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McDonald's app bug let people order for free in France
- rorocoeur 7y agoMore details: if you ordered a "Golden Menu" with a "McFirst" sandwich on the mobile app or on the self-service machine, almost everything you add would have been for free. The bug was first reported on Twitter and it took about 7 hours for restaurants to refuse to give orders.
- zozbot234 7y agoInteresting that they had the exact same issue on both platforms. It's also the kind of thing where some people might just guess that the behavior is intentional and take advantage of it.
- keanzu 7y agoSeems like a good way to promote the app specifically and McDonald's in general. I wonder what the ROI on something like this is vs a more traditional marketing campaign.
- Donald 7y agoTheir franchisees bore the entire cost of giving out the free food. McDonald's corporate paid nothing except for paging someone in to fix the bug.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoWell, the software is provided by corporate so franchisees likely have a claim for compensation. Whether they would dare at the risk of facing any negative consequences is another issue...
- speedgoose 7y agoI don't know if McDonald's food is that expensive. I would expect that most of the costs are the employees, the building, and the equipment.
- saghm 7y agoWell, their employees had to do all the work to make that food without the franchise getting revenue for it, but the employees were presumably still paid
- swiley 7y agoI don’t know about McDonald’s but I knew a manager at a Taco Bell and a lot of this fast food takes very very little work to make. Many Taco Bells can run on just a couple people when they’re not having to clean or maintain anything.
- bwilliams18 7y agoBut the people were already there, it only happened over the course of a single day; it's not like they paid the people more because they were busier or making more orders.
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- adrianmonk 7y agoThrough the magic of software, McDonald's has allowed its customers to live out their fantasy of becoming real-life Hamburglars.
- ghego1 7y agoWell said sir
- thrower123 7y agoThere was another one I saw where you could order a dollar burger, then order another ten burgers without the burger, and because of how the kiosk software calculated the "no burger" modifier, the total came out to $0. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/04/08/11-free-burgers-these-friends-reportedly-hacked-mcdonalds-kiosk/3398623002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/04/08/11-free-burge...
- WalterBright 7y ago> There was another one I saw where you could order a dollar burger, then order another ten burgers without the burger, and because of how the kiosk software calculated the "no burger" modifier, the total came out to $0. This looks like the software was missing some internal sanity checks. For example, it was hammered into us at Caltech that any answers we derive need to be sane. If an energy value turned out to be negative, we would have to note on the solution something like "the negative value is clearly wrong but I don't know where my mistake is" or we'd get not just zero credit on the solution, but a negative credit. Software should have the same sort of checks. It's called "contract programming", the simplest manifestation of which are asserts.
- orf 7y ago> Software should have the same sort of checks. It's called "contract programming", the simplest manifestation of which are asserts. A wrong answer is wrong, but the correct response isn't always to fail. Imagine you added this and that caused 0.01% of orders to fail for 10 days while you debug the issue. Perhaps your assert is only stopping a 1 cent deviation from the correct order total - is it better to prevent 0.01% of orders in their entirety or have the absolute correct order total? Also a value of $0 is a perfectly valid cost for food - maybe they are using a voucher, or some loyalty points, or something else. The Uber eats integration with McDonalds seems to print an order that costs £0.
- WalterBright 7y agoDetected failures should bounce it to the cashier to ring it up. All the McD's I've been in with a kiosk also have a human cashier to help anyone with problems. > or something else Easy to account for it. BTW, the entire reason for the invention of double entry bookkeeping is to detect errors, not throw up hands and say it can't be done.
- giarc 7y agoIs there any proof other than the picture of someone with a ton of McDonalds food and a caption?
- humaniania 7y agoSshhhh, you'll disrupt the marketing campaign.
- rorocoeur 7y ago[video] https://twitter.com/LeRoiLeBg/status/1226133445346316288 https://twitter.com/LeRoiLeBg/status/1226133445346316288
- giarc 7y agoI suggest we change the post link to this instead of a simple photo.
- cruzah 7y agoHere in Australia, the app has placed several phantom orders which I have paid for but did not actually order. Have tried to contact McDonalds but they did not respond. It was only 4 or 5 coffees so I deleted the app. Should've chased it harder but didn't have the time.
