Comment by StrictDabbler

I'm not worried about privacy on any of that. Maybe a little about locations, but it's not like I'm randomizing my fast food visits to hide my tracks.

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)