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?
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.
"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."
I wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits.
> 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.
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.
At my location I can get an iced tea with free refills. Then I fill out the survey listed on the paper receipt and use that to get a buy one sandwich get one free deal.
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.
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.
My first job was working at Wendy's (c. 2006/2007). I recall the kitchen being busy enough that you had to constantly navigate around your coworkers. I worked with a bunch of Brazilians (all super nice people) and a handful of kids around my age.
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.
The goal of modern fast food restaurants is to eliminate dining rooms. They're moving towards walk-up windows and drive thru only where I live.
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.
It’s a US problem and I say it as an USAnian. Go to Paris, Berlin, London, McD feels like a fine establishment. I mean, it’s anecdotal, but that’s what I saw.
Prices have gone up, service and quality have gone down.
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".
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.
Restaurants, especially the largest chains and franchises like McDonalds, have been data-driven for many, many years. They don't guess. They know year-over-year sales and recent regional trends. They haven't been using intuition in a very, very long time. They might get it slightly wrong less often than in the past, but they haven't been "very wrong" in a long time. We knew how many burgers we would sell in a day decades ago when I worked fast food, within about 5% most days.
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.
Its important to know that McDonalds in other countries still schedules 10+ workers at a time. The wages are just too expensive in the US to justify that kind of schedule but in countries like the Philippines, where the average livable wage is $20 USD a day, it makes sense to hire 10+ workers for a single shift.
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.
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?
>“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.
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".
"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.
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”.
> 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.
> 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?
"Provide a good ENOUGH service to keep [you] coming back."
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.
>If they can use the information from my past interactions with them to provide a better service to me, that seems fine.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 7.7 ms ] thread“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?
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.
Great line. I do really love their fries though.
> 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.
My only complaint is their firewall blocks the tailscale control plane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
I mean, that is exactly what i would think a loyalty program would contain.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
No thanks.