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.
— Anatole France.
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.
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.
We hear your point that it could have been a bit clearer, but you’re agreeing with the OP.
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.
They are close to zero (I think).
Most McDonalds (I know of) either have free refills or provide pre-filled cups.
So this mainly prevents you refilling "to often" or with "to old cups".
The huge majority of people will not "refill to often".
But homeless people might try try to get some extra drinks by refilling using old cups or cups from other people.
But they also don't really have the money to buy additional drinks.
So no relevant amount of not sold drinks are missed out on.
At least IMHO and with the kind of McDonald I have been in.
EDIT: Cleaned up sentences.
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.
I don't know why we need to speculate and pretend that we know that their decisions are well-considered and backed up by data.
I don't know why we pretend like leaderships does not have same flaws the rest of humanity does, and egos to boot.
- They have feedback from every venue, sales data, and dispenser use data, and these teams have been running the company for years, some decades.
- And we have A SINGLE TWEET, and 30 seconds for a hot take during a coffee break.
Clearly, we know better.
FFS.
- 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.
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.
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.
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
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?!
Thus, all we can do is speculate.
You're more than doubling the materials cost to sell a coke.
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?
Eg. A unique QR code on the underside of the cup.
> Eg. A unique QR code on the underside of the cup.
Let's have a QR scanner below the cup, where people constantly spill their drinks. Great idea. /s
A single soft drink may not cost much in terms of raw materials, but running the business has lots more costs involved than just raw materials.
The purpose of this and other things like armrests on benches is to drive away the homeless and the poor so the rich don't have to see them.
The homeless are simply problematic, to the rich and the poor alike. They drive away everybody which is lost sales.
You do know the last president was a very frequent McDonald's customer right? And he was more than rich.
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?
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.
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.
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>.
Turning tables over in restaurants is important, as restauraunts make money from the number of meals they serve.