Tommy Siegel | Bluesky
Transcript
Single panel comic
Illustration of a highway with 3 billboards for fast food chains. A bridge is visible in the background, as are power lines running along side of the service road.
Each billboard has a chain logo, with secondary text below.
Wendy’s
- Your fifth favorite burger is now an app
McDonald’s
- Will you give us your data for food?
Burger King
- Guess what: No app? No food
It’s not getting out of control at all. Just stop eating at these places.
I had no idea they even had apps, because I don’t eat at these places.
Agreed. Supposedly all the best deals are on the apps, and the food is reasonably priced like it used to be if you play your cards right. However, to use those apps, you’re agreeing to binding arbitration in perpetuity should they fucking kill or maim you with their shitty food. That’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make. I’m also not fond of ever giving anyone my data unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I just don’t go to these places unless I’m desperate and it’s the only thing open.
There are many fast food chains that effectively require the app
McDonald’s and Subway are examples. You’ll be paying quite a bit more without the app exclusive deals
There are also many chains that don’t require an app for the best deals. Burger Kind and Culvers being examples
I wish this comic had a bit of nuance, because Burger King shouldn’t be getting lumped in because they’re better than most others
But the deal are so shit in recent years I just don’t even go there anymore
I didn’t mind the app, but even then they still didn’t stop make them shittier over the years with them being less reliable and losing features I just uninstalled them.
I dunno, I go to burger king way more because they have a deal with Walmart + of 25% off your order ever day for members, but the only way to claim it is via app, so I’d say they’re right there with the others.
They don’t require it. You just want it for the deals. I love it for the free food I get. But I but from them all the time without the app when I don’t care. Before the app they never had deals like these anyways. So it’s just like the old time.
Fast food serves zero purpose now. It’s not cheap and it’s not good. So why on earth would I ever install an app for any of these ghoulish companies?
Last time I ate at McDonald’s they had 1€ burguers. Last time I checked it was like almost 20€ for a shitty menu.
Not in your widest dreams. I rather make myself a quick burger at home.
Because it’s fast?
Basically every restaurant is fast now. The Sysco/US Foods duopoly has made it infeasible to prep/cook fresh in-house
It’s mostly just heating up pre-made foods now (that I grudgingly admit have gotten a lot better over the past 10 years)
Chain ones maybe but there’s absolutely still restaurants that cook food from scratch.
It isn’t fast either.
It’s Louisiana fast … aka slow as paint peeling.
screw em all. they just want all your personal info to sell for increased profits
i have such a simmering nostalgia for the old days. on tuesdays there would be 39 cent hamburgers and on wed there’s be 49 cent cheeseburgers. this was at the local micky d’s. that’s what we called mcdonalds in those days. we were beyond a first name basis.
this was around the time i started my first job, which paid $7.50 an hour. and no, this wasn’t in 1970, it was 2001. i wasn’t in the middle of a space odyssey, but an odyssey of the everyman; it was days filled with the aroma and flavor of savory fast food and nights spent with fit y2k hotties in low-rise jeans sipping strawberry shakes. neither of these things cost much and that was a mutual expectation.
Run everything in a sandbox ftw. Nothing touches the host ever. No apps talk to one another and you have total control of data going in and out of each sandbox.
Or just eat real food.
I was more so going at this from a general point of view as it’s not just fast food apps with that behavior. In the age of data mining it’s safe to assume the vast majority of apps/services are doing this…
I doubt the person who drew this comic has had the misfortune of trying to order food in China. It’s basically a literal form of what the comic is poking fun of, and it’s ubiquitous.
In China, you can go up to the counter, but you cannot place an order. Sometimes, you cannot even read a physical menu. Not even so much as a menu on the screen. You have to scan the QR code using the Panopticon app (also known as WeChat) and then get bombarded with advertisements. Like us and get a free drink! Click here for a random coupon! Join our WeChat group! No, no, no, no. Then click through their garbage UI to find the one thing you actually want. Make sure you don’t accidentally replace your order with one of their “recommendations” that pop up! Then, try to check out. Do you want to join our WeChat group for exclusive deals? Do you want to create an account? Dismiss, dismiss, dismiss.
Click here to pay. Only WeChat Pay is accepted. No cash, you backwards peon. Enter your mobile number here. Required to order. Ha ha, nice try, 123456789 is not your mobile number. No worries, we got it from WeChat. You’ll get 3 order confirmation texts and 2 advertisements a week for the next six months.
Mfw the “communist” country that can do no wrong according to the tankie instances out-enshittifies the home country of enshittification and capitalism in general 🤦🏻😄
Meanwhile, the best baseball player in the world is Japanese, the number one ranked player in the NBA is Serbian, and they’ve even been overtaken as the most obese people by the citizenship-deprived residents of American Samoa!
If not for Handegg and money hoarding, the US would hardly be #1 at ANYTHING anymore!
If not for Handegg and money hoarding, the US would hardly be #1 at ANYTHING anymore!
The US has ended like 40 wars this year alone!
