For anyone that can't see twitter/the images, it's a RFID tag in the base of a McDonald's cup that allows the dispensing machine to validate the cup & track the number of refills (and also not dispense to a cup that doesn't have RFID).
Surely the cost of all this infra/maintenance is several times higher than some people taking a few extra refills, my understanding is that the sugar-syrup costs to McDonalds are insignificant. Perhaps not?
And RFID chip is less than 10 cents. The rest is amortized rather quickly.
When you calculate McDonald's losses, don't assume the base cost of water, or soda, but the opportunity loss of missed sales, which are significantly larger.
A coke is one dollar. So paying 10 cents to get back a missed dollar suddenly makes a whole lot of sense, doesn't it? I know it's not 1:1, but they have the data, and apparently it's still more profitable/preferable for them to have RFID.
Furthermore if McDonald's doesn't want to attract freeloaders, which bring with them all kinds of other risks and cultural issues that might repel actual paying customers, they have that right. They're not a social center.
And don't forget they HAVE THE DATA.
They know how much cups they sell and how much water and soda they dispense. They've done the math. Can we stop pretending we know more about their profit/cost and operations than they do?
I don't know why we need to speculate and pretend to know more about McDonald's than they do, given they have made those decisions based on data, not speculation.
Also soft drink/water sales are not "close to zero". I don't know what you mean.
But us not knowing better still doesn't mean that their decision is backed by data.
In my experience quite a lot of business decisions are not backed by data, especially when it comes to people generally perceived as "less liked" like e.g. homeless people.
So is your thesis going to be that attracting groups of homeless people in your restaurant is positive or neutral with regards to attracting customers, staff dealing with problems, additional maintenance and so on?
Surely if you had a restaurant, you'd want to invite your customers to the smell of pissed pants and drunk people begging for change?
Let's be real here.
Homelessness is an issue that shouldn't exist, but it's not McDonald's issue, that's not their role in the game, and they can't offer their services at a level, when they need to deal with homeless people on their premise. If your country sucks and can't take care of social issues, it's not suddenly the role of private businesses to play that role for those in need.
You just critiqued the author for assuming he know whether the decision was made on data.
Now youare assuming its about homelessness - you dont know that homelessness was even considered in any way when this decision was made, so this entire critique is baseless.
For all we know someone wanted to look like their are innovating, and got some brownie point for their end of year
How can you say "I assume" things which are literally SAID in the parent comment? Do you know what "assume" means?
As for the "all we know" thesis, for all you know the Sun might not rise tomorrow. But odds are it will. And therefore all thought process and decision making is made on odds. Not on absolute, perfect certainty.
And the odds are that management decisions at McDonald's have a higher quality data sourcing and analysis process, and have spent more time figuring a problem out, than bunch of random people on Hacker News, who spoke about McDonald's that day simply because they saw a tweet about it.
But of course, "for all we know" maybe the Einstein of fast food is here among us, so who knows?!
- Boeing has feedback from every aircraft, maintenance data and data from every crash. They've been building planes for 104 years.
- And the plane has A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE, of a sensor that need to be replaced regularly , as their maintenance data would show. That killed 500 people, grounded the entire fleet for two years and coat them billions.
I work in corporate, we consult other corporates. Stop peddling this dangerous fantasy that every decision is based on data, or is even made by an expert in the area.
Believe it or not, most business decisions are not data driven, and even if these were certainly data driven, we have neither the data nor their conclusion. Just one observable artifact of a business decision.
>Also soft drink/water sales are not "close to zero". I don't know what you mean.
The comment was about the number of "lost soft dink sales due to reusing old/external cups".
The number of soft drink sales is high, but the number of "lost sales due to people refilling to often or trying to get drinks without buying them" is not.
At least not as far as I can tell in the McDonald places I know of.
The cost of losing the soda/water is probably insignificant. The real loss is the money not paid by people for the refills which is orders of magnitude higher. I don't have any figures on it but I would guess this is more than enough to justify the infrastructure and maintenance.
I'm not sure what you mean, I mean what have the arguments you commented on to do with "the rich".
In the end there is a very large swath of people between poorish and not rich which go to McDonalds.
> homeless are simply problematic
Idk, I can't speak about the homeless in other places but at least where I live it's most times not too big of a problem. But then I could imagine it quite a different situation in other places. Like e.g. where I live there are places the homeless can go to to take a shower, it's not perfect but in the end except a few exceptions most homeless tend to be at most a bit smelly and in turn it's not a problem in most McDonalds if they would pass by there.
>I mean what have the arguments you commented on to do with "the rich".
They're directly responding to a comment literally saying that this is done to drive away the homeless and poor so "the rich" don't have to see them.