- tonmoy 7y agoYou may be able to create a dispute with your credit card company (or other payment processor)
- tenryuu 7y agoMy father has also had this issue, on his first order too. It's interesting since the application is used in various countries around the world too, it's just re-branded and given it's own unique app. I wonder if it's just as garbage everywhere else
- 1123581321 7y agoIn the US, there are a couple of locations where, at certain times of the day, the app will process your payment but the location will not receive the order. Later, the payment either reverses or doesn’t actually bill. I assume it’s related to an equipment problem at these locations, since they’re also often cash-only after 2am, and possibly an address location since both insist they have a different address than what’s reported in the app.
- stevenjohns 7y agoJust give them a call, they credit you immediately. I had the same thing happen at Sydney International Airport a few months ago - I placed one order but it went through five times. It didn't show up on the app and didn't show up on their registers, but I was definitely billed for it. A two-minute phone call and they refunded it all.
- Deimorz 7y agoIt's always interesting to me that so many people seem to completely lose all compunction about stealing once technology is involved. If they were ordering from a cashier at McDonald's and the cashier got distracted for a minute and somehow forgot to charge them before finishing the order, most of the people that abuse a bug like this would tell them about the mistake. I've been in similar situations plenty of times, where I easily could have gotten something without paying because of a staff oversight, but I always tell them I haven't paid yet. Most people won't suddenly decide to steal something just because they're handed an easy opportunity. But when the transaction is through an app or a website or something, people are completely willing to abuse errors, and will even go through an obscure process deliberately to cause errors so they can abuse them. When Amazon accidentally sells expensive camera equipment for 99% off on Prime Day, people clamor to steal as much as they can, even though it's a blatant mistake. None of those people legitimately believe the price is intentional, they know they're taking advantage of an error. The ones that get away with it brag about it, and others that missed the chance are jealous that they didn't manage to steal anything. It's really a fascinating piece of psychology to me, that once there's a "system" in place, abusing holes in it feels like a reasonable thing to do, even if the end result is effectively shoplifting. Edit: the replies to me are a perfect demonstration.
- criddell 7y agoIs this stealing or just taking advantage of a loophole? When tech companies funnel revenue to Ireland or other places to avoid taxes, is that stealing?
- thoughtstheseus 7y agoStealing would imply deceit. McDonalds decided it would be best to use software to engage in these transactions.
- brmgb 7y agoThat's because both situation have absolutely nothing in common. People tell cashiers when they make a mistake not out of a desire to avoid "stealing" (stealing is taking something without permission or right by the way so neither case is actually stealing by the way) but because they empathize with an actual human being making mistakes like they sometimes do and want to be helpful. Corporations can't at the same time replace people with machines to optimise their bottom line and expect their customers to remain empathetic. Once you put in place automatic system you have to owe them. You can't win on both side. If Amazon gives huge reductions by mistake, well, too bad for Amazon, the reductions are still there. It has absolutely nothing to do with shoplifting.
- beedyg 7y agoThere was one evening in a small town is England where my fellow students convinced the staff in the local McDonald's that the student offer of one free hamburger did not require a purchase. We ate a lot of free hamburgers that night. Guilt aside, dare say they were the best McDonald's I've ever tasted
- Karto 7y agoIt might be a stunt, but stuff like that happens. Many years ago I used to work for a large European company that ran a booking system for several hundreds of airlines. The system was used as a back-end by more than one famous online booking site. Currency rates were updated automatically. Once, on a new year's eve, at midnight, a glitch slipped into the Canadian dollar conversion rate, setting 1 CAD to 0 EUR. All of a sudden, all Air Canada flights were for free for European customers, at what might be the worst time of the year : "- so, this year's resolution : we take time to travel. - hey look honey, Canada looks cheap. - deal done, book right away, and let's open one more bottle of champagne !" I don't know how many AC flights were booked before someone realized and an on-call guy fixed the conversion rate. However, I know that all those free bookings remained valid, and were offered by my company who payed all of it directly to Air Canada.
- 101404 7y agoI always wonder why systems like this so rarely do even basic plausibility checks before data is updated.
