I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
wired.com
wired.com
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.
It's worse, we simply abstract away everything else, including innumerable things that are quantifiable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
For example, McDonald's reported a full-year 2025 net income (profit) of $8.563 billion, an increase from the $8.223 billion reported in 2024.
May 'annual profit' continue to be the only measure that has mattered, does matter, or will ever matter to those that bask in the radiance of perpetual earning growth!
The correct question is: how much more or less would they make if they were applying some other philosophy?
At least in the context of this conversation.
And, an increase in profit of $340 million across 13,882 stores (in the US) is less impressive.
And presumably that $8.563 billion is McDonalds corporate and the franchisees didn’t see all of that gain.
What if we knew that Maccas could have made $20 billion, but ignoring qualitative data reduced their profits to $8.563 billion. Do those decisions still look smart?
I suppose you meant quantitative and it's just a typo
Sure, I said.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with..."
"Umm, can I just tell you why I cancelled my service, as if you and I were both human beings?"
"I'm sorry, I have to follow this script exactly."
So I apologized to the guy and hung up.
The problem isn't an ability to understand long term signals. The problem is that if a franchisee tried to generate that signal corporate would filter them right out of their franchise.
> it takes a lot of work for a number to mean anything and we largely aren’t doing it
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.
I've noticed this at other restaurants too and have debated emailing corporate when it happens (since I'm guessing the manager of the restaurant also is on board).
It's not that I don't get _why_ they do it, but it just compounds the problem. Corporate will see the stats and go 'oh X employees is enough at Y hour' despite 10 people waiting for their order since it said complete.
I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.
I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”
But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.
The naive take is to think any one of these actions happen in a vacuum. Plus if this is happening at any scale at a restaurant then the manager probably told them to do it.
Either way, the conversation would be better without your involvement.
But, like you said, I realized what they were doing, and how they quite possible NEED to do it just to keep dumb management happy.
So of course I didn't say anything.
> The impulse to rat on low level employees for gaming the system
While waiting their <$20 fast, cheap food.
When I worked in fast food, in the nineties, the managers were under pressure to optimize a variety of metrics. But they didn't have a lot of carrots or sticks, and most of the rank-and-file employees put in an honest day's work but beyond that didn't give that much of a shit.
That was probably true at some point, but it isn’t now.
My teenager works part time at McDonalds. She tells me the drive thru at her store is equipped with cameras that automatically track the progress of each vehicle from order taking to payment to presentation, as well as into the waiting bay if you end up there.
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
The only counterexample I can think of is In-N-Out, which is always packed with customers and always has a large and very busy kitchen staff.
I think that explains it. The singular Carl's Jr in a nearby city was always busy, for a similar reason. it closed during covid, for whatever reason, and the next nearest one is at least 2 hours away. Compared to the 6 McDonald's in my metro: 4 Taco Bell, 3 Whataburgers, 5 Wendy's, and 4 Open BKs out of 7 that were open prior to 2020.
The Raising Cane's is always packed to bursting, too, because there's only 1 in the area.
My wife laughs at me because every time I see that commercial, I point out that if our local BK (now out of business! surprise!) had to do that, they'd have been out of business even faster. Every single time I went there, they screwed up at least one thing. I just finally stopped going.
Doesn't matter; the price of McDonald's has gotten to the point where it costs about the same as the local diner whose food is exponentially tastier and they'll give me a free soda as I wait for my food to be made.
I’ve used the app once - it was slower than ordering at the kiosk, I was bombarded by ads and promos, and they didn’t pre cook my food.
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.
Or in the slim chance that there is a line it's good. But I've rarely seen a number of kiosks insufficient to prevent lines.
I worked at McDonald's at that time. We would make a tray of 12 cheeseburgers and microwave them then leave them in the warmer until they're sold or got disgusting enough for customers to complain.
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.
Yes, peepul, this was a thing.
You'd go in, and ask them what's hot, and you'd pick one and pay and you're off to the munchies races.
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.
In the DT you are placing yourself at the mercy of every order before you. A delay to the front order at the DT in a peak time delays every car that's entered the queue. Maybe as many as 8 orders. So a delay of one minute there wastes 8 human minutes of life.
At the counter, on the other hand, it's not serial of course, so a delay to your individual order affects only you. So, even by old-fashioned good business sense (rather than modern MBA KPI-optimizing logic), it's reasonable to waste 2 minutes of your time, instead of one minute each of a whole queue at the DT.