And maybe homeless people differ depending on location, but where I'm from a good amount of homeless are obviously mentally unwell and alcoholics/on some other drug. Most of them seem peaceful and nice enough, but I've also had pretty negative experiences that range from unpleasant to downright scary. I wouldn't care if I saw a single homeless guy at a McDonalds, but if I knew that this was a location that attracted groups of homeless people (like e.g. some parks are), I would definitely stay clear of it.
> They're directly responding to a comment literally saying that this is done to drive away the homeless and poor so "the rich" don't have to see them.
ok, makes sense, it's not <so "the rich" don't have to see them> but <so "the non-homeless" don't have to see them>.
Well, it's also because McDonalds offered him free food for life if they could spread the story about him. Did they offer him more than just a free hamburger, I dunno.
Allegedly rich.
It's still not clear how rich or poor he actually is.
In any case, I very much doubt he spent any time at all in a McDonald's.
At most he would have used the drive though. More likely be sent someone else to the drive though.
It's even understandable - he's been very recognisable since before the apprentice. Would you want random bystanders asking for your autograph, or insulting you while you were trying to eat a burger?
It's about keeping homeless and very poor people out of it.
It's the same kind of thing as park benches being designed to be unusable for sleeping on, empty unused rain areas below bridges being walled of or filled with spikes or vegetation in parks being removed and replaced with grass and similar to make it less pleasant to stay there over night.
I fear if they could they would use a combination of image recognition to ban people which look homeless from entering their shop at all.
Just to be clear this things are/would be normally mandated from the top, so the people operating the specific restaurants might not have any say in it.
Those above the homeless in social status go out of their way to keep them out of sight. If your store becomes a de facto gathering place you will have few customers.
i.e. it's not about losing money due to free refiles but losing (or being afraid of losing) money due to people leaving due to the presence of homeless people.
A decision because of the first point (free refiles) is not moralistically questionable. A decision on the second point can be seen as moralically questionable due to discrimination against people which already are in a pretty bad situation.
So it is indeed about the money, then. It’s just a question of whether or not you consider a business catering to patrons who avoid establishments populated by homeless people to be morally questionable.
You're right, but I don't think that's the full picture. I once was working on a book that featured several homeless characters, I spent a lot of time talking to and hanging out with the homeless as research (think early 2000s).
Things are different now. I don't have any numbers for you, but the meth epidemic has left us with a whole traunch of society that has permanent brain damage if not permanent psychosis. I honestly don't know what we are going to do with these people, or how we are going to care for them.
I live in So Cal in a city with a large homeless population. I cannot take my daughter to McDonald's-- it's just not safe.
I personally have had homeless folks try to open my car doors at stop lights and in drive throughs. I've seen numerous fights break out. People standing on the street screaming at something. Aggressive and threatening begging-- including one guy who parked his wheelchair behind my car (I've seen him walking, it was a prop) and wouldn't move until I gave him $20 (I didn't).
I have every sympathy for the homeless. But the fact is my local McDonald's is probably missing out on a visit from my family a week not because its not safe.
In my teenage years when McDonalds used to do those Monopoly scratch cards (UK), we used to go into the local McDonalds, order the cheapest hamburger on the menu, rob a whole bunch of scratch cards and then hand out the winning ones to local homeless people. Good times.
Seriously, giving folks water isn't going to make a noticable dent in the water bill, considering how much water is going to be used simply washing the restaurant during the day. The drink stations already have water there, and the ice machine often enough cools the beverages (so no extra cost).
But it's not only about paying for utilities. If you had a restaurant, would you want homeless people come in? We need to build public water fountains instead of expecting private enterprises to do charity.
I'm smart enough to know that homeless people aren't bad folks, and that homelessness doesn't mean scaring customers away or even mean uncleanliness. Landscapers and other folks that get stinky, dirty, and sweaty are welcomed in.
And I've "let" homeless folks into places I work before and given folks water. The McDonalds I've worked at did not charge for water. I'll also mention that water fountains aren't all that useful during winter.
It's not simply a matter of the water bill, but also what culture it promotes around their service, what customers (or "customers" in quotes) this attracts, how this affects other actual customers and so on.
McDonald's have bought or rented the place, own the equipment, pay their staff, and pay taxes. They did all this to offer a specific service. You can take that service or leave it. They're not a public free water dispensers, or social services, or whatever role people are trying to impose on them.
I am a person living in a house, and honestly could get water somewhere if I needed it. And if someone knocked on my door and said they needed a glass of water, I'd give it to them. I'll add that not all homeless folks look like your stereotypical homeless person that people think of, and I've seen folks get off work and be dirty and stinky... and they are allowed in all sorts of places (and do, indeed, come in, especially on lunch breaks)
I've given folks water when I worked in places that had such things, and most food places I've worked at - including McDonalds - gave folks water if they asked for it.
They aren't the only ones paying taxes, by the way.
