PSA: Restaurant Touch Screens Are Unbelievably Gross

by Ryan Vagabundo

If you're a long-haul traveler, you're no doubt stopping in at restaurants for quite a few of your meals.

If you're stopping in at restaurants for quite a few of your meals, you've probably noticed a slow but steady proliferation of touch screen ordering kiosks.

For example, some independent McDonalds locations have opted to go kiosk-only; if you go up to the counter, there's some kid who is apparently just standing there to tell you to go back to the machine.

These are also common at smaller local restaurants, where they often have an all-in-one credit card payment system tied to a tablet that has you sign with your finger.

The most important thing to know about these screens: they're absolutely crawling with nasty bacteria.

UK newspaper Metro got the ball rolling by anonymously swabbing eight McDonalds locations in London. The result? All had feces bacteria on them, five had the specific feces bacteria type that causes kidney infections, two had staphylococcus (aka staph infections), two had listeria, and all of them potentially had the bacteria that causes general food poisoning.

Yum!

This is entirely predictable if you think it through. People touch all sorts of nasty stuff all the time. Even if they don't touch themselves, they touch their phone, which studies have shown is covered in 10 times more germs than the average toilet seat.

Restaurants add the nice spice of people going to the bathroom first, then going to the screen - especially fast food places like McDonalds that are frequently used as a road pit stop.

People don't clean their phone screens often enough, and restaurants don't clean their kiosk screens often enough. How many times have you seen someone cleaning one of these screens? I haven't seen it happen once anywhere yet. About a month ago I was at a McDonalds for about an hour and half, on my computer while waiting for a bus that stops in a nearby parking lot. I happened to be facing the touch screen kiosks. I didn't see anyone clean them once.

They have to use special wipes, which is not only an added task for workers but also an added cost. So you know they're gonna scrimp. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are never wiped down until something obvious is smeared on them.

And yes, these types of bacteria are one just about everything ... but in tiny quantities that can't hurt you. This is a concentrated source that lots of different people keep touching over and over and that is not cleaned nearly as often as it should be.

The big takeaway here is that if you can't avoid one of these things, remember to WASH YOUR HANDS THOROUGHLY after using it.

I'm really not one of those germaphobe guys, but this is enough of a road problem that I'm considering packing out some packets of quality hand sanitizer for just these situations. Having norovirus or food poisoning while traveling is 100x worse than being sick at home.

Bon appetit!