(Yes, you can park the delayed car at the DT, but trust me, that's not a sustainable solution to do routinely. In general, getting "behind" during a lunch rush is an extremely tough and frustrating ordeal for the whole crew, no matter what)
Tell this to the idiots at supermarket checkout who wait for the total price to ring up before they reach into their purse (or whatever) to retrieve their checkbook and only then begin filling in alllllll the check's fields...
But current system is close to perfection for me.
I remember 1980s McDonalds, where they had steel rows of styrofoam encased Big Macs and Quarter Pounders behind seven tills of staff, with little metal separators telling the time they were made so anything older than 10 minutes was sent to the garbage. This was before drive throughs, but even with a line five deep you'd be out in 5 minutes at noon. My boss would take us for lunch every day, it was amazing.
We call it an automatiek. It's not just FEBO, there's a few other chains that do it too. Like Smuller's at the train stations. I always love the satay croquettes.
I get what you're saying, but a downside to what you're describing is guaranteed waste of food. If food is prepared based on expectations, there's no way that all the food will be ordered before it goes cold/end of hours, and has to be dumped.
If you sell 80-150 hamburgers at the lunch rush, front loading 70 so there’s a bunch at the start is fine.
Data is useful, but only to a point. A process-first approach (guided by clearly defined quality characteristics) is going to produce more meaningful and sustainable results: products and services that customers value more, lower costs and less waste for the company, and happier and more empowered employees.
Now you hear about people being "on call" for basically minimum wage jobs, called in for half shifts, sent home early, etc. Stringing together 40 hours at a job like this is basically a job in itself.
I'm not so sure the experience (of talking to fast food employees?), if you can call it that, matters all that much to people who want to grab a quick bite with their family.
To me the biggest change in restaurants is the norms/expectations of service personnel. e.g. I'll walk into a restaurant and the young hostess might stare at me until I go "Uh, for two please". Or the waiter at a restaurant might make it feel like he's only standing in for his friend and never was a waiter before in his life before I release him back to the waiter social circle going on in the corner. But I can't blame that on "data".
I could be wrong: Was register-work a welcome reprieve from the Potato Salt Mines of something even worse or more-stressful?
Public sentiment (at least that I hear) towards McDonald’s, Subway and Chipotle have dropped a lot.
You’d get better service if a glowing neon sign appeared above your head that said:
“A customer is standing in front of you. Tap here to begin.”
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 replace McDonalds for the customers they lose. The circle of service industry life.
Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
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.
McDonalds, of course, is 5% corp-owned flagships and 95% franchise "opportunities". They don't have customers, they have tenant farmers who work the land leased to them.
So many parties either directly exploiting others or being able to do it by taking significant cuts of revenue for questionable value...
I sometimes have the urge to go to an In-N-Out, but the drive through line loops through their own parking lot and into the one next door. There are people standing outside the restaurant because the indoor dining line extends past the doors. I don't really want to sit in my car or stand in line for 30 minutes.
I used to go to In-N-Out weekly when I worked a late shift; the line after midnight is much shorter.
They literally can't cut staff because they only make money due to the incredibly high number of meals they serve per hour. So they have to serve as efficiently as possible, which requires that fully-staffed kitchen and counter, or there wouldn't be enough time in the mealtime hours to do that volume otherwise. It's just as impossible for them to cut any staff as an airline could remove pilots from the cockpit, in that the whole operation would cease to function.
McDonald's and the rest are never going to be In-N-Out though because it would take years of operating at steep losses in the hopes people would notice how fast and tasty they'd become. I can't think of a mature company that's ever pulled off going from "boring mainstream place" to "cult favorite" like that.
McDonalds chose to aggressively enshittify, In-N-Out did not. You're probably right that McDonalds will never be that again, I don't think they even want to. If you cut minimum wage in half today, they'd keep the same staffing levels and the franchise owners would pocket the difference.
Again, caveating I'm not a franchise owner and don't know the details in depth, but the bulk of what McDonald's collects is the rent on the stores themselves, which is fixed, and royalties are a percentage of gross sales, not profits, so they shouldn't have much reason to care if franchises are profitable as long as they stay in business.
Having a dining room attracts "undesirable" people who hang out inside and use your bathroom. By killing dining rooms businesses will eliminate one of few remaining third spaces and reliable public washrooms.
Definitely results in me going far less. But I'm also the type to complain and demand a refund if my food takes more than 10 minutes at a fast food place.
Like the entire reason I'm even buying your crap food is because I'm in a hurry and it's cheap. Now it's not cheap but I'm still in a hurry. I'll just climb over the counter go back and make it myself at this point.
