AI Checkouts Made BMO Stadium Worse: Slower Lines, Fewer Choices

BMO Stadium’s shift to AI/camera-based checkout kiosks slowed lines, reduced menu variety, and worsened food quality compared to last year. Even ‘quick’ smart-cooler kiosks were sluggish and error-prone, causing the author to miss parts of the match just to buy water during 87°F heat. The author rejects vendor claims of faster service, arguing human cashiers were quicker and better for fans.

Key Points

AI/camera-based checkout kiosks replaced multiple staffed lanes, adding 1–2 minutes per purchase and creating long lines in the heat.
Menu variety was slashed to items easier for computer vision to recognize, reducing quality, choice, and portion sizes.
‘Smart’ vending coolers were slow, occasionally mischarged customers, and lacked paper receipts, causing delays and missed game time.
In hot, crowded conditions, slow access to water became a health and safety concern.
Vendor claims of dramatically faster checkout and higher profits are contradicted by on-the-ground experience; human cashiers were faster and better.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is overwhelmingly negative and largely in agreement with the article's critical assessment. Commenters echoed the author's frustrations with poorly implemented automation, viewing it as technology for technology's sake that degrades user experience, prioritizes corporate profit over service, and is often mislabeled as 'AI'. The single opposing viewpoint was a specific critique about the article's speculation on menu reduction.

In Agreement

Many commenters shared similar negative experiences with poorly implemented tech in event venues, particularly systems that force app installations for basic purchases, highlighting a 'massive arrogance problem within tech' where products don't 'get out of the way'.
There was strong agreement that automation requiring constant human intervention (like the Mashgin kiosks described) is not true automation and actively makes processes worse, akin to self-checkouts needing a human to scan, rearrange, and confirm every item.
Several users concurred that the primary motivation for such 'AI' implementations is to cut costs and boost profits by reducing human labor, rather than genuinely improving the customer experience, especially when customers are a 'captive market' inside a venue.
The suggestion was made that this 'unnecessary technology' could also be a 'data-harvesting scheme', adding another layer of concern about the new systems.
It was acknowledged that even traditional self-checkouts can be problematic, but the article's examples illustrate particularly egregious failures of automation.

Opposed

One commenter explicitly dismissed the article's claim that AI was responsible for the reduced food menu as 'speculative' and 'almost certainly incorrect', stating they stopped reading there.