The sourced ingredients are indeed regional. The menu is regional as well. The website is built on top of their mobile ordering platform. The mobile ordering platform requires your location to be able to route your order to the “correct” McDonald’s. This is done via requesting your location from Google or via location services within the mobile app.
This platform is used by a lot of different QSRs. Or Quick Service Restaurants. Dunkin, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Checkers, etc.
I know this because I built the platform.
The biggest hurdle to the platform was delivering your order to the store “just-in-time” for it to be hot and ready when you get there.
Checkout CardFREE. It’s been a decade but they are still delivering value. The VP of Engineering was a new hire junior engineer when I was there.
That ship has sailed. Location data is vital to a lot of internet services now. GeoIP fencing is one thing but location fencing is a tech that is being used by every major government (despite them outcrying privacy concerns).
I wish it wasn’t like this but until the open web becomes the “transparent” web, the snooping, spying, logging, graph-identity-building, MarTech driven, web will continue to go towards walled gardens and deanonymizing the internet.
Why can't you just select a particular McDonald's, set a (first-party, essential) cookie to say that address is "my restaurant" and then show nutrition facts/delivery destination with that location?
You don't need to know which room in my house I'm sitting in to tell me how many calories are in a McChicken.
I find mcdonalds won't let me submit my order until I'm on the same block, and it adds an extra step during ordering, and it makes the app janky. I then have to wait while they prepare. This is not an improvement over the non geotracked version.
I specifically order starbucks long before I get there because I prefer their hot food to cool down before I eat. Mcdonalds takes that agency away.
Depending on the stores “load”. Exactly. It will hold onto your order until you are close enough for them to start making it and be done when you arrive. It requires knowing the turn-around time, business of location, distance, traffic, order length, estimated time to completion, and of course - your payment authorization. Not all brands show this but all brands do this.
McDonald’s does regional distribution that affects some of these factors too; different suppliers, etc.
It’s harder to see these days, but where I live in Albany, NY, McDonalds was in the New England region, and we would get the lobster roll “a New England favorite!”
Head a few miles away and you’d be in an area supplied out of New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Western NY. This sort of thing is noticeable if you live in a place that’s sort of a Venn diagram from a distribution standpoint.
Almost certainly this. Not just chicken but breading ingredients, the oil they fry them in, probably salt content. Maybe sauces too?
Oil sounds like the likely culprit to me. About a decade ago a bunch of cities, including Chicago, started regulating the types of oil that could be used for frying in restaurants.
That's a nice idea, as if these nutrition facts are super specialized to your precise McDonalds location, and don't actually ya know come down to how much the kid in the back of the kitchen is using the salt shaker.
People don't actually believe these are anything more than averages with huge error bars right?
The cardinality of the suppliers is higher than a dropdown of menus can provide. In some areas that straddle distributors it may be unique for each store.
Interesting that they won’t infer a location from an IP or other information they have. Seems like they just want the location data and have an excuse to demand it.
Same here. I am in Charlottetown, but can get either that, Halifax or Montreal, which I assume are at different levels of the interconnect to the rest of the Internet.
Occasionally, I will get French language automatically picked because of the assumption that I am “in” Montreal.
>Seems like they just want the location data and have an excuse to demand it.
1. you don't need google maps script to request location
2. the site needs to ask the user before it can get their location. the average user doesn't even know whether google maps is involved or not, so it's totally irrelevant.
Because Sites usually have an input box to enter the store address / zip code, otherwise you'd never be able to look up for another location. Probably the case here too
I have a feeling this is some dependency the dev created that's breaking their framework's rendering of the content.
I have Firefox loaded with all the ad and privacy blockers installed for this reason when I do tests and code reviews. It reveals a lot of inadvertent dependencies and bugs that devs are unaware of.
I mean there's a change your location button at the top that literally displays google maps, also might use it to auto complete addresses, they're probably just preloading the script for that. That page doesn't even request location permissions, this is much ado about nothing.