Until customers say nope and stop going it will just get worse. Too many people are on autopilot and won't just say no. I remember last time I'm at subway they're like "oh it's an extra 2 dollars for pickles" and I laughed said, "alright bye" and just walked out. "Hey what are we supposed to do with your sandwich" "it's your sandwich, not my problem".
IIRC lunch rush had (my memory is fuzzy..):
2 drive through positions, 2-3 people on cash registers, dining room cleaner, fry guy (sometimes 2?), 2-3 burger assemblers, one person on drinks, griller, dish washer, and the assistant manager and manager helping out everywhere. Prep team might still be working too.
I remember really enjoying the food a kid (in moderation). And everyone having a mini tantrum when someone ordered fries with no salt :D
Was also shocked to see one of my Brazilian coworkers working at the crack of dawn on my way to school, cause he typically had closing shifts.
Just for comparison, the average meal price at McDonalds in the Philippines (Big Mac meal with small fries and a drink) is around $4 USD.
Data says it won't stop you from coming back. It may even make you a more profitable to-go orderer that doesn't need onsite resources.
I worry that this kind of thing will make "delighting your customers" too expensive compared to just minimum viable product.
The one I went to last week had a banner advertising a $20/hr starting wage. Clearly they'd like to hire more.
Also, in California, that’s now the minimum wage allowed by law for fast food. Fast food is a special, higher-minimum exception for some silly reason. (And I say this as someone who spent over 2 years of my youth doing that work.)
A burger made of fresh, never frozen ingredients from In N Out or Five Guys only carries a 50-80% markup [1], and those stores are properly staffed and consequently offer a much more pleasant dining room experience.
I suppose my point is that it is possible to deliver a good customer experience and still maintain a healthy operating margin. What McDonald’s is doing to make the whole experience worse is not a necessity to keep the business alive, it is a choice to maximize profits at the expense of the brand’s long-term reputation.
That's what the end of the middle-class means: everyone is getting too wealthy to employ in near-menial jobs.
My memory is that McD drive through was worse before, and less people used it. Go to a Burger King drive-through if you wanna go back in time.
Inside, similar number of customers, and inexplicably fewer employees serving them. I blame the management decisions more than the data it's based on. Probably the numbers are telling them to punish the indoors customers, and they aren't using their brains about how that's going to be a long-term problem.
Speaking of data, you can ask the app to "anonymize" you as Valued Customer. Your name doesn't really matter to McDonalds.
The data-driven decisions at this point are corporate offices working out how to make an extra $0.25 off every transaction. The enshittification is coming from the franchisees who are working out how to maximize their profits after whatever corporate royalties are paid.
These days, they have a stranglehold on the best real estate and they know it. If you want OK food at an OK price in an OK restaurant, they know you'll go to their place. If you personally won't go, five other people nearby will and they don't need you. They don't need an exceptional experience. Customers will be there.
I can have a succulent Chinese meal at my table in less time than either of those big-three, and my local roast chicken joint about 30 seconds after I sit down.
because you and others keep going back to the store no matter how bad it gets, they keep testing what other cuts they can do
eventually it will be just one employee sitting in the corner watching several humanoid bots doing all the work and just required to press the reset button when they glitch
maybe even a single human remote employee doing that for 100+ stores
vandalism will get insane and then corporations will just get congress to pass felony laws to slow that
$20 burgers will also slow that
I miss pizza
now as a human there, i could clearly see what was happening. I could come up with a bunch of simple things that could fix it. But as I drove back with my sandwiches, I kept wondering how this shows up on a spreadsheet or some internal system that Subway might have for decision making.
That really really made me question things that I had always suspected but swept under the rug. I concluded to never go back to subway (which I've always liked FWIW) or any other fast food joint. What stops them from adding absolute garbage into the food (which will never show up in any report) or the factories that I'm not privy to if it adds to the bottom line. Fast food is no better than packaged frozen food. Fast food companies are no better than the current crop of mega corps draining every nickel and dime to the bottom line for the next quarter.
I have more respect now for few employees at some joints (even airlines) that refused to give me some food items when I was with my kid on the basis that they haven't ever seen that stuff go bad for months and their conscience wont let me feed that to my kids and handed me something else instead. This human character trait I have new found appreciation for.
And subway isn't the exception I see, its the rule. I now see the same at McDonalds, Chipotle, Dominos and other fast food joints. Goddam Moneyball.
