This is such a weird mindset. How much interaction do you think the person hearing your response has with the person in corporate that made them all ask that question?

Being rude or hostile to service people, even just mildly, because of corporate decisions is not only ineffective, but it's also cruel.

We shouldn't be rude or hostile to people, but expressing your disapproval or displeasure definitely can (and in my experience, has) caused a chain reaction enough over time the corp makes changes.

disney just reinstated kimmel due to a shitstorm of angry twitter fans + cancelled memberships.

vote with your mouth and wallet

Fair enough, but where do you draw the line? What if they ask you for ID for a burger? What if they ask to see your browsing history? Or your medical history? At what point is "I will never give that to you" or "Ha ha, no" justified?

At some point you just buy your burger elsewhere. "Can I see ID!" is absolutely across that "go elsewhere" line. No need to be rude, just stopping giving your money to them.

These questions are missing the point. The person you're talking to has no control over the policy so any response directly to them is not going to impact that policy which means the objectionable nature of the policy and your desire to change it are irrelevant. If you're so deeply offended by the question, either stop patronizing the business or voice your criticism in a more constructive manner like trying to reach out to corporate or organizing some consumer action. Don't go the easy and lazy route of attacking the messenger.

No, I see the point, I just don't buy the argument that people working retail have been stripped of all agency, and so therefore your reaction to them must always be a calculated indifference. At some point, you've got to stick up for your dignity. Maybe it's not this case, but it's not far off.

Rudeness in hostility is in how you state your position. Having a position (that you dislike and won't participate in a corporate sales funnel is always OK, and it's always OK to politely express that to representatives of the corporation. Even if they happen to be employees of the franchise owner, they're wearing the uniform and promoting the brand, rather than representing 'local burger restaurant.' Of course, you can just not eat there at all (I don't) but in that case no communication is taking place. Many people are OK with McDonalds' food offerings but not with their invasive app marketing.

Trust me, no communication is happening in either situation. Your complaint is not being run up the corporate ladder. All you're doing is making someone's day a bit worse in order to get some fleeting feeling of self-satisfaction for voicing your opinion. You're of course free to be that person, but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.

In the modern corporate world that leadership has entirely insulated itself from customer feedback - if it was plausible to voice your opinion through more appropriate channels I'd advocate for that but many companies have purposefully shut those channels down.

What is the better option to pass along that message than modestly increasing retraining costs for that position?

I treat service workers with respect, personally, but I am struggling to see what other venues of communication are still available.

1) Stop using the service.

2) Directly email them anyone who might have some say in the matter.

3) Make public posts on social media about your position.

You still may not get heard, but all of these have better odds than complaining to the front-line service workers.

Like I said in my other comment, this is missing the point. This approach won’t be effective. Nothing is actually being communicated to the people making decisions. The difficulty in finding another more effective approach doesn’t change that fact. If you feel passionate about this issue, you should try some of the suggestions by the other commenter.

> but the rest of us are free to judge you for it.

FALSE.

In today's economy and politics of normalized and systemic dark pattern enshittification, fomenting discord toward the turtles all the way down is a responsible civic duty of a disgruntled public captured and corralled by corporate monopolies with no exits.

I do not trust you, because I have been a food service worker and actually know what I'm talking about. A customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if they weren't rude about it. If it happens often enough it does get passed on, even though the individual impact of any counter conversation is low. You are trying to turn normal amicable commercial interactions into some kind of moral purity test.

> I have been a food service worker and actually know what I'm talking about.

Same here.

> A customer expressing a preference has never bothered me if they weren't rude about it.

A lot of people are seemingly skipping over OP describing their behavior as creating a “hostile atmosphere”. That is inherently rude.

> If it happens often enough it does get passed on

But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.

This read to me like a poorly-chosen phrase from a non-native speaker. I had no impression OP intended to communicate hostility, just rejection of the corporate practice.

But we aren’t talking about just telling your manager. There are so many layers of management and bureaucracy with larger corporations, especially ones with a structure like McDonalds’ franchise model, that these complaints will not make it to the decision makers.

