McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France

I remember at some point the French computer retailer had an issue when running a "buy 2 get 1 free" offer on blu-rays. One could remove the two bought items from the cart and the free one would remain. Repeat ad-libidum.

Last year Amazon ran an offer where all photographic gear cost $94. All of it, even lenses which retailed for over 13k. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/07/19/amazon-prime-... If there is one regret I have in my life, it was not checking the prime day that fateful morning.

That was a problem. So I emailed them to let them know that it was an issue, and received a phone response. I was told "oh, that's not a big deal." I responded by telling them to place a $500 box of cigars in the field.

NOW it was a big deal.

Apparently around 400 orders had been made using it before it was found, which on the scale of things isn't as bad as it could have been

From what I followed it didn't seem malicious, it was a broken attempt to implement a referral bonus

When tech companies funnel revenue to Ireland or other places to avoid taxes, is that stealing?

People tell cashiers when they make a mistake not out of a desire to avoid "stealing" (stealing is taking something without permission or right by the way so neither case is actually stealing by the way) but because they empathize with an actual human being making mistakes like they sometimes do and want to be helpful.

Corporations can't at the same time replace people with machines to optimise their bottom line and expect their customers to remain empathetic. Once you put in place automatic system you have to owe them. You can't win on both side.

If Amazon gives huge reductions by mistake, well, too bad for Amazon, the reductions are still there. It has absolutely nothing to do with shoplifting.

To most sane people, it is not stealing when a transaction price is set, and that price is paid.

If you buy a car and complete the transaction and as you're driving off the lot the dealership says, sorry, that car is 200,000 not 20,000; would that be stealing? Why or why not?

Perhaps the world would be a better place if everyone behaved honestly all the time, but that is an unstable state because it takes only a single person to deviate from the norms in such a world to exploit all the systems that weren't designed with bad actors in mind.

The cashier situation is not comparable because it's not exploitable reliably. Unless you have an easily distracted cashier that can be cheated all the time. If that were the case I could see some less scrupulous people starting to do that.

Edit: I don't eat at McDonald's. Do you, downvoters?

This is the same anti-empathetic "what can we get away with" dynamic as stores engaging in surveillance-based advertising, deploying menacing robots that bother customers, setting up mobile device tracking and facial recognition cameras, price discriminating with coupons and routine sales, etc. Also when any customer service fleshbot says they "can't" do something because the computer says no.

It's only as technologists that we see the details of technology as ultimately mediating interpersonal actions rather than just taking its presence as a given. We know better than to mess around with holes in apps this way, largely because it's in the category of malicious hacking which generally gets punished pretty hard (burn the witch!), especially if you are one of the first to find such tricks.

But I personally am not going to get too upset over some individuals getting occasional freebies, especially while similar abuse by businesses tends to get normalized and then scaled up.

I've always wondered how much of those are actually mistakes, and not just media stunts

To understand why people are generally ok with this, ask yourself: Who benefits, who loses?

In this case, some random person benefits, and the company (hopefully not the franchisee) loses.

"Robots are stealing our Goddamned jobs!" is a popular sentiment around the globe. Who is using these robots to replace jobs that should belong to people? Corporations. Corporations are not people, as much as some sorts seem to believe they are.

Taking advantage of a corporation's mistake hurts billionaires and millionaires (this includes McDonald's franchisees, as the corporation doesn't allow just anyone to become one, costs are high), who aren't really people in the conventional sense of the word.

These corporations, billionaires, millionaires and so forth are the ones who are stealing from the people; taking advantage of their errors for something like this is good. McDonald's spends millions a year on lobbying to harm the common good; $5 or $10 or even $1,000,000 from them will mean nothing to them, but will go a long way for the people taking it.

Taking advantage of McDonald's Corporation errors is morally no different than shoplifting from Wal*Mart, which similarly spends millions lobbying and harming the common good, the only difference is that the former presents no risk to the person doing it.

In an era where "No one should be a billionaire!" is a popular political viewpoint, and billionaires have effectively stolen the common person's political agency through lobbying, it seems reasonable that people won't see any harm in taking stuff from them, especially small amounts that they won't miss, like this.

I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but it's definitely reasonable and understandable to see why people don't care about taking from people who, from their perspective, didn't earn it in the first place, and won't notice that it's gone.

Also, Amazon have more wealth than like half the population put together. A few lenses aren't going to put a dent in that. The only case I can think of that did was the "Hoover free flights" fiasco, and that wasn't even an error.

This looks like the software was missing some internal sanity checks. For example, it was hammered into us at Caltech that any answers we derive need to be sane. If an energy value turned out to be negative, we would have to note on the solution something like "the negative value is clearly wrong but I don't know where my mistake is" or we'd get not just zero credit on the solution, but a negative credit.

Software should have the same sort of checks. It's called "contract programming", the simplest manifestation of which are asserts.

I wonder if it's just as garbage everywhere else

I assume it’s related to an equipment problem at these locations, since they’re also often cash-only after 2am, and possibly an address location since both insist they have a different address than what’s reported in the app.

A two-minute phone call and they refunded it all.

What's bad about McDonald's is not that the food is unhealthy (it is, but no more than most restaurants), but that the food is so cheap that so many people regularly eat it instead of proper home-cooked meals. Also, it's easy to get way too much food and sugary pop.

I eat at McDonald's a few times a month, but I don't view it as an unhealthy habit. My typical meal is two sandwiches, either McDoubles or Junior Chickens. That's less than 800 calories in total (I usually drink water). I rarely go for the combo meals or the big sandwiches.