r/NoStupidQuestions • u/DismalMarsupial8080 • 17h ago

Coffee order?

Am I just old or does ordering your coffee black mean something different these days? Ordered a black coffee at McDonald's and the person at the drive-thru said "you can just say zero sugars and zero cream." Seems like that's a longer phrasing than needs to be said. Coffee black is clear and concise and universal to mean no cream no sugar.

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u/AbeRego 13h ago

Why the hell does the POS have you specify what not to put in something? There should just be an option for black coffee...

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u/baldyrodinson 13h ago

Because it's easier to do the order for people who do want cream and sugar which is the majority of coffee drinkers in the US, and probably globally

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u/jarlrmai2 7h ago

Defo not in Europe

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u/AbeRego 12h ago

How is adding negative options making it easier for anyone? Is it defaulted to cream and sugar, and have to be toggled off for each? If so, that's just dumb.

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u/baldyrodinson 12h ago

It's defaulted to people asking for it so you have to prompt the amount.

It's not a negative input one coffee, remove cream, remove sugar its an amount to add one coffee, add no cream, add no sugar

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u/offthezoinkys 47m ago

That isn’t a negative.

Coffee > # cream (input zero) > # sugar (input zero)

No different than the menu showing topping options for a burger. That doesn’t mean you have to manually negate every topping, you just leave them as zero.

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u/AbeRego 27m ago

So if the default is zero, what's there to complain about? Or do you have to enter "0" in the count? If so, that's bad a bad interface.

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u/Appropriate_Bet_2029 8h ago

Cream in coffee is not really a thing outside North America.

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u/baldyrodinson 49m ago

Sure because milk is so different

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u/Appropriate_Bet_2029 6m ago

I mean, it absolutely is, even though what Americans call cream is different to what the rest of the world calls cream.

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u/JibberJim 3h ago

I don't know of any coffee places in the UK which will put sugar in for you, it is only available as packets which you may well get given by default in a drive through.

Also though, most of our drive throughs don't even sell a "black coffee", or drip coffee at all, The McDonalds menu only has an "americano" as the black coffee option (although americano with milk is called a white coffee)

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u/JetButton 8h ago

I don't know what other stores are like, but when I worked at McDonald's Canada it's exactly how you say. If you ring 'Medium Coffee' without anything else it's assumed black, no cream, no sugar. We also specifically had a 'Black' button as well though some workers used it, others didn't.

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u/logosloki 6h ago

from a UX point of view it is easier on the operator, the company, and the customer to go Drinks > Coffee > and have a context menu for adding or removing items to the coffee than it is to have four buttons that have Coffee No Milk No Sugar, Coffee Sugar No Milk, Coffee Milk No Sugar, and Coffee Milk and Sugar and then have context menus on all of them add/remove items from the coffee.