I've been collecting ideas on how and what to carry or buy when we travel instead of relying and feeding my family on this. Its hard but I think worth it.
Fast food, in my lifetime, seems to have moved more to the lower end of the demographic spectrum in terms of customer base.
Some combination of wealth driven taste changes and health concerns within the top half on the customer side.
honestly, this is the biggest problem with american capitalism these days.
consumers that just act like zombies and never modify their behavior, no matter how much they get abused.
Name checks out.
Minnesotan, perhaps?
I always feel a bit disconnected from what other people feel when I read things like this.
Personally, this kind of data doesn’t bother me at all, and is the type of data I don’t mind them having at all, and is the type of analysis I expect them to do. Using the data they have about my direct interactions with them to predict how I interact with them in the future seems fine. As long as they aren’t charging me extra, why should I be upset that they can predict what I will do based on my predictable behavior?
Their job is to provide me a good service that makes me want to keep coming back and giving them my business. If they can use the information from my past interactions with them to provide a better service to me, that seems fine.
My daughter has ARFID, and for about a year McDonald’s chicken nuggets were one of the only safe foods she would eat, so I went quite a few times. I felt much more embarrassed and worried about the workers who saw me there all the time than the app knowing i was there all the time.
What is the actual concern with McDonalds having this data about you? That they will charge you more if they know you will come back anyway?
I have no idea if it’s realistic, but I could see people being reasonably concerned about insurance companies, etc. making actuarial decisions based on a partial understanding of your dietary habits.
But instead the article lifts that McD knows your favorite drink is a large diet coke and you probably spend $25 there at your next visit because .. well you usually do. If that's what you bring up then no, nobody is going to be concerned.
One could almost think McD has sponsored that "investigative" piece to calm people down. As in: if that's the strongest criticism you can find, well, then it'll all not so bad after all.
That’s the underlying fear and issue - and quite right.
Over the next decades we are going to gather and analyse soooo much data, and society will be dystopia or utopia based on what we let commercial entities and governments do with our data.
Not prevent them from collecting it because then all the good stuff cannot happen (epidemiology is going to rock in 2035) but preventing the bad usage.
I think a simple set of medical-like privacy laws (collect it, keep it locked down tight, use in the best interests of the citizen, do not sell onwards but share with licensed data brokers, introduce some cottage industry of data lawyers who can recover damages from dodgy data brokers)
That probably will be enough but interested in others views
The actual drafting of these laws is … we need a GPL for privacy
This seems a bit over the top? If you and I interact, I am not allowed to remember anything about our interaction at all, because that is 'your data'? That is ridiculous. You don't get to tell me I can't remember information about what you do.
If you come into my restaurant and then dine-and-dash, I am not allowed to put up a picture of you saying "Don't serve this guy" because it is 'your data'?
My concern is Goodhart's law.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Named after British economist Charles Goodhart, it means that once you reward or punish people based on a specific metric, they will game the system to optimize that number, destroying its reliability.
With McDonald's, this is quite clear. They have always aimed at minimizing the drive thru time. To support this, restaurants now tell you "please pull around and park in spot X", then they bring the food out.
But when you're in spot X there are downsides. First, you have to go through the extra time to park, which may be affected by lot traffic. Then, if they forgot the soda or a condiment, they have to run all the way back in to get it. They need extra staff running those orders from the back to the cars and the staff are now clogging the restaurant entry. They're even losing some of their HVAC with the main door opening more often.
Trying to minimize drive-thru time actually made the drive-thru experience less efficient and less effective.
So when I see a company getting data-driven in a way that doesn't really affect my privacy, much, I have a second concern about how the data they're pulling will distort their operations.
Maximizing average spend is one of those things. It suggests they're going to try to rejigger the menu so that ordering items ala carte is unexpectedly pricey.
And indeed, it turns out that the best way to order two hamburgers, fries and a drink, currently, is to order the two cheeseburger meal without cheese, because any other version of the order is a money trap.
This also gets you a fresher hamburger because it has to be handled as a special order and isn't out of the Universal Holding Cabinet.
But that makes McDonald's less efficient for anybody who isn't trying to hack McDonalds' latest data-driven menu decisions.
All of which is to say, I recommend purchasing citizenship in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong while it's still inexpensive.
(That is, read Snow Crash, and understand that is the dystopia we're actually headed for - apart from the main plotline - rather than the Big Brother world people generally fear)
Differentiated pricing is a future concern, but states are preventing that for now. The article did not raise any alarms for me about how my data is being used.
