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When I was young it was common for a McDonalds to have 10+ employees working the lunch rush, one for every station and a few floaters cleaning the dining room. Someone took your order right away, and you got your meal in a minute or two.
Now I go and it's 3, sometimes 2 employees. You order on a tablet, and 10+ minutes later an overworked employee sets it on the counter and scurries away, probably after realizing it's not a drive-thru order. The dining room hasn't been cleaned since 6am, the trash cans are full. There's at least one alarm going off constantly.
Back then they were run based on someones intuition of what makes a good customer experience. Now they're run based on the data, and the data says they have enough loyal-to-a-fault customers like the author that chronically understaffing is more profitable than providing a good experience.
Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
When I was young, they predicted orders and had hot food waiting, you would get your meal as you ordered. Unfortunately, after merciless teasing by other chains, they relented and only assemble to order and cook to order in some cases. Huge increase in lunch latency; ordering via the app can help a little...
So of course they delete the orders as soon as humanly possible, relying on the printouts stuck randomly around the kitchen to try to keep track, and now anyone in the management chain who does care about actual service time is completely blinded to how well or poorly they're doing. Even a manager who is out there helping, and can plainly see how slow they are, still knows the metrics are meaningless so it's hard to track progress towards improvement.
It can? I used it once a few years ago and they wouldn't start making the food until I was in the parking lot.
It's been so obvious for a long long time now, but people still keep believing that smart things make you faster or give you a better life or whatever, but that just doesn't add up. It's just frustrating, often takes longer and the only reason it is there is to grab your data. There is no other reason.
Edit: Found it. You did get a coke for free. Damn, 2004. https://www.burgerschachteln.de/2004/Sonstiges/index.htm
Now? In the queue behind 23 other bespoke orders while they try and service the drive-thru as quickly as possible and nothing stopping them taking the burger that was made for me and adding it to another order.
I was so angry once, I walked out after paying and I just didn't wait for my breakfast muffin because the whole thing like the parent says is that they used to care about efficiency as well as customer experience and now that goes out the window.
I didn't know it at the time, since it was my first job, but they got bonuses based on how fast they could make us work to fulfill those orders during certain times of the day. A backed up drive thru line would always get faster treatment than in store customers. Unless it was a special case, like a bus kid of field trip kids. I assume in those situations the managers could argue for their bonus based on the large amount of sales they got in store.
They obviously didn't share those bonuses with us.
If they are indeed saying understaffing doesn't matter because their current customers don't care, their loyalty numbers will only go up because of that sampling bias. Relatively upscale fast casual places (e.g. Chipotle) will fill replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
Don't underestimate the equally intense downward pressure on staffing that minimum-wage hikes have provided (for instance, in California). I won't speculate if it's been "worth it" since it'll devolve into an off-topic political debate, but basic economics does predict that since labor costs twice what it did 10 years ago, they'll do everything to minimize how much labor they buy. Couple that with what you said, basically, using "Moneyball" techniques to finesse everything with all these optimizations, we get the operations we see now in all retail establishments.
And even if there are states that haven't done the minimum wage changes, the markets that have are so big. The national businesses that have adapted to it have proven out their barebones-labor model there - why wouldn't they roll out most of the changes nationwide?
I think if someone launched a fast-food place or a drugstore in 1995 that operates with the type of skeleton crew they use today, it would fail overnight due to people having a choice. But today, since essentially 100% of retail operates this same way, they don't experience any pressure to do better.
In-N-Out allows us to discard this notion. They've maintained full staffing while simultaneously paying staff above-market rates (even in California). They only charge 30 cents more for a basic cheeseburger, and the burger is much higher quality, so even that is hard to attribute to wages.
No. You should never have to try to figure out what companies are collecting or how they are using it. They should not ever be allowed to aggregate data at the individual level. And if aggregate data ever becomes fine-grained enough to fingerprint individuals, then regulation should force coarser graining. (This would mean that better machine learning systems would result in companies being able to collect less data.) We should have forced audits of every consumer company.
> Privacy experts I spoke with said this level of detail may feel invasive, but it's fairly standard for how large companies in the US run their loyalty programs.
Something can be both invasive and standard. This practice is both.
I grew up in New York state, but my dad used to shop from a company called Cable Car Clothiers, based out of San Francisco, and he'd order everything by mail or over the phone. He probably shopped there for 20 years or more before I moved to San Francisco and I literally walked by that very shop on my way to work. He knew that my new job took me by their storefront and so he asked me to go in and pick something up for him. I had a short conversation with the shop owner who had a retail system that showed every order my dad had ever placed going all the way back to the late 80s. There is a bunch of derivative data that is available when you have a log like this, like the total amount ever spent, the most frequently purchased item, date of the most recent purchase, date of the oldest purchase, etc.
Is it the scale of McDonalds that's causing concern, or is it something else?
Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
That's not really all that nefarious is it?
From what was listed in the article it seemed like it was all data generated by the chain. If it included a lot of stuff from outside sources I would probably be put off, but this seems fairly benign.
I suppose they could be sharing that information with third parties and that could be bad.
It could even be helpful, if they know what you usually order they could present that as a "one-click" option rather than you having to navigate their incredibly tedious standard kiosk UI to order what you want.
