Technology

The bargain with fast food was that it was shitty for you, but it was quick, cheap, and tasted good. Now it’s even WORSE for you, costs as much as an actual meal, and increasingly tastes like garbage. What exactly are people trading off now?

This takes "what the market will bear" to a new level. I haven't been to McDonald's in years and now I have even less reason to go.

Stop using their “Rewards app” It’s tracking your purchases, which’ll inform their surveillance and skew the boards.

Dynamic pricing nudges the price to the maximum a customer can afford which temporarily maximises profits but creates in the mind of the customer a feeling of being relentlessly over charged and eventually and long-term they won't come back.

Yet another reason to avoid McDonald's, as if the lousy food wasn't enough.

Someone's about to enter the find out phase of their fuckery

Thank god, finally I'll get cheaper burgers I'm sure!

Can't fucking remember when I went there last. It's just bullshit now.

They did this before, its just that they are using "AI" now. Probably not an LLM but it would be funny if it is.

When I'm bored, I get price quotes from Lyft and Uber to the airport. I'll click around and look at the different tiers of service. Then I choose not to actually request a fare, and close the app.

I fly enough to where both apps probably have me as a regular airport customer, but that I'm price sensitive enough where I just won't use their service sometimes.

I do the same with Doordash and other food apps, where I just put together potential orders to get a sense of how much something would cost if I ordered it, and then just never order it, letting that cart expire. I'm hoping this poisons their data or adds something to the price sensitivity metrics.

I also look at airfares, hotel prices, etc., a lot. It's not for the purpose of manipulating their algorithms, as I just like to get a sense for how prices move over time. But if there's a side effect that these variable pricing algorithms take into account people who window shop and walk away, maybe I'm helping push prices down.

If they're gonna create a panopticon, we should fuck with their data.

So if I have no income, dynamic pricing will set the price to free, right?

I'm so glad I quit going. And if I quit going, pretty much everyone has

I had one of those less than stellar childhoods, but I had a fantastic grandparent that would take me to McDonald's sometimes, and that was A HUGE BRIGHT SPOT for me, back when they had aquariums and play places in them? Like, until pretty recently, I was a die-hard fan. I WANTED to like them. What they actually tasted like almost didn't matter, the SIGHT of the yellow arches made me start to think about what being loved by a trusted adult feels like.

They had to WORK TO LOSE ME as a customer rather than the other way around. And they still managed.

How do I manipulate it to lowball

My house is literally a 3 minute walk from a McDonalds and I don't eat there at any price. Use AI to model that, fuckers.

hate to break it to you but pretty much all marketers use llms to crunch their data to optimize profits.

The obnoxious amount of user data available today - you need AI to compete

On the bright side, at some point in time it will probably price everything at one cent.

Convinve the AI to give a negative price.

On the plus side, surveillance pricing legislation has already been introduced in (IIRC) four states just this year, and if I had to guess, we could eventually see state-level bans in at least half of the states.

This, like the electronic tags at Walmart, or Uber charging more when your phone battery is low, or Target mining your loyalty club data to surge price you, is something that they're speedrunning to try and normalize before the law catches up.

Normally my knee jerk reaction would be against this. But if it helps to drive McDonalds to lose customers in the long run, well…🤔

Yum Brands, which owns KFC and Taco Bell… [is] developing AI platforms for just about everything, including a dynamic drive-thru menu that changes based on the car approaching the window.

Bet you didn’t algorithm this portly fuck in a tricked out ‘93 Del Sol wanting 55 enchritos until tonight.

Not that I needed another reason to avoid McDonald's. Tastes nice, but the burgers have become tiny, and their food gives me the shits.

Anyone with any sense and other options stopped eating there a long time ago. I feel bad for those who literally live where there's no other viable option, mostly because it will rapidly make the last possible option non-viable.

I have zero sympathy for those with good alternatives that don't walk away. The company ran its course. Let it burn.

I don't buy McDonal's because the price/value equation is off. Whether it is off because they think I'm rich or because they think I'm addicted doesn't really matter. The result is that I just don't buy.
But if I was a regular customer, I would see unstable prices as a negative because it means, I have to research current prices first before going there. That's inconvenient. I prefer reasonable and stable prices.

Maybe, McDonald's introduces haggling next so customers can feel like they are buying a used car when they buy a burger...

There should be quotes around "burgers" in this headline as well IMO.

Glad I haven't eaten their trash microplastic food in like 5 years since I found out it was our pedophile and Chief's favorite restaurant