They don't do this analysis for fun, they will do something with that information. At minimum, expect to be bombarded by special offers and other promotions if you should ever e.g. try to reduce McDonald's visits or do something else that raises your "attrition likelihood" above some threshold.
At worst, they could literally try to charge you extra by experimenting how much they can raise prices before the rate of visits starts to drop.
Hopefully being a low profit customer makes me a cost of business vs someone to be deterred. I can imagine a someday where the person who ordered a $2 10 piece nugget gets the stale ones and the fresh ones go to the guy infrontof me who paid full price.
That they will sell it to someone else, who will match it with other available data to derive a profile with which they can do bad or immoral things.
Such as...? Lure me into a trap with a 10-piece spicy mcnugget that they know I can't resist?
If my diet is the cause of a medical issue, then I'm the one at fault.
Car insurance should cost more if I'm more likely to claim, that's how insurance works.
This just sounds like you don't want data to force you to be honest.
This makes sense for drugs with strong correlations to specific medical issues. Alcohol usage -> liver failure. Smoking cigarettes -> lung cancer. Trying to generalize this to entire categories of food is farcical, because most food isn't bad by itself unless you eat too much of it without eating other things. And if insurance companies are given the power to set premiums based on diet, they certainly aren't going to burn money and effort trying to tease apart the nutritional nuances of every possible thing you could eat. They'll instead be incentivized to do the "easy" thing and impose blanket dietary restrictions under their insurance plans, and use any violation as an excuse to deny claims or increase premiums.
This is exactly the kind of data that every business collects and processes to one degree or another even without an app or loyalty program.
As you should - this is setting terrible meal expectations for your daughter and fueling a condition that will severely affect her development. No joke - feeding her that garbage is ignoring the problem and making it worse. You should sit down at the table with her instead of going round the drive thru again, and get some interventions other than a stream of chicken nuggets.
They can also use this data to understand how much further they can raise prices, and how much further they can degrade quality, before losing you as a customer, projecting that over their entire customer base to ensure they are providing the least their customer base will accept.
This is the facebook model, figuring out how much damage to the signal:noise ratio the average punter will accept before leaving.
While McDonalds is somewhat benign, most people simply don't understand that this data can be (technically at least, legally is a different question) permanently stored. See the surprise in the article that it is now easy to store every app open. Almost certainly with associated location data. So McDonalds selling/sharing that is a concern, particularly with the extraordinarily lax US approach to data privacy. Data like that cleanly bound to true identity is very unhealthy. McDonalds is highly likely syncing that into facebook as well, which is generally done both via email and phone.
And if McDonalds is doing this, imagine what more natively sensitive apps/websites are storing about you. Medical sites, period / pregnancy trackers (particularly in light of the US bans on medical treatment of pregnant or possibly pregnant women), a whole host of health-related information; political opinions, etc.
When I clicked the article, I thought it was going to include, like, how many kids/pets he has or his wife's maiden name. But I don't find any of the information listed in the article "creepy". It seems like obvious stuff they'd want to track.
The "ENOUGH" is the essential word you didn't include. They don't care about "good". They care about your money and the least quality they can provide to continue to get it.
The red lines here would be adjusting pricing for an individual based on this dossier. Also, correlating this with data obtained from elsewhere would be really bad. Sharing this data with other parties would be really bad.
I think that would be the real story here. Is this data sold to 3rd party aggregators?
I literally had my internet provider try this. I was moving and went to sign up for internet at my new address so I'd have overlap and not be without internet for any amount of days. Went to their website, saw the prices, called them up.
Well, they informed me that for "me personally" they wont' give me the prices listed on the website. Instead, the only option is a much higher price. I suppose I wasn't supposed to see those lower prices. I hadn't gone to their website in years and presumably the cookies got wiped, because after I logged in and went back to the website all the prices were gone, and it just said I had to call to get a price.
Airlines have also famously tried this, and the practice is spreading. It's consumer hostile and unethical.
The hook you on the cheap Big Mac Meals, or $1 McFlurry, then over time they discover you actually enjoy Big Macs, so they give you less rewards for Big Macs, as you were likely gonna buy a Big Mac at full price anyways.
If you don't visit for a while, they'll notify you of a discount personalized to you, which is just on the edge of reasonable/worthwhile. You'll head to the store and spend money you would of otherwise not.
In the long run, the data tracking is designed to make you THINK you are saving money, but you are actually worse off! There is a grace period where rewards are good, you earn points and bonus points and you break even, but after a while it goes into a manipulative state to extract every cent from you.