The US has ended just the Iran war 40 times already, without even counting the others.
Hey now, we’re still the #1 lapdog of the petrochemical industry!
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Now download our app.
they’re the current leaders at global terror
I thought that was Israel, US is being led, not leading
Israel and Russia keep their shit pretty localised (espionage notwithstanding). The US exports its shit globally.
I saw a post about this last night. Really scary stuff.
Removed by mod
I’ve seen this in Abu Dhabi. A bit creepy but it came with inbuilt convenience like letting your party members each pay for their items or splitting into X portions (you can pay for n*X portions if you want). Sure it’s handy but just give me a paper menu for fucks sake, let me ask the staff for a recommendation
Stop buying fast food. The companies are scum, its terrible for you and you will save a lot of money.
Fucking hell fast food costs as much as a sit down meal these days, of far better food.
I just haven’t done fast for for so long that I didn’t know the prices had skyrocketed.
Your sit down meals must be incredibly cheap. In this area, they’ve gone up, too. We usually don’t get out of a sit down meal for less than about $50 these days. And we’re not ordering extravagant meals or any alcohol. Fast food will be $20-$30 for the two of us.
Have started carrying out from local restaurants by calling ahead instead of any fast food for this reason.
I found I was spending near too or as much each time anyway I was going out and this way I help put money into the local family businesses instead of it going to CEO profits.
I went to Mc’dicks after seeing this. The fuck is wrong with me?
I’m never going to install an app for a fucking fast food restaurant lol
I was broke and in college and the app deals were so incredibly cheap then. I used to exploit a burger king coupon that was a free kids meal with a $1 purchase. At the time you could get a 10 count nugget for $1. That kept me fed for sure
Fast forward to today, and now you have to have the app to get a still expensive meal. It’s a bit more expensive than full priced meals used to be. It’s not even worth it anymore
Just curious about the lemmy consensus, what is it about the app specifically that people find distasteful? Is it the concept of ordering through your phone instead of in person, the app making a profile of your ordering habits, or some nefarious third thing the companies do by getting an app on your phone to steal data?
I think the answer is generally all of the above
Privacy is a big one
For me, I don’t think they make any sense. Ordering through the app is slower. I have to add a credit card and select a location before I can even start ordering. Half the time I get to the end to find out the discount/deal I was using isn’t honored by that specific location. In all, it would be much faster to just order at the restaurant than use the app at the restaurant
Most seem to assume you’re ordering before arriving, which requires pre-plannung that defeats much of the convenience of fast food IMO
Also I really dislike the fact the vast majority of the time, the reality is people are ordering while driving. It’s a safety hazard
As someone who walks, I love ordering before arriving. You just order it as you walk to pick them up, don’t even need any pre-planning.
The bigger problem with apps is because each app takes quite some space and you can only use it for one franchise per app, when WEBSITES exist. I do still often order through website on places that have them.
Also, it’s quick to repeat your last order with an app. I eat at a subway-style pizza place called Mod, and there’s at least 20 pieces of information to relay to the person making the pizza. I’d rather have it print out an easy to parse list for them to work with.
I’ve never seen a restaurant in the US or Europe that requires you to download an app to order. They bribe you with coupons and discounts to download the app, which is fair enough, I suppose, but you’re not obligated to. You can still walk up to the counter, tell your order to a human, and then pay with cash. No algorithm will ever know who you were or what you ordered.
Of course they don’t require it, but you pay way more at some without it
Subway near me is $11.50 for the footlong I’d normally get. They regularly offer $7 footlong on the app, or buy one, get one free
At $11.50, I’d never eat there. For $7, it’s a decent deal
They bribe you with coupons and discounts to download the app, which is fair enough, I suppose, but you’re not obligated to.
They jack up prices and then offer what their menu prices should be through the app. It isn’t a discount and this deceptive pricing practice is not fair enough.
Sadly, you get forced to a digital kiosk most places in my city if you walk up to the counter and expect to order there… but at least you still can avoid downloading the app. It’s actually been helpful for me as I eat less fast food now, lost some weight.
I think the vast majority of stores with the kiosk still have a cash option, but it takes forever to get an employee for the register
Taco Bell (here) does not. They expect you to use the filthy kiosk and then eat with your hands. I am surprised that there hasn’t been some kind of outbreak from this.
Taco Bell is for sure the worst with forcing the stupid kiosk, they just hate hiring staff for a register. It’s a terrible experience all around going into a Taco Bell anymore because of the terrible customer (none) service.
I’ve seen a few of those stores around, but they seem to be the minority. At least as of a year ago. I used to travel quite regularly for work and taco bell was a common place to go. Living out of hotels sucks sometimes
All the places around me are installing ordering kiosks inside, which not only removes even more human interaction but also tracks data I’m sure because you have to use a card to pay. I hate it so much
The places I’ve been to either allow you to pay cash at the counter or they have a machine that accepts cash.
I’ve never seen a restaurant in the US or Europe that requires you to download an app to order.