Not everyone who needs water are homeless, and a good deal of homeless folks
No one builds a RFID system because one guy really needed water that one time, can we at least be serious here?
No one is discussing some hypothetical situation where someone knocks on your home, either.
We're talking about a problem that's systematic, at volume, and persistent over time, and therefore qualitative change for McDonald's and the environment they offer to customers.
McDonald's wanted to offer finite refills to paying customers. Their current system had a loophole with unintended consequences, so they closed that loophole.
If you want to help homeless people I guess go work at McDonald's and give homeless people water when they ask, and everything will be perfect. But let's see if your ideals stay intact after 10 cups of water. 100 cups of water. 1000 cups of water. A million cups of water.
It's very easy to say "oh I gave water to a dude once". I also gave water to a dude once, doesn't matter for McDonald's and people habitually coming back to leech a resource they provide that's not intended to be free in the first place.
You might expect free basic water, what we in the UK would call "tap water". But that's not one of the options - the picture shows Dasani, which is a product that's marketed as a premium water competing with mineral water. I wouldn't expect to walk into a restaurant and get free mineral water, regardless of my housing situation.
(In reality Dasani is just filtered tap water, and is infamous in the UK for ending up less pure than the tap water it started with and having to go through a huge product recall before they even released it. But, as silly as it is, it's still a paid product.)
Hmm, that's a good point. If it literally is just tap water with Dasani branding, it's like an implicit admission that Dasani in general is nothing more than tap water.
You think it's unlikely that water is packaged and shipped? What do you think bottled water is? Whether you think someone is cheating with tap water at the source is beside that point. Some do, some bigger brands don't as they have more to lose by cheating. But regardless, water gets packaged and shipped all the time.
Your regular variety grocery store Coca Cola is also 90%+ tap water, bottled and shipped. They're not mixing syrup at the store.
> You think it's unlikely that water is packaged and shipped?
You're refuting a different point than the one the parent comment made. They didn't claim that no water is ever shipped. They just claimed that these types of drinks machines don't work that way.
> What do you think bottled water is?
They weren't talking about bottled water, they were talking about this type of drink machine. Of course bottled water in a proper restaurant is shipped as such. It also usually arrives at your table in the bottle, partly so you know that it's not just tap water.
> Whether you think someone is cheating with tap water at the source is beside that point.
It's not besides the point at all. Actually it's completely central to the point. The comment chain you're replying to is precisely about whether people are being denied tap water, or some (supposedly) more premium product. If it's the latter, it completely invalidates the point of the original tweet.
Plus it's interesting in its own right. If the makers of Dasani admit that it's indistinguishable from tap water, then that's very relevant to people buying it at a store to take home and drink instead of the tap water they already had access to!
> Your regular variety grocery store Coca Cola is ...
Now that actually is beside the point. If bottled Coca Cola is the same as tap water + Coca Cola syrup + fizz, then that's not really a surprise to anyone buying Coca Cola in either form.
> You're refuting a different point than the one the parent comment made. They didn't claim that no water is ever shipped. They just claimed that these types of drinks machines don't work that way.
Really? And how do they work?
It's a drink dispenser, not a Mars spaceship. How complicated do you think it is to have one that mixes in syrup and tap water, and one that just serves from a container, like a regular water dispenser THAT'S LITERALLY IN EVERY OFFICE around the world?
> It's not besides the point at all. Actually it's completely central to the point. The comment chain you're replying to is precisely about whether people are being denied tap water, or some (supposedly) more premium product. If it's the latter, it completely invalidates the point of the original tweet.
No, if it's branded as a specific type of water, it's not tap water. You're reaching here for a conspiracy theory based on how "these types of drink machines work", despite evidence to the contrary.
Also no, a business doesn't owe tap water to anyone, either. So it's absolutely irrelevant wrt these RFID chips.
> > ... the parent comment ... just claimed that these types of drinks machines don't work that way.
> Really? And how do they work?
As you can see by earlier comments in the chain, they normally work by having separate containers of syrup for each type of drink that can be served, a single CO2 canister for carbonation, and being plumbed into the water mains. The drinks are mixed from those on demand. Soft drinks dispensed in pubs/bars work the same way, with one of those magic tap things on the end [1].
I already knew this before I posted my initial comment and someone corrected me, I had just forgotten and failed to join the dots. It's fairly common knowledge.
> How complicated do you think it is to have one ... one that just serves from a container
It's not complicated, it's just very inefficient, both in terms of getting those containers to the outlet, and in terms of staff swapping the containers all the time when they run out. That's why it's not normally done, so it would be a surprise if this one were any different.