1. By combining and correlating this data, a stalker doesn't even need to leave his chair to have a very good idea of where you will be. "AI, when is the best time and place in the next week to find my ex alone?"
2. Startup idea! A dating site that gives an involuntary set of ratings to every single -- never mind, every human -- within 50 miles of your location. Healthy habits on a 0-10 scale. Willpower. Financial resources. Willingness to spend. Emotional vulnerabilities reflected in external behavior. Litigious or doormat? Look up someone you're interested in, or give a rank ordered listing and recommendation of how to meet them based on their purchase history. (eg they spend a fair amount at REI. Or perhaps they spend a lot but seem to collect gear, never go on trips?)
You may be proud of the results of your diet, but you'll have to wait until it gets reflected in the data before anyone will return your calls. If any information is wrong, you have no recourse to correct it. And if an undesirable's data gets mixed in with yours, look forward to dying single.
3. Scoped to a single company having the data: a lot is about the asymmetry of the information. You'll be charged more, get less, be marketed to when you're most vulnerable or in the most need. Imagine the extreme: a $40 bottle of water at a concert or a fee to see a doctor a bit sooner when you're bleeding out. Only not that obvious, it's only a little bit at a time so you'll never complain and never notice (until maybe one day you will). The rich get richer and the poor get dead. We don't have comparable information on the companies to make them compete more or more fairly, and the Grand Opening of Jimmy's Burger Shack will need to convince everyone that they have better enough burgers that it's worth the premium price because Jimmy's doesn't get the Big Data boost that the McD's around the corner does.
And note that McD's is not using the data to make your experience better. It's using it to make your experience as bad as possible before it might cause you to stop going there. At least in any way that saves them money or increases the amount you're willing to pay. It's not even malicious, it's just the inevitable outcome of making numbers go up.
4. You really don't want to live in a world where everything is optimized to the bone. Your barista is stressed and pissed off all the time because they're doing the job of 4, which turns out to work enough of the time that only 10% of the customers stop coming, and it saves the equivalent of 11%. The only companies you can buy from are huge and surviving on surveillance and economies of scale. You have to drive your kids 45 minutes to school and 2 hours for a haircut, because having them closer together is inefficient. Not that your kids will be able to get a job without nepotism, because The Machine says that they cost more to train than the employer can get out of the existing single mother by forcing her into another shift. The world needs slack and long-term benefit, or we end up optimizing the measurable and pessimizing everything else.
Update: to be clear, I don't think McD's is being particularly scummy here. The question was "why care?", not "is this proof positive that Ronald is going to Hell?" With current legislation, they'd be dumb not to collect what they're collecting. I just think that this sort of thing can cause enough harm that a large group of people should work together to forbid this practice being applied to them. Everyone in the group doesn't have to work on it individually, we could pick people to do the work and call those chosen ones the "lovernment" or maybe something rhyming with it.
And the answer is "wake me up when those things start happening." I can imagine all sorts of even worse things being done with my data, but until they happen, it's just speculation.
Police stalking women with Flock camera data. Period/pregnancy data used by ex- and current boyfriends or law enforcement. Near Intelligence designed Planned Parenthood as a trackable brand, enabling location-based targeted harassment of those who visited a clinic. (Or more innocuous data leading to the same thing, as with Target predicting a pregnancy and revealing it.) Telecom location data used for roadside assistance -- as well as bounty hunters, stalkers, and bail bond companies. Grindr sharing HIV status. Cambridge Analytica. Avast selling browser histories, and buyers de-anonymizing it. (That data ended up all over; I haven't looked to see what explicit harms it caused.) Equifax data being used for identity theft.
What exactly needs to happen for it to be a concern? Personally, no, there's nothing too bothersome to me about McDonald's having my purchase history. But I don't want anyone else to have it, and since nobody seems to be able to successfully prevent exfiltration, then actually I don't want McDonald's to have it (or store it, at least, and associate it with me). Oh, and I'd prefer restaurants to compete for my business on the basis of their food, not their IT departments.
That being said, that's what they signed up for. What did they expect?
I think that getting discounts through loyalty programs should be illegal, because people aren't qualified to evaluate the value of the information that they're selling. If you want to do this, become a private club and simply don't sell at all to people who don't want to be tracked. Instead, it effectively becomes a transfer of cash from people who don't want to be tracked to the ignorant, and a transfer of the data of the ignorant to unscrupulous algorithms and data brokers.