I've always wondered how they are able to get convictions from a theft months ago with no evidence that you actually possessed the item after you left the store? Is it really good enough to just have video that looks like you probably stole something and an inventory system that they claim shows lost inventory?
Journo is search of a narrative that isn't there. McDonalds could stop tracking customers tomorrow and people would still be eating the same food there in 50 years.
The secret sauce is has more to do with actual sauce than anything claimed here.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
Brother, did you give your brain to AI already? There exists technology
However, companies do have an absurd amount of data on us, and the fact that it's automatically collected makes it more troubling, not less. But it's normalized.
I don't think so. You can inflate raw data arbitrarily. They could have laid out on a page the decimal byte values of a one minute video clip of you waiting in line or something. Something redacted by a human would be much more dense in terms of relevant information, and much more digested. If it's just a data dump then at least it's information that not necessarily anyone knows, in the sense of residing in someone's brain.
Information collection is also not necessarily malicious. You can never know what you might need in the future. I was kind of on board with Recall, if the data could live in storage in my control and can I could turn it on and off at will.
Anyone collecting information has an obligation to think about how it could be used in the future - whether by government or by corporation.
McDonald's has also very visibly and successfully switched to gamifying their order selection with machines and dark patterns to drive people to higher priced items, so it's safe for anyone there to assume any data collected will be used to harm customers in such ways.
"We predict he won't get fries until Monday. Send a push notification."
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
“Oh no McDonald’s runs a Customer Lifetime Value algorithm, a thing in use for decades and which has minimal privacy implications.”
“GASP the Golden Arches knows I like Diet Coke and has applied a marketing segmentation to me!”
Congrats, you’ve discovered they use concepts taught in Marketing 101?
I don’t think any of this is non-surprising in the “we’ve been conditioned to think this is normal” kind of way. This is really just a basic transaction history with extremely basic non-AI analytics applied.
The length of the document sounds scary but it also seems like it’s essentially a transaction list.
I would have thought the article might get into more details like location tracking like being able to predict where that person would be at a certain time, or maybe details inferred from data like “this person buys McFlurries when they’re on their period.”
Something scarier would be figuring our friend and family relationships, where relatives and friends live, etc.
I’m sure that could be done with data like this, and it’s critical that companies like McDonald’s keep that data secure and delete it when they don’t need it. We should have better laws in that regard.
At some point McDonald’s doesn’t really care about all that extra creepy stuff. Anything beyond figuring out your buying preferences is not useful information to them. The biggest concern would be that they would be willing to sell that data to someone else who is interested.
Try to sell me more burgers and fries? Fine, but don’t tell my doctor, or palantir, or the government etc etc. I don’t believe that’s a huge ask as a consumer in the Information Age.
It also wasn't clear how much of the data they have is because he's using the app. If it is, it seems much/most of the data was in his control.
Do they think McDonalds (or whichever company) is going to spend a lot of money building an app and a rewards program and not expect an ROI on it?
I agree we should not expect everyone to have taken a marketing class - but I sure expect the author of the piece to have demonstrated some curiosity about some of the terms. And we know they did, because the author decoded them into plainer language in their table. So why present these elements as an abnormal thing for McDonald’s to compute about them, rather than something an undergrad might be expected to compute as part of a project?
McDonalds is just a restaurant, they predict what menu items you like and how likely you will come back, is that really a problem? What is the concern here? I don't use their app but presumably for those that do, isn't this exactly the type of data that would simply influence whether the app offers a coupon or something? Or how well a franchise is doing? Maybe also what to keep on the menu or how much to stock?
What exactly is the bar here I wonder? McDonalds has security cameras, it also has menu kiosks with cameras (I think?). The alternate reality evil tech-like McDonalds could have theoretically used facial recognition to categorize all footage of any given customer, then used this footage to estimate their friends, spouse, BMI, age, gender, ethnic group, attractivness, disability, etc. They could then sell it to third party data brokers for extra cash.
That would certainly be the kind of dystopian surveillance to get me swinging my pitchfork around, but this? Having assumed the worst I'm now walking away realizing McDonalds might not be so bad after all.
It should not shock anyone that Amazon has an entire history of everything that you've ever bought. I would likely not surprise anyone here that they have a log of every item you've clicked on, or even moused over. The beauty of modern systems is that storing all of that data is very cheap.
The dark side is if the fellow queried McDonalds and found not just his McDonalds trends, but his shopping habits from, say, Target. Where McDs and Target perhaps had a data sharing agreement to correlate customers.
Or seeing a copy of his credit report in there buried underneath the stack of Diet Coke and Quarter Pounder receipts.
That's where the concern shows up. Not the raw data, but the cross cutting concerns as the data is potentially more centralized. Perhaps into a company that you don't even know is collecting info on you. Some corp that McDs is sharing with. You request your dossier from McDs because you know they're collecting your data. But you don't request it from Company X, because you don't know they're doing so.
Then there's the issue of handing the data over to the authorities without so much as a warrant -- different problem.
The classic case here is Target inferring that someone was pregnant before her family did[1] - so yeah, this is nothing new.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...