I'm Tired of Pretending Tech Is Making the World Better

Its the McDonaldization problem[1] that sociologists used to talk about when McDonalds was conquering the world.

And then they stopped talking about it, cause no one has come up with a model that not just survives side by side, but replaces the McDonalds model.

Everyone just ends up copying that model, cause it did produce results no one had seen before. Laws and regulations evolve to help that model out. Investing more and more in that model becomes automatic.

Restaurant count kept multiplying, franchises were willing to spend more and more on the best real estate with highest foot traffic UPFRONT. Costs of running things kept falling, thanks to all these accumulating network effect/economies of scale. Price stays low. All fantastic right? To the point people started asking why can't the McDonalds model feed the world? And naturally anyone who was very happy with their profits and fries would start assuming it could.

Only once you start digging into that question, do you start seeing how their success at optimizing for a few specific variables really well, comes at the cost of all the other things they don't optimize for. Their success is not possible without rising external costs.

As a reaction there are nows lots of restaurants that survive with alternative models that optimize for other things. But no one has taken down the McDonalds model yet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvL6XDq0BQ

> I can tell you right now that anyone working in a decent venue would rather have a line of people ordering at the counter than be juggling iPads and QR codes while barely interacting with human beings.

The anecdotes I hear are the opposite. The workers are run ragged by low staffing and the customers get grumpy with them due to the wait. Apps get rid of the order taking work so they can focus on output.

The one shop owner I know prefers it as then she doesn't need to deal with language issues, customers pondering how to make up their minds, people reading the menu only when they get to the end of the line, people who can't see very well and need things read to them, etc.

That the apps suck is their main issue.

> I still pick up shifts here and there.

This smells of a certain level of privilege. I once delivered parcels for Amazon for an evening as an adventure. I thought it was fun, but it would be ludicrous to extrapolate it being a great job from that 4 hour stint in warm weather. If it had been raining, I could just not have shown up without consequence.

How do people who actually have to do the job full time, or even more than full time feel about the apps? It is easy to consider labour easy when you do it a la carte.

But…money