> like a regular water dispenser THAT'S LITERALLY IN EVERY OFFICE around the world
Nowadays most office water machines are also plumbed in as it's far better for the environment. But the type you used to see typically had ~20L bottles on them, which wouldn't even serve 25 large US McDonalds drinks like the one shown in the picture (blimley those drinks are huge!). Hopefully it's obvious that it's not feasible for someone to come and change the water every 25 times someone uses the machine. The turnover of an office water cooler is typically tens or even hundreds of times less than a soda machine in a busy fast food outlet.
Those classic office water dispensers are also gravity fed, which is why the bottle is on top, and obviously that's not what's happening here. But I acknowledge it would be possible, in principle, to make a pumped version.
> No, if it's branded as a specific type of water, it's not tap water. You're reaching here for a conspiracy theory ...
You're showing a charming amount of faith in the Coca-Cola corporation here :-) Believing that they would sell tap water as Dasani is definitely not at conspiracy theory level.
That said, I never said I was 100% sure that they're doing that. Only that it would be extremely unusual for a machine like this to be connected to bottled water rather than mains. I'd love to see some evidence either way. Still, it would be so surprising that the burden of proof is really on the claim that it is using a bottled source.
> Also no, a business doesn't owe tap water to anyone, either. So it's absolutely irrelevant wrt these RFID chips.
I agree businesses don't owe tap water to non-customers. But most restaurants / take away outlets allow indefinite tap water to those that actually are paying customers, and I'd be pretty offended if I was at one that didn't (even if I didn't live in a country where it's a legal requirement). It would certainly be more surprising than a business that doesn't allow you indefinite amounts of e.g. Coca-Cola.
When I worked at McDonalds in Germany about 1988 ('company store', not franchised) it was tap water from the local utility, processed by systems in the basement for compensating local differences in PH, for having a consistent
endproduct regardless of location. That was true for all stores in the region, regardless of company store or franchised. By 'the book' that was the way how it was done worldwide, then. Don't know how it is today.
I was pleasantly surprised that in the UK the waiters proactively ask you if you want tap water with your meal. In Germany you have to explicitly ask for it and then often have to endure the waiter's annoyed reaction.
On the other hand I was unpleasantly surprised with the taste of tap water in the UK.
> What free refill at a fast food have to do with homelessness?
The tweet implies that lack of RFID chips attracts homeless people who get free drinks.
So in a way the tweet actually justifies the RFID chip. Which kind of services wants to attract a mass of high-risk, low hygiene (during a pandemic) people who want some change while you're trying to order and have a meal before you go back to work?
Does a credit card stop you from getting water or food from there?
Maybe you meant bank card: In places where you have a right to a bank account (necessary for payroll and government stuff), you'd get a bank card. In places like the US, most places accept cash.
So no. No it isn't.
I'm not sure this was designed to deter homeless folks, by the way, though I do think they could provide water from somewhere that isn't from the toilet room.
Is that NFC tag really cheaper than just using an inkjet printed QR code? Using the same tech that's probably already on the production line to print batch numbers?
Then the drinks machine can keep track of which QR codes have had how much of which drink (either online or offline or a hybrid model depending on business needs).
Hmm, someone downvoted you for asking a good question, for shame, Hacker News.
A printed QR code adds few complications to the process:
- You can't print the QR code with the rest of the cup, as it has to be unique. So we need a separate printing step. That also adds costs, and the question is does it cost almost the same as embedding an RFID chip (which is 7-10 cents).
- You need to align and scan the code before a refill, which is a lot more intentional for a customer, than simply holding the cup for a refill as usual. So it's worse customer experience.
- The only flat surface of the cup is on the bottom, so any spill means you're spilling drinks over the scanner. So that would mean scanners constantly requiring maintenance to keep working.
I am actually amazed that somehwere on a planet, you can (could?) get unlimited refills for coke, etc. Or is it for water?
Anyway, you can't get free water at fast-food anyway. Maybe somwhere at public place you would get free water dispenser, at work etc. But not at fast-food.
It's pretty cheap. Until everyone is just getting free refills, including non-paying customers, and suddenly you need RFID chips on your cups.
These "free T-shirt" kind of schemes have always the same loophole. They rely on people acting "within measure" naturally due to social norms. Those fall apart quickly when the alternative is infinite free stuff.
> I am actually amazed that somehwere on a planet, you can (could?) get unlimited refills for coke, etc
In France there used to be a single KFC i knew of that did that and later on a law passed that forbade unlimited refills to combat sugar overconsumption and related issues.
However, any food place ( fast food included) are obligated to give you a glass of water if you ask for it, for free.
It's normal here in Canada. Not just fast food. In a sit-down restaurant with wait staff, refills for coffee are usually included, as well. And a glass of tap water is almost always free.
In a sense, I'm amazed anyone pays! These drinks are approximately the cost of the water and no one wants to lose a customer over $6 because they were thirsty and got upset at the surprise on the bill. A flat, relatively high but known cost might be better marketing. "No surprises" is the American fast food recipe for marketing/brand success, really.
Madness.
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