McDonald’s is facing an antitrust lawsuit over allegations that its AI-assisted pricing tools may be helping franchisees coordinate menu prices.
Franchisees technically set their own prices, but the suit argues that centralized pricing recommendations could reduce actual competition between locations.
Some key takeaways for the McD's consumer (connoisseur?) - i.e., I read this so you don't have to:
Can you deliberately engineer the human element out of your buisness and then bring it back with a script and a few hours of training? Or is it too little too late?
Five years of declining relevance, rising prices, and increasingly mediocre pizza. All capped off with a sale to private equity. Quite a legacy.
But I do appreciate it when the defense makes a sack.
OP’S EXAMPLE IS A MINOR PERSONAL PREFERENCE DESCRIBED WITH THE MORAL SERIOUSNESS OF A WAR CRIME.
The redesign makes a lot more sense when you don’t assume the goal was to help you order faster.
The old app was transactional. It worked pretty well. You knew what you wanted. You knew where to find it. You customized it, ordered, paid, and moved on. Very efficient.
But Taco Bell doesn’t want you to be efficient.
The new app is designed to make you browse. Search is gone or buried somewhere. Familiar shortcuts are harder to reach, and it takes effort to find things.
The longer you browse, the more control Taco Bell has over what you see: LTOs, combos, premium products, add-ons, and whatever else they want to push.
The new app isn’t designed around how customers already behave. They’re using the app to change how their customers behave. To turn you into the customer they want you to be.
Someone who browses more and spends more.
EXPLANATION OF PROBLEM THAT LEAVES OUT ONE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT DETAIL
EDIT: IMPORTANT DETAIL THAT COMPLETELY CHANGES THE ANSWER
EDIT 2: WOW, DIDN’T EXPECT THIS TO BLOW UP
Other notable comments:
• “The customer notices when you make a few changes, and we need to make sure that we’re putting that experience ahead of everything else we do when it comes to quality”
• Value will not be confined to a discounted section of the menu. “You should buy a double with cheese and medium-sized combo and walk away from that meal… and feel like that was a good deal”
• “At the end of the day, it’s a human being, making food for another human being, that’s made fresh when they order… Every single experience ends analog, not digital.”
I like what I’m hearing. But time will tell.
Everyday I see something about McDonald’s blaming their declining sales on everything but the obvious: prices, product and policies.
Today they are blaming it on:
• World Cup meals not meeting expectations (or maybe we didn’t want to pay extra for a plastic cup)
• Franchises not being on board (with what isn’t exactly clear)
• Their discounts are too confusing (what discounts?)
• Employees not trained to answer questions from confused customers on said confusing discounts (again, what discounts and what employees? Last McDonald’s I was in, I saw 0 employees. There wasn’t even a register or a counter. There wasn’t even a way to get napkins or a straw without yelling behind a wall.)
• And somehow… there are too many discounts?? (Seriously, WHAT discounts?)
But it’s not the CEO’s fault. He says, “we don’t have a strategy problem”. The problem is that franchisees, employees, and customers just don’t understand the strategy.
When literally everyone else is the problem… maybe your strategy isn’t as brilliant as you think it is.
CEO finally admits what people on this sub have known for years: lowering quality while raising prices is not, in fact, a great business strategy.
I found myself sitting between a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s. I checked the apps.
Ronald offered me 10 McNuggets for $2. Wendy said, “Buy something and I’ll throw in the nuggets for free.”
Wendy wins the fast food war today.
Some people meal prep. I just grill too much on Sunday, wrap it up in a tortilla and call it taco night on Tuesday.
McDonald’s thinks you’re not coming because of the war with Iran and the price of gas.
Not because a Big Mac costs $8, the value disappeared years ago, and they’ve redesigned their restaurants to be as welcoming as a morgue.
Nearly 2,000 people reported getting sick after eating at Taco Bell during a cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce. Sales and foot traffic, so Taco Bell unveiled its recovery strategy: heavily discounted food through the app.
So their solution is to make Taco Bell cheaper? I have no objections.
I’m looking for a mat for a 22” Weber kettle on a pressure-treated wood deck. The grill mostly stays put, and I light the chimney inside the kettle. I may occasionally use a small “refrigerator” smoker on the same mat.
The fiberglass “fireproof” mats seem very thin, while Weber and GrillTex mats look more substantial but aren’t ember-proof, which I’m not even sure I need.
For anyone with long-term experience: what mat do you use, does it stay flat, and has it caused any staining or trapped-moisture issues? Budget is flexible. I just want a good quality product.