McDonald’s has been using artificial intelligence to dynamically price menu items in the US and some global markets, according to a report by Reuters. This involves finding the “optimal price” to match what a particular store’s patrons would be willing to pay.
This fluctuates according to location, and even stores in the same city can have different cost amounts for the same exact items, according to information reviewed by Reuters. This is basically surge pricing, like with ride-share platforms, but for hockey puck burgers that have been sitting under a hot lamp.
Reuters got a look at the interface that franchisees use to access this technology and it’s pretty creepy. Messages show stuff like “your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to price” based on “customer willingness to pay in your area.” Cost differences at nearby locations can be stark. Researchers found that a Bic Mac at a Fresno, California store cost $5.69, but the same burger cost $6.89 at another branch two miles down the road. That’s a 21 percent difference.
How about McFuck Yourself
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…
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.
Stopped at a Mcyds on a road trip and ordered a hamburger. Took a while and it sounded like they were not real sure how to assemble it. Not a big selling item anymore.
Does it taste nice? I quit fast food 3 years ago but of all the things they serve, I don’t miss their burgers. Their fries and nuggets maybe, but I never want a McDonald’s burger. They just aren’t good at all, not by any metric.
I kinda miss ordering a double quarter pounder big mac, but otherwise not worth it for many reasons
I mostly miss the fries tbh. Fortunately a brewery near me has the bombest fries I’ve ever had, but sometimes you do just want those garbage McDonald’s fries.
About once a year I’ll convince myself fast food is a good idea. I always feel ill for a day after. Idk if it’s the mega sodium or the ultra processed grease, but I just feel queezy.
The burgers have become tiny because they’re using fattier beef, which has a 1/4lbs starting weight but it sweats off a lot of weight.
Here’s how they fuck you: https://youtu.be/JlpuVHdZyqI?is=Ea_H2b5qleAaq2Vo
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.
HEY AI! Model my dick and my balls!
If you have any spicy pictures of yourself online, it likely already has.
Excellent, I am part way uploaded into the matrix.
Error. Division by zero. Does not compute.
Can someone smarter than me explain what end game dynamic pricing looks like? I feel like supply/demand will move the price of essentials up as wealthy people buy items at higher prices. It eill be easier for a company to make 200 roles of toilet paper a year and sell them for $10k as an extreme example.
The end game looks a lot like it currently does. Charge the maximum they can get away with. Set a stupidly high floor, raise it per-person.
End game is probably a monthly subscription model where you can buy the privilege of getting fixed prices for a month. People that lack a McMealPlan or whatever will pay according to their social credit score, inventory levels within a given location, or simply the whims of the franchisee.
McDonald’s Prime.
sadly this is the most believable.
End game? No one thinks further than 2 financial quarters into the future anymore.
Unfortunately, if the cruelty of the (engineered) computer memory crisis is anything to go by, it might be exactly like your example with toilet paper. McDonald’s could decide that it’s more profitable for them to do some kind of catering model and price the average individual consumer out of relevance
the price went to high two years ago or more for all fast food.
How much ai they churning through for this? Is the return worth it?
Categorisation and such models are wayyyyyy cheaper to train and run than LLMs. And the training data is just their own price and sales history by location, nothing to scrape the whole Internet or scan unknown books for. This costs them very little at their scale.
That said, their dynamic pricing would have to halve the prices to get me to go again. Because the price of a big tasty meal is nearly twice what a double bug tasty meal was 6 or 7 years ago. Beef has also nearly doubled, but the other ingredients have not.
They don’t care if it’s worth it.
Corporatism makes every layer incredibly detached from each other, with everyone seeking their own glory, fuck the rest.
I can guarantee you that they hired some middle manager - not yet C-suite, but also not direct worker manager (say, an engineering or product manager) - like a VP, or Assistant VP (assveep), who recently joined the company, and has some very… Specific target KPIs to reach to get their bonus.
Basically, all the corpo layers are KPI driven, and you in your secluded job, will only focus on a single, specific aspect, instead of a holistic image.
What Maccas sees here is a manager who delivered what they were tasked with: AI driven pricing. Their goal was to have a system that adjust pricing for each person, outcomes be damned. The manager doesn’t care, their job isn’t to take care of the entire company, but to deliver that one tunnel-vision task.
This is actually why a lot of companies fail nowadays. I used to work for WBD, pre-merger on the D side, and this shift was incredibly obvious once management was pushed from the UK to the US (okay, pushed isn’t the right word, they fired all UK managers and put all UK engineers under US managers). With local managers we had sensible deliverables, actual scopes and effects analysis, and they pushed back on idiotic requests. To give an example, I was working on the video playback component of the Discovery+ apps (in the US we had separate build flavours for all the channels, the rest of the world got the unified D+ with all the channels). Two channel heads approached us and wanted extensive feature implementations for a handful of niche programmes. My manager pushed back because those features would’ve used up 70% of our team’s capacity and they didn’t even have a cost analysis let alone any arguments for product value increases! But because those two channel directors were buddy-buddies with leadership, and (presumably) they were banging the two product managers who came up with these genius ideas, there was tons of corporate back and forth to get it done.
