I had a friend in high school who spent part of her summer working at McDonald’s. And one of the reasons McDonald’s makes so much money is that they’ve mastered the art of up-selling.
If you’ve seen the documentary film Super Size Me, you know what I’m talking about. You order a hamburger and fries, and they try to sell you a bigger hamburger, a bigger envelope of fries, and a much larger drink to suck out of a cup that you will discover is too huge to fit into an armrest cupholder.
They do this at fancy restaurants too, with the surprisingly priced specials, always about 20% more expensive than anything else, and the chef’s tasting menus. But at McDonald’s, they’ve turned it into a system.
On her first day on the job, my friend was told the rules. When a customer places an order, the person on the other side of the counter, or on the other side of the headset, is required robotically to ask a series of follow-up questions: Do you want fries with that? Do you want a drink with that? Do you want apple pie with that?
So once, on her first week manning the drive-thru window, someone drove up and ordered fries, an apple pie, and a Coke. Just that. So, the three things she was trained to up-sell had already been ordered. My friend just stood there for a moment, baffled and brain-locked, frozen like a slow-loading web page.
“Um…” she said, finally, “Do you want any meat with that?”
Which made sense, but sounded weird, and apparently sounding weird is something they frown on in that industry, so my friend didn’t last long in the job. In her defense, she had been programmed to ask a series of stupid questions, and ask them she did.
To be fair to the McDonald’s Corporation, my friend didn’t follow the rules exactly. She interpreted the rules. She grasped what she thought was the underlying motive — to get the customer to order more food and spend more money — and she applied that understanding to the drive-thru encounter in which she said an odd thing to a customer. Her training was not to up-sell. Rather, her training was simply to stop thinking and follow the script.
It’s a basic principle of computer programming: the IF THEN command. If a customer orders a sandwich, offer them some extras. If the customer does not order a sandwich, don’t offer them anything because it will sound peculiar.
People, though, are not computers. People like to think about stuff and figure it out and get at the reasons behind the process. People, especially smart people like my friend, have a hard time shutting off their brains. And while that sounds like a pretty good feature of the human animal — we have science and technology and art and stuff because of it — it’s not without its drawbacks.
The biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life, for instance, were not the result of shutting off my cognitive functions and mouthing pre-packaged dialogue. My most colossal errors have always been because I thought I had figured it out. I knew what was up. I got the big picture.
McDonald’s doesn’t require its employees to up-sell in the same way anymore. They’ve refined the system. Customers can order something called “a Meal,” which includes all of the extras anyway and eliminates the shame of ordering a bunch of things you probably shouldn’t be eating in the first place.
The company has also installed touchscreens that allow the customer to see appetizing photographs of everything on the menu, so after they select the apple pie, fries, and McFlurry, they can ask themselves, “Hey, do I want some meat with that?”
The next iteration of the touchscreens, the company has announced, will incorporate elements of artificial intelligence and machine learning into the process. The company has said that this will create a more satisfying encounter between the customer and the order-taking computer because the machine will be able to anticipate and interpret what the customer might want rather than just following a rigid IF THEN command. The computer will be smarter, in other words. More like a person. Which is not always a good thing.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
