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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

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dathinab

> , 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.

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I don't know why we need to speculate and pretend to know more about McDonald's than they do, given they have made those decisions based on data, not speculation.

Also soft drink/water sales are not "close to zero". I don't know what you mean.

>"they have made those decisions based on data"

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.

Let's see:

- 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.

But us not knowing better still doesn't mean that their decision is backed by data.

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.

So is your thesis going to be that attracting groups of homeless people in your restaurant is positive or neutral with regards to attracting customers, staff dealing with problems, additional maintenance and so on?

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.

You just critiqued the author for assuming he know whether the decision was made on data.

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

How can you say "I assume" things which are literally SAID in the parent comment? Do you know what "assume" means?

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?!

Lets see:

- 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.

Believe it or not, most business decisions are not data driven, and even if these were certainly data driven, we have neither the data nor their conclusion. Just one observable artifact of a business decision.

Thus, all we can do is speculate.

>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.

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