It's not a coincidence that loyalty programs are mostly pushed in convenience store and drugstore chains, grocery stores of last resort for people who lack transportation and live far from a real grocery store.
> That they will charge you more if they know you will come back anyway?
That's certainly a concern. But that's a well known one that at least has some attention. But that McDonald's app knows your habits when it knows where, when, and how much you spend. Combined with 100 other sources of data about you, that might be the tipping point into a new way to exploit you. Hell, you mention that you started going to McDonald's more often and buying particular foods because your daughter is sick. Do you want that information going to insurance companies? How about to quack doctors selling miracle cures? What about PACs?
edit: that information could literally be used to deanonymize your comment.
Those people all have a profit motive, and use their knowledge about my interactions with the store to try to increase the profit they make from me.
I feel like that is just running a business. Every business owner pays attention to their customers and their habits. That just seems like good business, and it doesn’t bother me at all. I want them to figure out what I want, and I am happy to pay them a reasonable fee for doing that.
You are crazy.
Back in the good old pre-Internet commerce days, when you'd go in person to a store, you did not have a reasonable expectation that the owners/employees will forget you once you're gone. If you didn't want the owner/employees to know, you'd get someone else to go in on your behalf.
If you don't want McDonald's to know, get someone else to buy for you.
No one is making you install that app.
Long before smartphones were a thing, I refused to join any "loyalty program", for reasons similar to the ones you're voicing.
I went through multiple periods where I paid only cash, reserving CC's only for online purchases. I even paid most of my utility bills in cash (showing up in person at the office). For something as unimportant as fast food, it is totally doable.
If you want convenience (CCs) or benefits (loyalty programs), don't expect to have your cake and eat it.
Not if they don't like you.
> 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?
People are concerned about the scale with this type of thing. I don't know how rational it is. It seems like people imagine themselves in a situation like Sandra Bullock in "The Net" where if an evil and very powerful entity wanted to cause you harm, boy what a detailed picture they could weave! With this, I both disagree with them (most of us are orders of magnitude less important than we'd need to be for someone to care to do that) and agree with them (it's probably bad if tracking is so good and pervasive that the few who have a good reason to be paranoid can't avoid having digital footprints of way too high fidelity to hide).
Or they're just worried the ads are too good and they know they're so weak-willed that they'll be manipulated into shopping too much.
There is a big step between “we observe the behavior of user segments and predict that the company will sell x units at this time and place” and “these individual users behavior is such that we can influence them to purchase what they otherwise might have not purchased if we perform the following actions.” That is behavior modification on a large scale.
If you’re interested in developing a more robust view of this topic, I highly recommend “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff and “We Have Been Harmonized” by Kai Strittmatter. They go into detail about what these systems are designed to achieve on a population scale.
I understand privacy concerns in many cases, especially when it comes to big tech and online privacy, or credit card companies, but this to me looks like a complete nothingburger.
I see what you did there
I agree, and when you boil it down, "keeping a log of what each customer orders, and doing math and statistics to guess what they'll do in the future"... that describes how every e-commerce operation functions, even going back 25 years. Of course there's a record of what you buy at the place you buy it from. The only reason there wasn't a long-term record like that in fast food in 1990 was that electronic storage was too expensive and paper storage just wouldn't be useful to do any later analysis on.
Or maybe not so subtly.
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.
McDonalds is currently 46,000, 13k of those in the US alone. It's just not even comparable.
Nobody's too big to fail, and the way you fail is by making no innovation in your business, not doing optimizations that smarter competitors do, etc. (which was exactly what Kmart spent the 80s and 90s doing).
McDonald's would absolutely decline if they simply abandoned all 'loyalty program' ideas, while every competitor leverages them, because those competitors will take customers away little by little. Fewer customers, less money to justify renovations, less people want to open new franchises in the best spots, leading to fewer customers, in a cycle.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kmart/comments/1jiusko/the_last_us_...
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?
If you steal a car and dump it in the sea, but there's camera footage of you stealing the car, is the camera footage not enough evidence even if they don't find the car?
Target has footage that shows somebody who looks like you appear to put something in their pocket, then walk around the store for 30 minutes and leave without buying anything. Their inventory system shows that they have fewer widgets on the shelf than they should have. They say they have records of you doing this 3 times over the past year. Do you try to make a deal or take your chances in court?
"When I spoke with Cranor, she was floored by just how often I went to McDonald’s: “This guy eats a lot of McDonald's.” My boss, who was also stunned by my processed-food choices, says I now have to stop eating there. Despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes and greasy french fries, I agree."
