Nearly half of restaurants plan to replace or significantly upgrade their POS in 2026. At FSTEC in Dallas, PAR's SVP of Product told a packed room the POS market is splitting into two camps: open ecosystems and walled gardens. Which way your POS goes will shape almost everything else in your tech stack.

In this episode, I break down what the 44% stat says (and what the slide left out), how the restaurant tech stack outgrew the POS, and why every serious platform, from Toast to PAR, is some kind of hybrid.

If you run restaurants, you'll get four questions to ask any POS vendor before you sign a contract you'll live with for five to seven years, plus which path tends to fit independents, emerging brands, and enterprise operators. If you sell restaurant tech, you'll hear what a wave of POS switching means for your customer base and three moves to make now.

Team garden or team open road? Tell me in the comments.

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmolinari

Visit Popcorn GTM: https://popcorngtm.com

I read a Wall Street Journal article about fast food chains walking back the kiosk experiment, then drove to a Wendy's and ran my own live test. What I watched an older couple go through at the kiosk, while I built a five part custom Freestyle drink and bit into my burger before they finished ordering, says everything about where restaurant technology went wrong and how the biggest names in QSR are now spending real money to fix it.

McDonald's is retraining over two million workers worldwide and grading franchisees on hospitality. Burger King is mandating staffed counters and moving kiosks to the side. Wendy's is reviewing its own AI drive-thru trials. Chick-fil-A is winning on service by pairing tablets with people, not replacing people with tablets. This episode breaks down the receipts, what "good" technology actually looks like versus what just looks modern, and a kiosk feature I think every operator should be demanding from their vendors.

In this episode:

• The Wendy's kiosk experiment that inspired this episode
• Why fast food went all in on digital for a decade, and what it actually got right
• McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Starbucks all walking back the digital-first playbook
• Why the Freestyle machine is proof technology isn't the enemy
• The Chick-fil-A service data and what it says about tech plus people beating tech alone
• What operators should actually watch for in their own dining rooms
• An idea for kiosks borrowed straight from self-checkout lanes

Referenced: Haddon, Heather. "America's Fast-Food Chains Are Making a Big Pivot—Back to Humans." The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 10, 2026. https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/americas-fast-food-chains-are-making-a-big-pivotback-to-humans-3b8bb5b8

Modern Solutions for Modern Restaurants is hosted by Paul Molinari, founder of Popcorn GTM, and distributed on the Savor FM Network.

https://linkedin.com/in/paulmolinari https://popcorngtm.com

Have you ever had to help a stranger through a kiosk? Tell me about it in the comments, and let me know about any restaurant tech that's created more friction than it removed.

Keep building modern solutions for modern restaurants.

This episode revisits the 2021–2022 wave of restaurant Web3 experiments—Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Applebee’s, Chipotle, Bored & Hungry, and Starbucks Odyssey—and explains why none are still running by 2026. Paul Molinari argues the failures stemmed from being marketing campaigns instead of products, offering ownership without useful utility, inviting speculation that undermined loyalty, and adding customer friction through wallets and other crypto steps. He then spotlights Blackbird, founded by Ben Leventhal (Eater, Resy), which quietly uses tokens and NFTs under the hood to power a shared cross-restaurant currency ($FLY) and a payments product (Blackbird Pay) charging a flat 2% transaction fee. The takeaway: focus on outcomes like fee savings and portable loyalty, not Web3 vocabulary or architecture. Visit: Popcorn GTM at https://popcorngtm.com

00:00 NFT Restaurant Mania

02:10 Early Brand Stunts

04:25 Bored Ape Burger Reality

05:39 Starbucks Odyssey Rise

08:40 Why Web3 Loyalty Died

09:16 Four Causes of Death

14:57 Two Ideas Survive

15:57 Blackbird Explained

17:58 Payments and Network Effects

21:51 Does Blockchain Matter

23:02 Operator Vetting Playbook

25:18 What to Watch Next

26:22 Final Takeaways