The first couple of months I moved into my new house, many sites and apps were broken to me, as the address wasn't yet on Google Maps, and rather than degrade gracefully, those sites and apps were borked due to inability to pre-populate my address.
I had a very similar situation when I moved not too long ago.
I couldn't arrange for gas service before I moved into my home because the gas company's web site would only accept Google-blessed addresses.
I had to actually move in, and then go down to the gas company office with a copy of my lease to prove the address exists.
Strange, since at some time in the past the gas company payed many thousands of dollars to run gas service down my street. But, like in most big organizations, I suspect the web people and the company data people don't talk to one another.
> But, like in most big organizations, I suspect the web people and the company data people don't talk to one another.
Sounds like you're trying to assume good intentions, but you sound extremely naive as a result.
The issue is privatized utilities. They are an ordained monopoly. Their failure to "talk to one another" is not a failure at all. They have no reason to even consider the problem in the first place. You're still paying them, are you not?
Probably not, given that the post's author was seemingly more concerned about making an outrage post than doing the most basic of investigation. From what I can tell one part of the script is trying to do `google.maps`, which errors out because `google` is undefined. The code in question seems to be initialization related, so it's unclear whether the page actually requires google maps api, or the site was poorly designed and tries to initialize google maps api on every page.
Readit News
This platform is used by a lot of different QSRs. Or Quick Service Restaurants. Dunkin, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Checkers, etc.
I know this because I built the platform.
The biggest hurdle to the platform was delivering your order to the store “just-in-time” for it to be hot and ready when you get there.
Checkout CardFREE. It’s been a decade but they are still delivering value. The VP of Engineering was a new hire junior engineer when I was there.
http://www.cardfree.com
Eg, I always block location API access, and sites often have poor fallback UI for entry.
If it'd let me, I'd be setting my browser to always report "Toronto, Ontario" and auto-deny location requests.
I wish it wasn’t like this but until the open web becomes the “transparent” web, the snooping, spying, logging, graph-identity-building, MarTech driven, web will continue to go towards walled gardens and deanonymizing the internet.
You don't need to know which room in my house I'm sitting in to tell me how many calories are in a McChicken.
I specifically order starbucks long before I get there because I prefer their hot food to cool down before I eat. Mcdonalds takes that agency away.
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"Yeah but", do you need Google Maps do do the geolocation?
https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/regional-mcdonalds-items/
It’s harder to see these days, but where I live in Albany, NY, McDonalds was in the New England region, and we would get the lobster roll “a New England favorite!”
Head a few miles away and you’d be in an area supplied out of New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Western NY. This sort of thing is noticeable if you live in a place that’s sort of a Venn diagram from a distribution standpoint.
Oil sounds like the likely culprit to me. About a decade ago a bunch of cities, including Chicago, started regulating the types of oil that could be used for frying in restaurants.
People don't actually believe these are anything more than averages with huge error bars right?
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We used IP to determine regions before there even was Google Maps.
Right now, Google maps tells me I'm in suburban Atlanta. It's off by more than a thousand miles.
Occasionally, I will get French language automatically picked because of the assumption that I am “in” Montreal.
1. you don't need google maps script to request location
2. the site needs to ask the user before it can get their location. the average user doesn't even know whether google maps is involved or not, so it's totally irrelevant.
I have Firefox loaded with all the ad and privacy blockers installed for this reason when I do tests and code reviews. It reveals a lot of inadvertent dependencies and bugs that devs are unaware of.
I couldn't arrange for gas service before I moved into my home because the gas company's web site would only accept Google-blessed addresses.
I had to actually move in, and then go down to the gas company office with a copy of my lease to prove the address exists.
Strange, since at some time in the past the gas company payed many thousands of dollars to run gas service down my street. But, like in most big organizations, I suspect the web people and the company data people don't talk to one another.
Sounds like you're trying to assume good intentions, but you sound extremely naive as a result.
The issue is privatized utilities. They are an ordained monopoly. Their failure to "talk to one another" is not a failure at all. They have no reason to even consider the problem in the first place. You're still paying them, are you not?
Deleted Comment