They will eventually. Years ago Starbucks used to insist that customers specify 'tall, grande, or venti' for their medium, large, and x-large cups, to the point of arguing with the customer if they just asked for the large. They abandoned the practice some years ago, presumably due to feedback from their counter staff.

>This read to me like a poorly-chosen phrase from a non-native speaker. I had no impression OP intended to communicate hostility, just rejection of the corporate practice.

This is also incredibly weird to me. There is nothing in that post that shows any indication of them not being a native speaker. You just agree with their underlying point so you're giving yourself leeway to ignore the parts of what they said with which you disagree. However, you can't actually admit that bias to yourself or to me, so now you're completely fabricating stories about them being a non-native speaker. It doesn't matter to you that this justification is entirely circular, they didn't mean "hostile" because they're a non-native speaker and they're a non-native speaker because they said "hostile" when they didn't mean it.

Wrong on all accounts: I am indeed a non-native speaker, and reading it again I do see a few indications myself, and my definition "hostility" (and I'm sure I am not alone on this) is a spectrum so you are also giving yourself leeway to interpret things in your preferred way, for example furrowing your brow for a couple of seconds and then looking away is a hostile behavior, if you get on the train and look a stranger like that they would likely describe you as "a bit hostile", maybe I am using it too much as a synonym of "aggressive", which according to the dictionary it is, if instead I were talking about war or politics it would be crystal clear we are talking about the "hard" flavor of hostility but here we are talking about a simple client-customer interaction to get some food.

Well way back in the day, I worked at Radio Shack in college. We were suppose to ask for a phone number and address as part of the payment flow. People complained, I said it was corporate policy. I really didn’t give a shit about their complaints. I got my little minimum wage, sold useless warranties and got a $5 spiff and went on with my day.

Whether it bothered you, it was useless for the customer to complain

No. I call bullshit on your oddly protective stance in favor of how corporations do things.

The pushback has to start somewhere and if it means being mildly rude to some poor cashier for a second, well, that's part of their job and you're not some kind of asshole for making your dislike obvious. You came in there to buy something specific and simple after all, and being pushed on something else is rude too.

You can't be expected to write a strongly worded letter to corporate every one of the many times in an average day that you'll encounter some new, blandly packaged parasitic data harvesting or price gouging practice from some corporation.

On the other hand, if you and enough others create a pattern of responding with a bit of hostility at the customer service end of things, you're nearly guaranteed to fuck up some KPIs somewhere, and raise enough eyebrows to make the executives at X corporation reconsider a few things.

Do you think the cashier even care or will remember at the end of the day

The problem is that your response is precisely what the corporate decision-makers rely on to insulate themselves from criticism.

That doesn't mean that you are wrong: there is no point protesting to a cashier. My point is that there is no realistic or effective way for us to actually communicate to the corporate decision makers that rule our world. This becomes even more true as corporations consolidate power, which is precisely the "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow has been writing about.

No one said to be rude, let alone cruel, to service people. Talk about a weird mindset.

No one said anything that evenr remotely implied the cashier has the ear of the ceo. Talk about a weird mindset.

It's entirely valid, in fact it's positive, being helpful by being informative, to tell a business what you want or why you are not going to buy their product, instead of simply not buying their product.

It's for damned sure valid to tell them what you would preferr if for some reason you are forced by circumstances or priorities to buy their product under duress.

This whole comment is only 2 sentences yet manages to have like a dozen different facets of weird mindset if you unpack it all.

The original comment talked about intentionally creating a “hostile atmosphere”. Doing that for no other reason than making yourself feel better is rude and cruel to the people who have to deal with your hostility.

> Being rude or hostile

I think that answer is neither inherently rude nor hostile.

Some of these responses really confuse me. “Hostile” was OP’s own word not mine.

I just say 'Im allergic to apps.'

It's really evil that corporations closed all ways of giving feedback, and the ones that remained are considered bad manners because "think of poor employees".

when you go through the drive-thru the question is asked by an automated voice with the same weird inflection every time you drive up, not a human service person.

