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Comment by johnnycab | Hacker News Reader

I am not an active patron, but it impresses me how creative some people are at discovering these tricks. It appears that McD doesn't seem to mind, rather they leave the door slightly ajar for some tomfoolery, making the user believe they have outsmarted them; usually they are just open-secrets eg. surveys on receipts for codes, can be a random number.

https://www.lifehacker.co.uk/2014/08/29/get-much-free-mcdona...

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If I owned a McD franchise and had someone willing to do this repeatedly for free Coke I'd probably allow it indefinitely to create a creature of habit who I know at some point is going to want more than a Coke...

I used to work in retail software services and this was known colloquially as, perpetrating a scam.

Many times, the teams figure out many of the ways that scams can be perpetrated. Probably the coke instance was probably considered and OKed. But you're right, people do come up with some really cleaver techniques, which, when discovered, get added to the pre-rollout test cases.

Coke pretty much costs nothing compared to the rest of the operating costs. This is why many McDs have the price of all the fountain drink sizes the same. I'm guessing only a minority of people would come in for the free drink and leave without eating something. It's the same as the monopoly game pieces they give out. Many just have things like a free hashbrown, or fries, or a drink, small things. People aren't going to both waiting in line just for something small like that so either McDs doesn't lose anything when those people don't come back or they make a real sale when they come back and buy a burger with their free fries.

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