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.
If you interact with others, they might keep a detailed record of how you did so. And to some degree that’s their right. And obviously computers keep records basically by default.
> they’re tracking us to increase their profits, everything else be damned. Including your interests, your rights, the law, morality, and long term side effects.
The last bit is unspoken but ALWAYS there.
I'm sure they already are. Can you imagine how much health insurance companies would luv to get their hands on such data? How much they would be willing to pay?
If that changes, there’s still the problem that they would have to disclose it, and when people notice, they’d be sure to avoid the restaurant where eating there increases your insurance premiums!
Aetna already notices when I don't pick up my prescriptions on time and emails me about it. So I could imagine a dystopian future where the insurance company makes you install an app instead of using an insurance card (or at least makes this the default/easier), and the app sends you a push notification when it senses you're too close to a McDonald's and says "Do you really need that double cheeseburger? It's your third one this week! (and Apple Health says your heart rate ain't looking so great)"
I know there are a zillion reasons this couldn't happen exactly like that now, (e.g., you'd have to give permission for all of this) but how far off is it?
Happier, fitter, more productive...
Definitely prompted me to remove the Taco Bell app. I don’t need the occasional free bean burrito that badly.
Then my Mum got cancer, and my brother just said “why would you put that shit in your body?”
That was seven years ago and I’ve never had fast food or sofa since. I can’t imagine how sick it would make me feel.
I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions?
The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.
They found, perhaps counterintuitively, that the opportunistic customers are vastly less price sensitive than the habitual customers. The solution was a somewhat involved loyalty program, which is deliberately enough effort to set up to weed out the sporadic customers from using it. Now, they can charge the less-price sensitive one price, and their more price sensitive customers a different, lower price. As an added bonus, habitual customers are probably more susceptible to advertising/prompting.
One of the ideas of classic coupons was to offer a lower price to the most price sensitive customers. The people willing to deal with the fuss of finding and cutting out the coupons.
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.
As someone on both sides of the equation, any organization should be doing some kind of tracking and statistics. The bad part, and what upsets most people, including me, is when this information is aggregated across multiple services, gets attached to my real identity, and then sold to somebody. As long as this information stays with that one company, ideally is not linked to my real identity, and the company won’t sell or transfer it elsewhere, such as to an insurance company, I don’t really see a problem here.
OK, so they've figured out the guy likes Diet coke, and is likely to come back, and what exactly are they going to do with this information ?
I suppose they could send him a Diet Coke coupon, but they've already figured him as a sucker that is going to come back anyway.
I guess they could sell his data to someone else - maybe Burger King would pay to get a slice of this fast-food addicted customer ?
Really I don't get it. Sending out coupons is about the only thing that makes sense, but 515 pages of tracking ?!
Also, they're probably just collecting it all cause why not. Might be useful.
No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking
No cookie, no user-agent header requirement, no <center>, etc.
No Javascript, text-only
Option 1
curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \
|grep -o "<p c.*</p><d" \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/..$//' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
links https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/
elinks https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/
http-response add-header Content-Security-Policy "default-src 'none'"
curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/ \
|grep -o "articleBody.*isBasedOn" \
|sed 's/.\{14\}/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/.\{12\}$//;s/\\n/<p>/g;' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmMy only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
Brother, did you give your brain to AI already? There exists technology
If in the end it helps them to provide me a better service, I'm all for it. But I also never really was of the opinion that McDonalds was a large evil corporation.
"We predict he won't get fries until Monday. Send a push notification."
But there is definitely a slight logical disconnect between the levels of outrage or nefariousness at the actions being discussed here from a segment of the population who dedicates significant resources to building and having in depth product telemetry and metrics in the businesses we work for.
No thanks.
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
They're probably doing statistics on when you're going to die (=not a customer anymore) considering your diet, etc.
Funny thing is this kind of "news article" is properly McDonalds propaganda.
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.
“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?
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...
Once again, my assumptions of people prove misguided.
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.
I mean, that is exactly what i would think a loyalty program would contain.
Personally I stopped eating at McDonald's 21 years ago and it's the easiest thing in the world to quit (although I don't live in the USA, may not be a perfectly fair comparison).
Tangentially, here in the UK many supermarkets have upped the ante for people who don't want loyalty cards by introducing differential pricing: non members can easily pay an extra 10% on each shop. So far I've managed to sign up with fake details and save the barcode to Google Wallet, but it's all rather dystopian.
This is - forgive me - a McNothing Burger.