On the other hand, once we moved over to a US based manager; everything shifted. Our autonomy was reduced, and we had some product and head-of people pointed out as “never refuse anything they ask for”, because those people’s requests directly boosted the KPI of this manager, and the manager cared about nothing (not even doing his job, all EM tasks were offloaded to team lead engineers…) but his bonus - and as predicted, two years and two bonuses later, he “sadly” left the company with a hefty package (his termination pay alone was 6x my annual salary…). Meanwhile we had to deal with insane demands, no-pushback policies, and PMs that had to be pleased no matter what. Oh and on top of that, an enforced, illegal overtime scheme for on-call duties (this ended up buying them in the ass and as it came out during my redundancy consultation, I ended up getting a hefty 6-digit payout just so I don’t report them to like three different British government agencies).
I’m just baffled by such destructive company policies. Last year I worked for a very dysfunctional company (a major bank) where a lot of people seemed to be extremely adverse to solving the actual problems the company was facing. I was told it was politically sensitive. Later someone else explained that product owners had too much power but were only interested in building their portfolio, and not in whether any of it was actually good.
The bigger issue is the feedback loop: a model trained on willingness-to-pay signals can turn temporary local differences into a self-reinforcing pricing policy. If companies use this, I’d want clear disclosure, a way to compare nearby prices, and some guardrails against using proxies for income or neighborhood demographics.
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.
I’m pretty sure they’ve always done this, they’re just using different tools to determine the prices.
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.
no other viable option
Are there people who can’t prepare the most basic foods themselves? I’d always prefer to prepare or cook something myself over getting fast food. Even a slice of bread with some cheese or meat plus some carrots or such is better than fast food in my eyes (and much cheaper anyways).
You can go to the grocery store and buy frozen French fries and frozen patties and heat them in a toaster oven and it will be cheaper and better than McDonald’s.
Granted for that you need a freezer and a toaster oven and a grocery store, and many people don’t have those.
For where I live, the last time I looked into this (in 2024), if you wanted to make a burger with the same amount of meat and toppings as a basic mcdouble, you’re looking at spending almost $50 upfront for ingredients (meat, bun, cheese, onion, and ketchup) and even by weight you’re barely breaking even.
I know people in their 30s who don’t know how to cook beyond microwave meals and actively don’t want to learn. Some of them have enough money they basically always go out to eat and drive throughs are convenient
Sad miserable losers
some get so addicted to eating out, eating home cooked food is not tasteful to them anymore.
Are there people who can’t prepare the most basic foods themselves?
Sadly yes, either because they were never taught or never learned the basic skills, or live in food deserts that basically prevent them from access to groceries they can purchase and cook.
This guy gets it. There’s legitimately people who couldn’t get the food, don’t have the facilities to prepare it in their shoebox apartment, don’t have the skills to prepare it, have next to nothing for food storage capacity, and/or are on too much of a time crunch to actually prep their own food.
Does that describe everyone? No. Do they exist? Absolutely, and sadly more common than people realize. I’m extremely blessed to have a comfortable suburban house and all the access in the world to the resources I need, but I came up in less favourable circumstances and have old acquaintances who are still there. A grocery store was hard enough to get to it may as well have been on the moon for all the time and transportation I had to get there, my access to tools and appliances to cook were effectively non-existent and the fridge and freezer I had access to couldn’t hold a full week of food to begin with. Living on convenience store taquitos and fast food wasn’t a choice, it was that or starve, and you ate what was open when you had time.
It’s actually a problem that people usually doesn’t prepare food tried to, and have to spend an hour on everything to make mediocre food, to the point that there’s thousands of video teaching how to preo food quickly. Internet Shaquille’s video are basically made to combat that.
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.
i think you underestimate how little most people care about politics, current events, AI, etc.
It’s sad but true… drive through still full in my area. I often find McDonald’s trash polluting the parks and sidewalks. What’s the point of the “paper” cups when they’re lined with plastic or something that causes them to never decompose?
They put pfas on the paper cups, also all the wrappers your food is in.
Why do you think that? I didn’t say anything about current events or politics and this new AI story only confirms a decision I already made and am guessing most other people already made
most people have definitely not stopped going to mcdonalds. that’s what i’m talking about.
We quit too and we used to go all the time. After threats to Canada we boycotted whatever we could from US.
I miss Canadians but honestly good, the boycotts give me a lot of hope, I love seeing people stick to their principals
I will continue to avoid McDonald’s. Not going to break a no-meat streak for a shitty burger.
Not having had meat in ~8 years the idea of even just their French fries (with their beef flavoring) makes my stomach turn. I’ll never get over the fact people call fake meats disgusting while eating an actual (dead) body.
My ‘willingness to pay’ for McDonald’s is pretty low at the best of times. This certainly won’t raise it. It’s already overpriced for what you get.
I’ve noticed this myself. Always a good time for a break.
