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Comment by andy800 | Hacker News Reader

I am, for better or worse, a "heavy user" of the McDonald's app. And unfortunately, all this architecture somehow still misses so many usability issues. The most annoying one, is that the app always defaults to the closest location "as the bird flies." Despite the fact that I have "favorited" a different store, and also my last 5 or 10 orders were placed at this favorite store, the app ALWAYS defaults to the first store, which may be a tenth of a mile closer but has three additional traffic lights and twice the traffic.

The app is also wildly inaccurate with store open/close times (in both directions -- sometimes it tells you a 24-hour store is "currently closed"), and the in-store employees are often confused how to ring up or serve a mobile order.

But the deals are good. BOGO QPCheese just about every day.

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I also use it a lot (I have a disabled kid who went from feeding tube to chicken nuggets and LOST weight, whatever she wants she gets).

After you order and drive away, I’ll find the app hours later still tracking me and using GPS. I almost always have to force close the app.

Then the next time I use it the previous order won’t have cleared out despite me picking it up, and I’ll have to go in and “cancel” the order.

The coupons are good though. For a week or two it was giving 30% off, and almost always has a 20% off coupon.

Very similar experience, I often open the app and it is still hung up on my previous (completed) order and I have to clear out the cart. And like you said, the "offers" are good (actually McD has raised prices quite a bit, now with the offers I'm paying about the same as face value was only a few years ago).

I will also say, despite the issues, it's better than most competitors. BK and Wendy's apps are both full of problems as well. I have had multiple accepted and paid orders on the Burger King app, when I got to the store they didn't have the item, weren't accepting mobile orders, or were totally closed.

> Then the next time I use it the previous order won’t have cleared out despite me picking it up, and I’ll have to go in and “cancel” the order.

Yes, I have noticed that here in the UK. I have to keep cancelling the previous order even though I picked it up and paid for it.

> I’ll have to go in and “cancel” the order.

You can do that?? I got an order stuck and did delete and reinstall (clear local data probably would have worked too).

Since then, I try to avoid it getting stuck by making sure the app is frontmost with the screen on while I drive through and away.

Seriously, are you iOS or Android, and where do you cancel an order either way?

> The most annoying one, is that the app always defaults to the closest location "as the bird flies."

I've got a similar annoyance with basically every app or website that offers to find things within N miles of me. I live in Western Washington on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle.

Say the first two options they give me for N are 10 miles and 25 miles.

10 miles is too small. I need more than that to include Bremerton, Silverdale, and Poulsbo, which are the three most likely places that I'll find whatever I'm looking for if it exists over here.

But 25 miles means the circle reaches past Puget Sound and includes Seattle, Bellevue, and even some of Redmond.

For example if I'm searching for Target stores and enter my zip code, their search lists my nearest store first, then 13 stores on the Seattle side (5 in Seattle, 2 in Bellevue, and 1 each in Lynnwood, Everett, Redmond, Renton, Tukwila, and Woodinville) before the store that is actually second closest to me as far as actually driving goes (Gig Harbor).

I used to sell store locator software and this is always a problem. We worked on allowing “masks” over water that basically added a penalty for any vector that passed over the mask. It’s a hard problem at any kind of scale though and even this solution wasn’t perfect (imagine a river with no bridges or ferries only)

The correct solution is to use an isochrone rather than a basic radius search. Or to simply sort all the shores within the max search radius using a vehicle routing library/api.

That doesn’t work at scale unless you have an api with unlimited request throughput or knowledge of where water is (again needing access to the raw map or unlimited api access). In this case, the stores had to mark their own masks on the map.

Even the best event / data streaming architecture (or, more generally, a backend architecture) in the universe can be negated by a lousy frontend app / frontend layer architecture. I have never ordered anything from a Macca's… but I surmise that is the consequences that McDonald app users are facing.

The article lacks any details material to the event streaming architecture instantiation, and defers the details to a follow-up blog post, so it is hard to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

The one and only time I've used the app was when I thought it would help them during the pandemic when drive thru's were actually slammed with demand while they didn't have enough workers. After waiting in the parking lot for 30 minutes while literally dozens of cars went through the drive through I went in to check on the order and the employees literally couldn't look up the status of my order without an order number which the app didn't give me at the time. An incredibly frustrating experience which turned me off to the concept altogether.

> BOGO

I always find this phrase funny. Isn't buying one and getting one the normal state of affairs?

In UK we actually use BOGOF, which makes sense. No idea why one would drop the all-important F.

Not an english speaker, but I can't imagine "get" used for anything non free, especially after a "buy".

"Can you get me a pint?", "sigh - I've got to get a new phone", "buy a canoe get a paddle half price".

Buy implies buying, get implies buying/receiving, possibly at a cost, possibly an offer, all we know is you have it. Buy one get one free is standard here, BOGO would cause customer service staff to go mad from "do you mean 'Buy one, get two?'" inquiries.

"Buy one get another half off" or "I'm going to buy it online then go get it." The second may be using a different "get," grammar lessons were a long time ago.

No, if you get something you aren’t buying it. Either you say you pay for an item and get it, or you say you buy it. Or you get it for free.

BOGT doesn’t sound as good

should probably be BOGOF - buy one get one _free_

but BOGO sounds fun, while BOGOF sounds like an insult, or maybe an alien civilization with terrible poetry

> while BOGOF sounds like an insult

That's a feature, not a bug.

How about BOGA for buy one, get another

> The most annoying one, is that the app always defaults to the closest location "as the bird flies."

So many apps do this and it's really annoying. There are quite a lot of commercial activity on the other side of the river from where I live, and every store's site I visit, or app I use, always recommends a couple of locations that are closest "as the bird flies", but require me to take a ferry, or drive an hour and a half, whereas the store that's actually the quickest to get to for me is just 15 minutes away from me in the next town over on my side of the river.

It's understandable though, because it's so much easier to calculate straight line distance, and I guess in most cases it gives the right, or close to the right answer. I've just accepted that I live in an edge case area for how the majority of commerces calculates these things.

MCD drive thru:

> Hi do you have a mobile order today?

< Yes.

> Inexplicable silence for 10-15 seconds

> (New voice) How can I help you?

< Hi I’m picking up a mobile order (??)

> What’s the code?

Their process of using the app at the drive through is missing a step and it’s annoying.

When I worked in fast food forever ago, our drive thru had an automatic greeting that played when a car drove up, regardless of whether a cashier was ready to talk to you.

Sometimes the cashier was too busy to catch anything you said to the auto greeting.

No concerns about privacy issues? The Canadian iOS version of the app insists on running in background and complains of you disable precise location. This is slimy.

You give up location data in exchange for discounts, that’s the bargain you agree to by using the app, whether you realize it or not.

I refuse to play this game. When I go to McDonalds I pay in cash and don’t use the app, it’s insulting to be offered 20% off to allow McDonalds to track my precise location, no thanks.

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