- chx 7y agoIKR Once my brother wired 10M EUR from Austria instead of 10M HUF. The exchange rate is above 1:300. Needless to say, he didn't have 10M EUR on that account. Like, ever. Not even close. I still have no idea why the bank let him wire more money than he had especially on this magnitude. They reverted it but we needed to cover the spread which caused an almost 10k eur loss. That hurt. I have once accidentally copied my one time password into my ebank for payment (I was trying to copypaste the amount from somewhere else, it didn't take, that happens often with PDF and then the clipboard contained the previous copy) and it would've let me do it if I don't stop it at the confirm screen. It's mind boggling.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- technofiend 7y agoIt saves so many headaches. I used to support a system with an automated fallback. If today's feed wasn't in by cutoff then the previous day's feed was used. Unfortunately we'd sometimes get partial or corrupted feeds. Partial feeds triggered investigation and possibly a manual rerun and corrupted ones often halted the system. Because we only used monthly numbers for reporting, delaying and rerunning any other day was pointless beyond standard root cause analysis to prevent recurrence. And this system had hundreds of feeds so at first there were almost daily issues. So I added a check to throw out any deviations over two sigma from the median of the last 30 days' good feeds which knocked out 99% of our data quality issues. I got in a boatload of trouble for different reasons but that's another story.
- macpete 7y agoEven for free I will not eat that processed garbage
- frosted-flakes 7y agoI have friends like you. They decry McDonald's food as super bad for you—and then turn around and eat at the fancy burger place where a single burger and fries sets you back $20. Even though it's literally the same food: beef patty, white bun, ketchup, processed cheese, onions, and lettuce. And they get the pop and greasy fries too. What's bad about McDonald's is not that the food is unhealthy (it is, but no more than most restaurants), but that the food is so cheap that so many people regularly eat it instead of proper home-cooked meals. Also, it's easy to get way too much food and sugary pop. I eat at McDonald's a few times a month, but I don't view it as an unhealthy habit. My typical meal is two sandwiches, either McDoubles or Junior Chickens. That's less than 800 calories in total (I usually drink water). I rarely go for the combo meals or the big sandwiches.
- listenallyall 7y agoUnfortunate username, McPete.
- RaceWon 7y agoIP payment-->> French fries
- kenneth 7y agoI still wouldn't want to eat any of that pile of garbage food even for EUR0.
- milankragujevic 7y agoI ordered a MacBook Pro (though Pink/Rose Gold) for 29999.99 RSD (255.46 €, 279.63 $). It was supposed to cost 299999.99 -- 2,796.29 $ or 2,554.55 € (extra 9). The order was cancelled with no explanation, obviously. Laws in Serbia do allow for a sale to be cancelled before delivery if the merchant entered the wrong price, or the device is not available in the warehouse, etc. It was funny :)
- grecy 7y agoThat kind of thing happens in Australia and the sale must go ahead by law. The advertised price is the price, end of story.
- milankragujevic 7y agoI know, it's like that in the USA and a lot of the world, I think even European Union, that's why I mentioned it. Not in Serbia, yet. I think I've read about people in USA suing companies for refusing to sell, or requesting return, of products that were advertised with "incorrect" prices and ordered/purchased by the customer.
- commoner 7y agoIt's actually not like that in the USA. Amazon and other retailers have made numerous price mistakes in the past that were canceled without shipment. If you ask customer service, they might offer you a small gift card as a consolation. It's rare for companies to honor their price mistakes, especially major ones that incur them significant losses. If the retailer charges you a different rate than advertised, that's a different issue, but it generally doesn't happen.
- milankragujevic 7y agoYou can sue for false advertising, at least in the USA. Well, unless the company has "prices and specification subject to change without notice" and mandatory arbitration.
- Kaze404 7y agoBack in 2014 EA issued a discount code for Origin that granted you $20 discount, with no minimum value and reusable. Myself and a couple friends managed to snatch 20 or 30 games before they deactivated it. It was pretty funny, and since it's just a digital product I don't think there's a reason to feel bad about it.
- Jack000 7y agoa few years ago there was a local promotion for packs of nestea, where each case contained a coupon for a free case of ice tea. The coupon didn't say you couldn't redeem it for the same box (which contained another coupon) A bunch of people (me included) went around and basically cleaned out all the stores that sold it. There was a hilarious thread on red flag deals where people posted pictures of SUVs packed to the brim with ice tea.