The person mandating the question doesn't care if you sound hostile to the person at the window, they just care how many start using the app.

There are definitely some people who think that directing anger and unpleasantness at the person they talk to (who has no control over the situation other than choosing not to do their job) is a valid approach to providing "feedback".

Some sort of "trickle up" mechanism where if enough people are sufficiently nasty to frontline workers, it'll get back to decision makers who will then change course.

I think that's fantasy and/or rationalization for taking things out on others.

I was a customer facing employee for a company whose underhanded policies caused me to face a lot of (legitimate) hostility. I eventually quit for this reason, and I know at least one other employee who did. That company lost two otherwise good employees. It works, it's just a question of how much collateral damage you're ok with. If management want to use front facing employees to shelter them from customer grievance, what other target to people have?

Yes. But...

It is a bit off to attack the drones of a corporate, albethey the only available target?

Do you really need that burger? Better to boycot them entirety

(Easy for me to say, I dispise MacDonalds food)

The particular problem here is there's no feedback as to why you boycott them.

You see, the following headline has more effect on CEO's and decision makers

"McD's sales drop 10% after customers refuse the app and other forms of spying" --Forbes

If it's a silent boycott then you see stupid headlines like

"Are millennials killing McD?"

Remember the entire purpose isn't so that one company doesn't track you with an app, is so every company figures out tracking you with an app is a bad idea.

So write to the news. The problem is not lack of publicity avenue, it's too few people seem to care enough about apps selling their data to make the headlines in the first place. They'd rather just get the burger and not care.

Did things change after you left?

Many people here seem to think a customer clearly stating their preference is inherently angry and unpleasant to front line workers. It isn't.

I think that reaction stems more from the comment outright seeking to create a hostile atmosphere about it, not from being clear on preferences in itself.

It's the same thing with customers who make a big scene about a missing fries or something. 99% of the time it's not a problem and nobody cares - here's your fries, have a nice day. 1% of the time the person cares less about the fries and more about being hostile about it on principle/for fun/for respect/because they are in a bad mood/whatever, and those are the ones that suck to deal with when you're there but not in charge.

Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal with much worse shit from the public than somebody snarking at the premise of having an app.

The context of the comment I was replying was "The person mandating the question doesn't care if you sound hostile to the person at the window".

So the premise is "the customer is hostile".

The teenager on the other end of the headset isn't the person you should be fighting this battle against.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, pal. I am not mad at you, okay? I am mad at the system. Okay, but unfortunately the system isn’t here for me to direct my frustrations at it—“ Dennis

You can simply reply no, and be polite about it.

You’ll be asked the next time you visit, guaranteed. No matter your attitude so why be mean?

It's usually asked by AI, at least at Taco Bell. There is no human that will feel the hostility.

Are you saying AI takes your order at Taco Bell drive through? If so, good thing to avoid.

No, just to ask you if you're using the app. After you say no a human comes on the intercom. The human doesn't have to suffer the abuse of asking about the app, wouldn't surprise me if part of that is because it's set lots of people in a rage so they let them just vent to a computer.

I have no idea what happens if you order through the app, maybe in that case it's 100% AI.

On the contrary, some Taco Bell locations are using an LLM for the entire order conversation. It's still a human that takes your card/cash, but they only state the price to be charged, and ask about hot sauce packets. I was so unsettled by the experience that I ended up not noticing the extra drink they handed me until I made it all the way home.

if ones tirade is of sufficient duration, [or volume] the human will hear at least part of it.

like a glance at the menu wasn't enough ...

btw, i just now did glance at the menu online, i had no idea that this crap i wouldn't dare to call food (unless i were starving) is currently selling in spain. this is a tiny bit depressing but was actually to be expected, and i stand by my statement :-)

It did but I think they're rolling that back now.

It's a good thing that decision-making executives are the ones who hear what you say into the squawk-box. And that the local employees get to decide how to answer, and aren't on a mandatory script.