Same. So far it’s only been the perks of some sort sell. But either way, it’s gonna be a hard no from me. I refuse to install apps from significantly more consequential businesses/organizations even; restaurants are just never going to make the list for me personally.
Not yet, but that sure do keep adding more layers of asking you about the app when you pull up to the drive thru window
For a while, you could get fries or a McChicken for free or nearly do with the app. Like 5 years ago.
If you’re getting a deal, it’s fine? People pay iPhone prices for Google Pixel phones and don’t care that Google makes like $1700 a year off their data, and they defend this.
If you’re not getting a deal, don’t use the app. If you used it before but you don’t use it now, that data isn’t still helping them. It’s stale. Like a lot of their food. And that Pixel phone.
Yeah, they definetely kept the best deals for people that used the app as incentive to use the app. Now that focus has kind of shifted and the deals have been cut back to a minimum and its the same ones every time. The free fry is still cool and sadly the only way to get a 20 piece nugget for $5 bucks. Its nuts, but they want $5 for a 10 piece now which is nuts. If you cant get a deal dont go, but sometimes you can get everything for a decent price still and thats when I will sometimes go.
Tbh, Google Pixels have an unlocked bootloader, which is pretty rare nowadays, and nothing stops you from installing an OS without Google services. And I highly doubt they are able to extract any meaningful data when you are using such OS, even if there are hardware backdoors installed. It’s just extremely hard to do complicated* stuff, including data collection, while not being detected, and with just access to low level hardware; network packet analysis would give away any such attempts immediately. (*as in ‘more complicated than a few hundred assembly instructions’)
Modem firmware is a bit more than a few hundred assembly instructions. It’s mostly owned by Qualcomm, implementing trade secret designs made up by the boards of all sorts of corporations. Yes, even on the Samsung SoC design ordered by Google. That’s the price of phone calls.
Yeah, the mysterious Intel ME probably does similar things, but nonetheless these subsystems don’t have capabilities nearly as huge as the main OS, so they can’t store a lot of data, or do a lot of computation, or do stealth networking - (rant warning) such as embedding data in packets, that would require stealing the cryptographic keys from the main RAM, or even from other physical modules, basically so much convolution, that would be defeated by a simple update to the networking stack with changed offsets etc., I mean you would have to do crazy things to embed a universal rootkit you can never update yet is never detected doing shady stuff. This sounds more in the area of CIA capabilities, not really hardware manufacturers, but I really doubt they would risk revealing something so serious just to collect some meaningless data. TL;DR CIA backdoor probably exists, data collection backdoors are not feasible.
Intel ME can, in fact, inject packets, for it’s intended purpose of managing laptops at enterprise level. Don’t know how exactly but it was said it’s running minix, so I guess there are drivers hardcoded for some adapters. IIRC (source: truss me bro) it could use Wi-Fi in raw mode without the OS, associate by itself and stuff.
But uh, yeah, about the modem: it’s less that there’s some evil backdoor with global conspiracy but more that the cell towers can determine precise location at no cost (stored for a while which cops can look at it) and that there’s radio fingerprinting and stuff, with a whole entire load of nothing you can do about it because of how little we know. Pretty harmless when radio is off. Not really phoning anyone with your phone anymore but yeah.
Dropping all that garbage food for high prices they are doing you a favor for your Health and pocketbook
First time I saw a restaurant with an app only menu (that obviously required your phone number too) I just froze in confusion, looked at the staff like they were stupid (they looked me the same) and left. It was in Tallinn, Estonia. Later when I checked the rewievs of the place, those implied that it was more of a money laundering place than an actual restaurant, but I won’t go further into that. Suspicious anyways. Found great food in the next door restaurant, they had a normal menu as did most other restaurants except some take-away pizzerias.
This is not generally common here in the US, but Indian restaurants now tend to have no menu, just a QR code that you scan and then you order from their website (no apps so far, or at least they’re not mandatory yet). I was a mobile app programmer until about five years ago and I had to ask these guys how to scan a QR code.
Tallin is a gorgeous place. Did you hit up Headless Chicken too?
Yes, it is! Gotta go again some year and will try to remember that place, looks good. The Vegan Restoran V was amazing!
Is it really apps that are getting out of control? I still get by just fine not using them.
Prices, on the other hand… I’ll just say sitting down at a proper restaurant is often a viable alternative.
A lot of places charge a premium for not using the app. I’ve never heard of any that require you to use it
I knew a place where, during the day, I could get all-you-can-eat Sushi for the same price as a McDonalds menu.
Absolute no-brainer.
Yeah I remember the moment when I realised I could buy 3 full sized avocado and cucumber California rolls, for the price of one Big Mac or Whopper. The math was easy.
Plus, there was this thing where if I showed up at 6am, they would sell me the sushi literally hot off the presses before they officially opened (if I paid cash). Warm rice, cool vegetables, and crispy nori; God I want sushi now.
Get ready for burger+ subscription.
![but seriously this fast food situation is getting out of control [Tommy Siegel]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/333c7b0d-a459-48ce-baf4-108ba3f5aa2d.png){kind=link}