The Medium Is the Menu, Carl’s Jr. Hopes : Marketing: The hamburger chain is testing a video-screen ordering system. Instead of telling an employee what they want, customers push buttons.

The future of fast-food wizardry reached out Tuesday to greet Addie Lillie, but the silver-haired Monrovia woman was not quite ready for it.

“It’s nice for people who can see, but my eyes are so bad,” Lillie, 71, explained after unsuccessfully trying to negotiate her way through a video-screen ordering system at the new Carl’s Jr. outlet here.

The simple and mundane task of ordering a hamburger became a little less simple and a lot less mundane as customers sheepishly stepped up to confront a video screen to place their order.

Children rushed to the counter as if Carl’s had just become a video play land. Some customers wondered whether having to tell a computer rather than a smiling person what they wanted for lunch flew in the face of the Anaheim-based chain’s folksy image.

Most customers gave the new system the old college try, including Lillie, who was quickly assisted by a Carl’s worker in ordering salads and soft drinks for herself and her disabled husband, Sullivan.

Carl Karcher Enterprises decided to give the system a 90-day tryout in the new store on Foothill Boulevard to see whether it can speed customers through lines and help cope with what Karcher President Donald Karcher called a shortage of literate, trained workers.

“It’s the future for our industry,” Karcher predicted. “It’s going to expedite service and production.”

With video ordering, a customer reads the menu on an electronic screen built into the counter. The patron pushes on the screen to make choices--a Famous Star Hamburger or a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, for example. Customers are prompted to push another button to display choices of other items, such as desserts and different sizes of french fries.

With a touch of true fast-foot hucksterism, the computer even displays a “suggestive sell” item before the customer signs off on an order, such as, “Would you like a chocolate chip cookie?”

A real, live person repeats the order to the customer and takes the money. Another worker delivers the food to the customer’s table.

The system was designed by Management Information Support Inc. of Lakewood, Colo.

Laurie Pearson, the manufacturer’s sales manager, said the Touch 2000 system was developed by a group of Arby’s franchise holders in the Denver area. The $40,000 installation has been tested in Arby’s outlets since 1988, including recent tryouts in Irvine and Century City. The machines are also being tried at a Burger King outlet in Utah, she added.

At the Carl’s Jr. here in this San Gabriel Valley community, six screens are installed at the counter. Because each counter worker lords it over two screens, Carl’s officials hope the machines can speed customers through ordering. They are banking that customers will become as familiar with the touch screen as they are with automatic teller machines at banks.

The system is not without limits. Some customers said they had trouble figuring out the little labels, which displayed the names of products but no pictures. And the machine displays only in English, making selections potentially difficult for the multiethnic milieu of the Southland.

In the computer’s Tuesday debut, manager Cindy Stevens said that about 500 customers had stepped up to the screens by midday and that just one man flatly refused to give it a try. She said an employee took his order the old-fashioned way: by voice.

Others willingly punched in their selections, but not without some grumbles.

For Dan Schroeder of Monrovia, the machines quickly became symbolic of the decline and fall of personal service in America.

“The U.S. is trying to cultivate a service economy. When is the last time you got decent service?” he fumed.

Order-taking computers don’t contribute to the chain’s user friendly image, he said, adding: “Carl’s Jr. does not personify this operation.”

But while some of the adults fumbled, kids took to the video screens like salt to french fries.

“The kids love it,” said Meg Mortensen of Duarte. She had three children in tow, and all were ogling the screen. Her son Andy, 6, was particularly taken with the machine’s suggestion that he order a cookie.

“He was touching (the screen) before I could stop him,” she said.