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Comment by keanzu | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a good way to promote the app specifically and McDonald's in general. I wonder what the ROI on something like this is vs a more traditional marketing campaign.

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Their franchisees bore the entire cost of giving out the free food. McDonald's corporate paid nothing except for paging someone in to fix the bug.

Well, the software is provided by corporate so franchisees likely have a claim for compensation.

Whether they would dare at the risk of facing any negative consequences is another issue...

I don't know if McDonald's food is that expensive. I would expect that most of the costs are the employees, the building, and the equipment.

Well, their employees had to do all the work to make that food without the franchise getting revenue for it, but the employees were presumably still paid

I don’t know about McDonald’s but I knew a manager at a Taco Bell and a lot of this fast food takes very very little work to make. Many Taco Bells can run on just a couple people when they’re not having to clean or maintain anything.

But the people were already there, it only happened over the course of a single day; it's not like they paid the people more because they were busier or making more orders.

They can only handle so many orders in a given hour. If too many people took advantage of this, then queues probably got longer, discouraging potential customers.

Customers, who would've paid nothing anyway, presumably

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