
- Refocus your attention on the touch screen monitor positioned in front of your face, at eye level
- Select the drink you want
- Push the silver dispenser button just below the touch screen
- Hold the dispenser button down until your cup is full of your preferred soda
When we sat down to eat our table was situated in a way that I could watch people try to use these drink machines. And it was very interesting to watch. It made me wonder how much time Coke spent watching people try to use these things. There were a variety of reactions as people walked up to them.
I saw an older couple walk up to them. The gentleman didn’t say anything, but you could tell he wanted nothing to do with the machine. He watched his wife try to figure it how to make it work and then handed his cup to her once she had it down.
The wife on the other hand, was at first a little confused, not sure where to start. She put her cup under the dispenser and waited. Nothing happened. She realized she had to push a button on the touch screen. Once she picked her flavor of soda, she waited for it dispense. But the machine would eventually get tired of waiting for her and revert to the main screen and then she would have to select her flavor again. Finally she realized that not only did you have select the flavor, but you then had to push the button to dispense your drink.
This seemed the most common approach of the people I watched in the 20 minutes or so I was sitting there. People would first register slight confusion about how the machine worked. They would figure out how to select the flavor of soda they wanted. Then they would wait for the drink to come out. Which wouldn’t. So they would select their flavor again. More than once I watched a person go through this process several times before they figured out that you had to also push the dispenser button.
I also watched someone that thought the touch screen would work like an iPad or iPhone screen and they not only pushed the icon for their choice of drink, but tried to drag it across the screen using Apple’s gestures approach to navigation on a touch screen.
In addition to the touchscreen approach to drinking soda, Coke also added the concept of organizing things in folders. I was after some lemonade, so I touched the recognizable Minute Maid Lemonade icon on the screen and was immediately presented with about 5 other choices. Lemonade, Cherry Lemonade, Strawberry Lemonade, Light Lemonade and some others I can’t remember. This seemed to be the case for every icon on the main screen. You couldn’t just touch the Coke icon. You had to choose Coke and then choose from the family of Coke drinks. Or choose Diet Coke and then choose from the family of Diet Cokes.
The future of drink dispensing is already here at a mom and pop drive-in in a small Utah town.. And in order to get a drink you need to know how to navigate a touch screen interface and the concept of folders. Select Coke and then choose Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, etc. Select Diet Coke and then choose Diet Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, Diet Vanilla Coke, etc.
It’s getting hard to get a drink these days. Figure out how the dispenser works, choose which variation of Coke you want. After drinking my cherry Minute Maid Lemonade I wished Coke had spent more time on the drink and less on a fancy way to dispense it.
Whatever happened to just ordering a burger and a Coke?
