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Data has ruined fast food (among many other businesses).
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.
The problem with fast feedback loops is that they filter out long term signals. The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted. So the kind of dashboards that modern managers demand, offer nothing but the most obvious, short term "insights", that you might as well eliminate the man in the middle and feed the data directly into a set of simple decision rules.
> 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.
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...
The thing I most miss: Being hungry, going into McDonalds and seeing what they had on the shelf ready to eat now. Bic Mac, Quarter Pounder or maybe 2 Hamburgers.
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.
I totally agree, and I think this is why using a traditional, Deming-style Quality Assurance framework is so valuable.
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.
My read on this, beyond data and MBA's, is that all of the slack has been pulled out of the economy.
You also have the employees gaming the system (at least where I am). The order goes in through the touch screen, then the screen shows your order number as being prepared, and then as ready when it's time to pick up. But since they're judged on how long the customer is waiting, they cheat and mark it as completed long before it actually is, making it disappear from the screen. So now the data shows "wow with just 2 staff we're still serving our meals in 3 minutes" when in reality you have a line of people waiting.
Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.
> 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.
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.
Throughout the corporation teams are optimizing for what gets them promoted and I bet they're doing very well.
Likely at a cost of other teams, who lack the political positioning, power, and prowress to successfully fight for their own KPIs and promotions.
I've seen the same changes. The most noticeable is, now that they are no longer required to be visible at the front counter in case someone comes in to order, because of kiosks, the workers usually specifically hide anywhere else, to minimize the chances of being disturbed by customers with their endless requests ("I've been waiting for 15 minutes for a large fry...")
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.
> While the sheer amount of data McDonald’s stored over the years caught me off guard at first, the way it was used by the company’s predictive algorithms was what I found most concerning. The company predicted how often I would visit in the next six weeks (2.16 times), what I would spend on average ($13.49), and what I would spend in total ($29.15).
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?
What is the word “but” doing in this sentence?
> 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.
>“McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,”
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.
Similarly this reminds of Target's surveillance system, which is loved and adopted by police and federal agencies (https://unicornriot.ninja/21st-century-jim-crow-a-series/). Honestly it's one of the more technically advanced things about them or any store.
"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."
Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.
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”.
At first I thought "building a 515-page dossier" was needlessly hyperbolic for what amounts to a printed PDF of typical CRM values from a database. It's not like a McDonald's detective meticulously crafted it.
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 see anything wrong with the general statistics mentioned in the article such as average order spend or number of visits being calculated with your consent. Curious though what’s in the rest of the mentioned 500 pages.
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.
Some alternatives to archive.md
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.htmA 515 page file on a single customer ?!
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 ?!
In my area, the majority of McDonald's customers use the drive thru, and the dining room isn't very busy. So for the price of a coffee I can get a couple hours of work done from a table near a power outlet and wifi.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
Irony: The first thing shown to me when opening that Wired article was an info box asking me to agreeing to data collection.
Well... that's what it means to opt into convenience and benefits. That loyalty program that benefits the customer over the years of course also benefits the company, and not just by making said customer more "loyal".
I'm personally not too alarmed by this. All the tracking is in the context of their franchise and I honestly find the stats pretty cool.
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.
How many pages would be required to store all the information that a shopkeeper knows about one of their regulars?
Looks pretty normal to me. The data is kept and used internally for business objectives. This isn't like Uber mining users for information on whether they had sex.[1]
What is the point of predictive analytics for them? Surely they don't care about what one specific customer will do, only in aggregate? Since ML models can only learn from past aggregates, wouldn't traditional statistics on past transactions make more sense?
I did this a few years ago with a few companies. The most “interesting” was eBay, the data itself was predictably boring but they sent it to me on a USB flash drive!
I say this recognizing 1) that I am guilty too of what I am about to say, as a Product person, and 2) that I still think it’s insidious…
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.
Some time this year the McDonald's iOS app started demanding that I let it track my location at all times in order for it to keep me signed in.
No thanks.
> “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
Oh they know much more than that.
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.
McDonald’s is likely the safest fast food restaurant to divulge your eating habits and other personal information to because they will treasure that data and never share it with third parties
"She says a more beneficial approach for consumers would be highly detailed disclosures during the sign-up process that lay out what’s going to be stored in your 'permanent record' and how that data will be used to make specific inferences about you."
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.
Anyone vibe code a tool to read the data? I wanna see what mine is!
Some of the collection is creepy, and I’ve largely stopped using mobile apps and loyalty programs myself. However, some of the concern seems very misplaced.
“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?
Aren’t we mostly engineers here who have been paid to build these accounting systems , so it’s not our place to criticize McDonalds for deploying them .
Not exactly news, unless this is aimed at naïve teenagers who don't know any better.
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.
> I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program and received an extensive, personalized report that algorithmically predicts my next purchase.
I mean, that is exactly what i would think a loyalty program would contain.
"I was concerned about being surveilled so I also uploaded all my data to an LLM company"
There is an 18MB gif playing on this page. What the hell is wrong with Wired?
Could solve this, and in turn rid the world of a huge amount of algorithmic slop, by taxing companies according to how much personal data they hold.
Shocking that the McDonald's app knows about your McDonald's purchases.
This is - forgive me - a McNothing Burger.
I'm sick of greed, be it from people, companies, or their data hoarding practices.