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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

It's a failure of incentives for accurate tracking.

It's the same reason that when you buy from McDonald's, the order shows on the screen as "ready for collection" then "collected", then disappears from the screen well before the food has hit the counter at all.

The staff are incentivised to just press everything through the system asap regardless of the actual status of the food. They're presumably performance-measured against targets and aren't punished for just checking that everything went through quickly regardless of the reality.

Domino's are particularly bad (or noticeably bad) for it.

It's an important lesson about remote top down control and a failure mode of JIT systems. I've long wanted to prepare a proper blog post about this exact phenomenon using Domino's and McDonald's as examples, but I haven't put in the effort to collect the right evidence to fully understand the negative effects of IT systems misrepresenting reality.

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If you've ever been told to wait in the parking lot at a fast food drive through, it's because the store has a metric on dwell time and throughput that they're optimising for.

I've had to do this with absolutely no one else behind me and no one in front of me.

It's a funny feeling, watching the machine at work

Yes this is really dumb at McDonald's. Very confusing. I'm surprised nobody checks for this practice.

But in my area they now do table delivery so I tend to use that.

Ps: it's really funny to see McDonald's proudly advertising table service as if it's some cool new thing they invented :)

I think eventually they should.

It will cause a real problem if, for example, operations engineers try to make optimisations based on the data.

For a toy example, you could imagine someone might analyze the wait times and determine that the burger frying is on the critical path. Kitchens could be instructed to add an additional person to frying burgers while reducing the headcount at the drinks station. ( You can probably tell I haven't worked in a McDonald's kitchen, but bare with the example. )

However there is a hidden reality given the data was complete fiction, and it could be that the drinks were in reality on the critical path, and this intervention which a computer model predicts will boost throughput will actually harm it.

Of course the reality of operations research will be a lot more nuanced and subtle than that, but the conclusion that fake data will lead to expensive incorrect interventions and suboptimal optimisers stands.

There is also reputation to consider. If McDonald's gets a reputation as somewhere people avoid because they are put off by the broken system, then they should be proactively working out why.

It may well already show up in satisfaction surveys that people are put off by "the computer system", but it may be misattributed to the ordering UX rather than the complete package that includes the broken tracking system, fundamentally broken by misaligned incentives.

FYI the drink station is automated. When a person places an order and it has a soda, the soda machine actually has an automatic chute that drops the correct size cup into a rotating set of cupholders and dispenses the appropriate soda so the humans can be focused on preparing the rest of the order. When it comes time to finalize the order the soda is already in the cup ready to go, just add a lid and include it as part of the order.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akv4vSXa5a4

Here in Europe they don't even add the lid anymore if you dine in. Nor do they provide a straw for diners-in (but you can still request one - I always do because the ice hurts my teeth).

Are you referring to those new fancy French reusable containers created due to new regulations? People were going crazy over them on TikTok because of how cool they looked. What do you think of them?

If you go observe the restaurant (or work there for some time) you'll notice that these failures generally occur during crunch time because the screens that instruct what is in the order become overfilled with too many orders. Nevertheless, if you are present you can observe the build process of your food and see that typically it is generally within the correct time window.

>The staff are incentivised to just press everything through the system asap regardless of the actual status of the food. They're presumably performance-measured against targets and aren't punished for just checking that everything went through quickly regardless of the reality.

But at the end they are still required to deliver the food or else there will be worse consequences. It is just not realistic to expect perfection in a noisy system where you can't exactly predict how many people will come during a busy hour. Mcdonalds is trying to improve with their massive data collection operations. Things such as reading your license plates in the drive through are not only just a profit making scheme: they help predict analytics on what you may order and the goal is to improve wait times during busy hours.

Yup. I pickup my orders from Domino's quite regularly and it the tracker is reliable. The only thing that does happen is that they sometimes do mark it "Ready for pickup" while someone still needs to take the pizza from the oven and put it into a box. So I sometimes wait a minute seconds at the counter for that to happen.

I worked at McDonald's briefly 15 years ago. Every single person bagging would mark an order as completed when someone started working on it and then use the recall button to see what the order was.

Exactly the same as my experience working at one circa 2007 or so. It was something the managers would explicitly instruct the line workers to do.

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